Review of the Year 2019: Michelle Obama tops for Audible in 2019

The Audible chart for 2019 is topped by one of 2018’s biggest titles: Michelle Obama’s Becoming. It reigned atop the monthly Audible charts for five months across 2019, beating 2018 number one Stephen Fry’s Mythos into second. In fact, only one 2019-published audiobook hit the top 15, yet given that it was H G Wells: The Science Fiction Collection, much of the actual content was written in the first half of the 20th century. Bill Bryson’s The Body, which charted 17th, was the next-highest, released just three months before the end of the year. 

Though much of the top 20 was made up of audiobooks published in 2017 and 2018, including Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and Ant Middleton’s First Man In, older titles also flew high. Such successes include the entire Harry Potter series, released in print from 1997 to 2007; George R R Martin’s originally 1996-published A Game of Thrones, boosted by its HBO adaptation’s finale in May last year; and Professor Steve Peters’ 2012 self-help book The Chimp Paradox.

Aside from J K Rowling, Obama was also the only woman in the top 20, with Margaret Atwood the second-highest, in 21st place with The Testaments. Nielsen Book research has shown the average audio download consumer is likely to be younger, city-based and male, and the bestseller list certainly supports this. The rise of the male self-help trend, possibly sparked by young men feeling insecure about their role in the world following the #MeToo movement, has been most notable in audio format. Just eight female authors (Atwood twice, with The Handmaid’s Tale in 24th) feature in the Top 50. 

Non-fiction looms large over the audio market, with 21 of 2019’s top 50 titles non-fiction books, mostly made up of memoirs but with a strong vein of “male” self-help and literary global insights, too. However, the fiction bestsellers in audio paint a very different picture of the format’s demographic than print. The year’s big-hitters in print were all present and correct—Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which has now sold almost half a million copies through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM, and of course Atwood’s fastest-selling-fiction-title-of-the-year The Testaments. But 2019’s print fiction bestseller, Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz, missed out on an audio Top 50 place completely. 

In contrast, Science Fiction and Fantasy punched well above its TCM weight. The aforementioned “Game of Thrones” ending saw the A Song of Ice and Fire series ascend swiftly up the audio top 50, with opener A Game of Thrones in 12th and A Clash of Kings in 35th, with A Storm of Swords falling just outside the top 50. Fun fact: just the first two audio downloads in George R R Martin’s doorstopper series would take 71 hours to listen to, more than seven hours longer than the entire eight-series television adaptation from start to finish. Then again, you could probably get away with listening to the former in the office without ending up in some kind of disciplinary hearing.

H G Wells: The Science Fiction Collection, J R R Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring and Jeff Wayne’s musical adaptation of Wells’ The War of the Worlds also fly the flag for sci-fi and fantasy, with Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and Good Omens, written with Terry Pratchett and adapted into a BBC and Amazon Prime television series last year, also adding to the SFF contingent.

Children’s titles accounted for 12 of the top 50, though seven of those were Harry Potters and the rest were written by Philip Pullman. It’s a safe bet to assume these were more likely being listened to bt nostalgia-chasing Millennials than actual children in 2019.  Pullman’s His Dark Materials series received a television-adaptation boost in print and soared up the charts in audio. Both Book of Dust titles, The Secret Commonwealth (2019) and La Belle Sauvage (2017), also charted in the year’s top 50, meaning Pullman occupied five spaces in total. 

As always, celebrities took a hefty slice of the Audible pie. (Michelle Obama has just won a Grammy for Spoken Word Album for Becoming, after all.) Stephen Fry, audio’s benevolent king, notched up 10 titles in the top 50: two he wrote and narrated and eight he only narrated. “SAS: Who Dares Wins” star Middleton scored two top 50 places for his self-narrated First Man In and The Fear Bubble, and Louis Theroux’s memoir Gotta Get Theroux This hit 20th. The narrator column was if anything, even starrier, with Michael Sheen narrating Pullman’s Book of Dust titles, Taron Egerton lending his dulcet tones to Elton John’s Me—both actors also performed The War of the Worlds—Elisabeth Moss contributing to The Handmaid’s Tale as the television adaptation’s Offred, and a full-star cast (including Ann Dowd, Bryce Dallas Howard, Derek Jacobi and even Atwood herself) narrating The Testaments.