These days, it's commonplace to find unabridged spoken audio titles by bestselling authors sold side by side in bookstores with abridged product. That's thanks, in part, to the advocacy position taken early on in spoken audio's development by sales heavyweights Dean Koontz and Stephen King, both of whom had the clout to insist that audio publishers release their works exclusively in the longer format. (Unabridged recordings, with their prohibitively long running times and high price points, had previously been mostly the domain of library and rental markets).
Koontz's stance was born of experience. His book publisher from 1977-1993, Putnam, did not establish its own audio division until 1996. As a result, Koontz saw his written output -- novels, a short story collection, even a children's title -- adapted by virtually every major audio publisher on the map, including: Simon & Schuster Audio, Random House Audio, BDD Audio, Harper Audio and Time Warner Audiobooks.
Back in 1988, when audio was first making inroads into the bookstore, Koontz recalls licensing the audio rights for an abridgment of Lightning to Simon & Schuster Audio. He remembers being "horrified" at discovering the severity of the abridgment process. "When I originally sold the audio rights, I was naive about how much was being eliminated," he says. From then on, he decided that everything would be released unabridged. Or if abridged, that he would have hands-on involvement with the scripting. With his ardent fan base, Koontz felt that he had a devoted enough following to support such costly productions.
Koontz was so adamant in his belief in the full-text presentation that he first turned to a small independent Hollister, Calif.-based unabridged specialty house, The Reader's Chair, to realize his wishes. With them, in 1991 and 1992, he issued three full-text spoken titles: Coldfire; Hideaway and The Bad Place. In these, the producers employed tandem readings by male and female narrators, a distinctively theatrical mode of presentation that Koontz says he enjoyed. Did he regret the commercial downside of working with a small publisher? "I was more concerned about the adaptations than volume of sale," he insists.
Three higher-profile full-length productions followed, published by Random House Audio: Dark Rivers of the Heart (1994), read by Anthony Heald; Intensity (1996), read by Kate Burton; and Sole Survivor (1997), read by David Birney. These were among the first mainstream unabridged audio titles packaged for retail bookstore sale.
For two reissues adapted by Random House Audio, Icebound, read by John Glover (1995) and TickTock, read by B.D. Wong (1997), Koontz produced the abridgment texts himself, bringing their running times down to a reasonable six hours each. He notes that, as the author, he has the advantage of being able to rephrase things. "If I take out a few paragraphs," he explains, "I can write a completely new sentence or two that takes their place." The challenge lies in "thinking of it as a script or a screenplay." The downside was the labor involved. Each project required "a whole new job of writing to adapt."
While Koontz, like many authors, admits to not having listened to the entirety of every title in his spoken audio catalogue, he is pleased to say that all the readers have been "thoughtful." What's more, he feels "there is a benefit" to the listening experience as a writer: "the interesting thing about it is when you hear it read aloud, by a well-trained reader, you get a different appreciation for the rhythm of the words. You realize how realistic the dialogue sounds."
With Fear Nothing (1998), read unabridged by Keith Szarabajka, Koontz began his affiliation with his newest audio publisher, BDD Audio. The novel's protagonist, Christopher Snow, will return in Seize the Night, also read by Szarabajka (with a release date of 12/29/98). Expectations for the new release are running high, since Fear Nothing currently has some 50,000 copies in print, a remarkable figure considering that it is a 10-cassette unabridged production with a $39.95 price point.
Jenny Frost, newly named President, Random House Audio Publishing Group (which will include the two independent imprints, Random House Audiobooks and BDD Audio Publishing), is "thrilled with the way Koontz did last year." She adds that, with Seize the Night, "we're looking at an even stronger initial distribution," putting the figure at 45,000 copies. Heavy publicity is planned to all media and especially with audio-specific retailers.
Because Koontz favors unabridged productions, that tempers the way Frost handles the material as an audio publisher. She notes that, by default, there is "no scripting process" involved. Nor d s she take umbrage at the author's format demands rather, she sums up her working experience with him as a "wonderful experience."
For Koontz, finally, the unabridged question comes down to a matter of common decency. For an author to have to hear the result of having his writing go under the knife, he says only, "I don't know how you live with it." For him, it remains the single most important issue for how his work is adapted to audio. "Once I stopped them from chopping the book up, that was the key thing," he concludes.
