Skip to the steamy parts with Audible Romance
You devour romance novels to get to — OK, admit it — the steamiest parts.
If the above describes you, you’re the type of person Audible is trying to seduce into subscribing to a new service launching Wednesday called Audible Romance. It promises romance fans unlimited access to more than 10,000 audiobooks that fit the romance spectrum, from Jane Austen to erotica.
Amazon-owned Audible is the largest seller of narrated books and spoken content, with more than 400,000 titles overall, and “romance is not an easily and singularly defined term,” says Audible chief content officer Andy Gaies.
Audible Romance costs $14.95 a month as a standalone offering, or $6.95 a month as an add-on for folks who already pay $14.95 month for Audible’s core service. A regular Audible subscription gives listeners one credit towards an Audible title each month, plus a discount on purchased audiobooks. If you tend to buy a lot of romance-oriented bestsellers under the core plan, you may come out ahead with the new offering.
Romance fans are “voracious consumers of content,” Gaies says, and “on the cutting edge of digital.”
The company says 103 of the top 153 bestselling romance authors, such names as Nora Roberts, Robyn Carr, Sylvia Day and Debbie Macomber, will have works included in the service.
There seems little doubt that Audible thinks sex sells, judging by one of the main features behind the new service. It’s called “Take Me to the Good Part,” and it promises to, um, do just that. Audible says the feature was driven by machine learning and data-science.
Another new feature, also driven by data science, is a “Steaminess Score” that is supposed to help clue you in on the level of “passion” you can expect from a given audiobook. The scale: Sweet, Simmering, Sizzling, Hot Damn, and O-O-OMG. Audible says its team developed these categorizations through an algorithm that scans each title to look for key words that trigger “steamy” markers.
Blair Underwood, Dermot Mulroney, Jesse Metcalf are among those voicing the material.
Meanwhile, lest you think the designated “good” parts are all about the hottest encounters, they also cover flirty banter and first meetings. “We don’t want to define what good parts to one person would mean to another,” says Audible chief financial officer Cynthia Chu, who leads the data science team.
Overall, Audible Romance includes 41 micro-categories and 131 story and character tropes selected by Audible’s own editors. A subscriber might search for books around fire fighters, football players or other character types. Or look for material that delves into rescuing a character from “Mr. Wrong” or raising the question, “Will they or won’t they?” You’ll be able to listen to a sample from each title before choosing to plunge in.
Audible Romance costs $14.95 a month as a standalone offering, or $6.95 a month as an add-on for folks who already pay $14.95 month for the core service.