Writers are turning to the spoken word as their preferred medium, encouraged by a boom in audiobook sales that is transforming publishing.

This weekend, audio publisher Audible, owned by Amazon, released an audiobook of Andrew Motion reading 30 mostly unpublished poems as part of his memoir Essex Clay, and thriller writer Brian Freeman has given up on print entirely for his 19th novel, out out next year, which will appear only as an audiobook. “We haven’t even thought about print,” he said. Just 15 years ago, hardly any of his readers chose audio versions of his books. “Now I hear about them all the time. It made sense to do something specifically for the audio market.”

Spending on audiobooks has more than doubled in the past five years, from £12m in 2013 to £31m last year, according to new figures from the Publishers Association released to coincide with its Love Audio week. There was a jump of 21.5% in 2017 alone. It’s a fraction of the total value of the industry, which sells £3.1bn of books and ebooks a year, but the growth has created a lot of excitement, according the association’s chief executive, Stephen Lotinga.

“It’s the fastest-growing area of consumer publishing,” he said. “It has breathed new life into the sector, with more investment in production, and high-profile narrators.”

Freeman is one of several authors trying out exclusive audiobook deals: others include US political biographer Robert Caro, crime writer Jeffery Deaver, and science fiction authors Dennis E Taylor and John Scalzi.

Audible dominates the audiobook market, but faces growing competition from newcomers such as audio-books.com, Kobo and Bookbeat, as well as Google, which launched a dedicated app in January, and Apple.

Alice Lutyens of literary agency Curtis Brown, who represents Freeman, says part of the attraction is that authors get the same advance for an audiobook as for print and ebooks. She believes more innovation is on the way. “I’ve been encouraging agents to consider which of their authors is ready for something a bit different and fun,” she said. “Writing something just for audio, or doing a series of podcasts that go beyond the book, or getting in people who are not authors, such as screenwriters.”

Much more care is now taken over audiobooks than a decade ago, according to Sarah Shrubb, who has worked in the industry for 15 years and runs Hachette Audio, a division of Little, Brown Books. Big publishers and audiobook specialists are building new studios to meet demand.

“When we used to publish abridgements, we could only do our big brand authors, like Patricia Cornwell or Alex McCall Smith,” Shrubb said. The company recently launched an audio edition of self-improvement author Cal Newport’s book Deep Work. “I suspect we wouldn’t have released that back then, but it’s doing incredibly well.”

Standout recordings abound. Man Booker winner Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders features 166 voices, including Lena Dunham, Julianne Moore and Susan Sarandon. Deborah Frances-White, a comedian whose podcast, The Guilty Feminist, is consistently in the top 20 iTunes chart, is writing a book for Little, Brown that may incorporate podcast clips in the audio version.

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Daniel Storey’s account of footballer Paul Gascoigne’s three years at the Italian club Lazio, Gazza in Italy, was an audio-only release from HarperCollins on 7 June, serialised in five-minute chunks on TalkSport. The group’s audio director, Rachel Mallender, former editor of Radio 1 and 1xtra, said each of its 600 narrative books published each year had an audio version. “Gazza in Italy is narrated by James Richardson, who does the Totally Football podcast,” she said. “We can take people who listen to the podcast and lead them to a longer form.”

Casting narrators is “one of the joys of the job”, Shrubb said, but audio publishers need to think harder about unconscious biases. Research by Little, Brown shows its audiobook listeners tend to be younger, with more men listening than women, who buy print and ebooks in much larger numbers.

She said 23% of its audiobook listeners are black or from other ethnic minorities, compared with 13% of the population overall.

“It’s a really good opportunity to challenge unconscious biases,” she said. “For non-fiction – or science fiction, where things are set in a completely different world – why are we thinking of a white narrator?”

The new medium beckons a change in writing styles. The omniscient narrators of 19th-century novels, whose godlike qualities were unpalatable to the realistic writers of the 20th, are more suited to the audioboomers of the 21st.

Freeman has adopted a first-person narrator. “All of my thrillers have been in the third person, so this is the first time. For an audiobook you have the narrator’s voice that gives it a presence and immediacy. You really have to make sure that people want to listen to her and be in her head all the way through.” He now reads everything aloud as he writes. “I feel like I’m hearing voices in my head,” he laughed. “It’s been a fascinating thing.”