In Istanbul’s Bostanci district. Image – Getty: Cane Rozkan
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
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Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024: Frankfurt Audio and The Arts+
Penguin Random House Opens Its Audio Narrator Mentorship
Malaviya: ‘Our Businesses Around the World’
The audio business, according to Penguin Random House worldwide CEO Nihar Malaviya, “will continue to grow and evolve in many of the countries where we operate, driven by the shifting retail landscape and consumer reading preferences, as well as by technological developments such as artificial intelligence.
“In these dynamic times, Penguin Random House has a tremendous opportunity to be at the forefront and to even more closely coordinate, collaborate, and share knowledge with our businesses around the world,” he says.
Nihar Malaviya
That being the premise, Malaviya today (August 21) has announced in a staff memo that Amanda D’Acierno is being made the global president of Penguin Random House Audio, effective immediately and continuing to report to Malaviya.
D’Acierno has been the president and publisher of the Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group in the United States since 2008. So the change it title is an expansion of her purview from the States’ division of PRH to oversight of the company’s international reach. He goes on to say that D’Acierno “has been doing this work incredibly well on an informal basis for many years and is widely recognized in the industry and among our PRH colleagues for her depth of expertise in audio.”
Amanda D’Acierno
The promotion gives D’Acierno a seat on the company’s international executive committee. She is to “partner with our audio group leads to expand our audio publishing worldwide, increasing the catalogue across all genres from children’s books to adult, and furthering our investment in in-house recording studios around the world,” Malaviya says. “She’ll foster closer collaboration across all PRH Audio groups globally, acting in a pivotal advisory role to local teams across territories and continuing our successful relationships with our global retail partners at Audible, Apple, OverDrive, Google, and Spotify, among others.”
D’Acierno’s background in the business includes time in Houston as a bookseller and as a manager of events at Barnes & Noble’s Union Square store “during the height of the author-tour boom,” Malaviya says, “before she transitioned to publicity at an independent art press and joined Random House Audio in 2003.”
A Programming Note
On Frankfurt Wednesday, October 16, at Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20), our 2024 Publishing Perspectives Forum will stage Meeting the Demand: Audiobook Strategies, a conversation in which Amanda D’Acierno will speak, as will Jon Watt, the trade audio and business development director of Bonnier Books UK.
That event is set for 4 p.m. on October 16, and—as in all the Publishing Perspectives Forum events this year—will be staged in Frankfurt Studio in Hall 4.0, just off the Messe Frankfurt’s Agora.
This and all other Publishing Perspective Forum events are open free of charge to all Buchmesse trade visitors, and you can learn more about our Publishing Perspectives Forum plans as we develop the details on them.
Also, as Publishing Perspectives readers know, the Frankfurt Audio area in Hall 3 this year is taking on new prominence, at almost twice the size of last year’s Frankfurt Audio area, according to organizers—an allocation of 640 square meters this year (6,888 feet) as opposed to last year’s 330 square meters (3,552). More about Frankfurt Audio is here.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the work of Penguin Random House is here, more on audiobooks in the international publishing industry is here, and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here.