Writer's Grove

Audio Miscellany

From time to time I get questions about the audio situation overseas, so here we go—all the answers. Like, ridiculously detailed stuff you probably didn’t want to know. But when people ask WHY THIS and WHY THAT and I say IT’S COMPLICATED they’re like BRING IT, SON, so here we go.

When audio rights to the Iron Druid Chronicles were first sold to Brilliance Audio, they bought North Amercian rights only, which means they could legally sell the English recordings only in the United States and Canada. Due to a rather large mistake, they told their distribution peeps they had World Rights, so they pushed it out in the UK and Australia and…yeah, the whole world. We were selling copies in South Africa. I didn’t find out about it for close to a year because I don’t check overseas vendors, and on the one hand, I was like, “Cool, people dig it in that country with the posh accent! Nice!” But on the other hand, it’s unwise to let people overreach on contracts. So I asked my agent to send Brilliance a polite wtf, and they politely said oh crap we didn’t mean to do that, and they took it down overseas.

But they couldn’t just buy World Rights and carry on—because while we didn’t know what was going on over there, we wound up giving UK territory rights to Orbit in the meantime, so once the audiobooks came down, they didn’t go back up. Notice that we only gave UK rights to Orbit…not Australia and New Zealand, also known as ANZ. That’s because the paper books of 1-3 were published by a third publisher, Harper Collins. Harper Collins never wanted audio rights, so at that point nobody had the rights to sell audio in ANZ. We couldn’t give ANZ audio rights to Orbit UK because audio is a subsidiary right and Orbit doesn’t publish books 1-3 in ANZ.

Still with me? Because I might have lost myself. To recap things to this point: Brilliance has NA rights for 1-3, Orbit has UK rights but no recording, and nobody has ANZ rights. Except consumers in the UK and ANZ did have access to the NA audiobooks for a while due to an error. You can imagine the emails I was getting for a good year or so there. I didn’t have any good answers for people who wanted to know where Atticus and Oberon went. I didn’t know when or even if things would eventually work out.

So: The second book contract for books 4-6 comes along, and we do things differently. North American rights are sold to Random House, not Brilliance. Luke Daniels continues as narrator, it’s just a different audio publisher. In this contract we don’t do CDs because it’s a dying medium. So if you’re waiting for CDs—I get emails about that too—I’m very sorry, they’re never coming. Everything will be digital only going forward.

UK and ANZ audio rights for books 4-6 were all given to Orbit UK, and Harper Collins was out of the picture. But we still had this situation where no one had ANZ audio rights for books 1-3, and Orbit understandably didn’t want to publish books 4-6 if 1-3 weren’t available there. GAH. So Brilliance did us a solid and stepped up to buy ANZ rights for 1-3 since they made the Worldwide Mistake earlier. Truly very cool of them—they didn’t have to do that.

OK. Awesome. We finally have a situation where Orbit can consider developing audio overseas, and so they’re doing it! YAY! But UK publishers in general—not just Orbit—tend to like doing their own versions of audiobooks—and the same is true of US publishers. If there’s a UK audiobook out there they want to publish here, they’ll probably record their own version for US audiences. Very common. So Orbit UK is recording books 1-6 with a different narrator named Christopher Ragland—solid dude—and they’ll all come out pretty quickly leading up to the release of Hunted in late June. Hounded is out now! I’m turbo happy that we can finally get you audio of the Iron Druid Chronicles overseas!

But there’s a coda for ANZ: Because of the bizarre rights situation, ANZ will have access to the Brilliance recording of Luke Daniels for books 1-3 and the Orbit recording of Christopher Ragland for books 4-6. And no, I can’t fix that so you get all Luke or all Christopher. Sorry. I know that a change in narrators isn’t ideal but hopefully it’s better than nothing.

As bureaucrats on trial are fond of saying, “Mistakes were made.” If we had a TARDIS and could get all timey-wimey and re-do contracts we would, but alas. We’ll just have to travel through time in a linear fashion and deal with it.

The final situation for books 1-6:

North America: Luke Daniels
UK: Christopher Ragland
ANZ: Luke for 1-3, Chris for 4-6.

Keep in mind that only Hounded is available in the UK at this time of this post, but the others are in the pipeline and will be released soon. Same goes for ANZ—if it’s not up yet, it will be soon. Happy listening wherever ye may be; I hope you enjoy the stories!