Tale of the Tape : With a Knack for Picking Best Sellers, Studio City Company Taps Growing Audience for Books on Audio Cassette

A year ago, Michael A. Viner read “A Brief History of Time,” a recent book about the universe by Cambridge scientist Stephen W. Hawking. And where Hawking saw stars, Viner heard the sound of money.

“I thought it was going to be a big hit, no one else did,” Viner recalled. The hard-cover version of Hawking’s book was published by Bantam Books, but Viner’s Studio City company, Dove Books on Tape, stepped in front of Bantam and other publishers and bought the audio rights to record the book on audio cassette tapes for a $2,000 advance.

A month later, Viner had a six-hour, four-volume tape version of Hawking’s book for sale--retail price $24.95--in bookstores nationwide.

Viner’s hunch paid off. Hawking’s book was one of the most popular nonfiction books of 1988, and has spent the past nine months on The Times’ best-seller list. As for Dove, it’s sold 40,000 copies of the tape version of the book, making it Dove’s biggest seller since Viner started the company four years ago.

Picking Winners

Most of Dove’s success, in fact, rides on Viner’s sixth sense about what new books will be big sellers and popular with the burgeoning audio-book market, while moving nimbly to get the rights to those books.

Dove, which is two-thirds owned by Viner, also banks on its ties with some well-known authors, including Viner’s close friend, best-selling fiction writer Sidney Sheldon (“Master of the Game,” “The Sands of Time”) to supply raw material for its tapes. Sheldon likes the books-on-tape idea too, and is a part-owner of Dove.

The market for books on tape is now roughly $100 million and growing by 25% to 50% a year, industry executives estimate. Although a limited number of audio books had been around for years, sales began surging in 1985 after Dove and the major book publishers jumped into the market to take advantage of the 300 million audio cassette players Americans own.

Figures Double

Dove’s sales this year will hit $4 million to $5 million, nearly double last year’s $2.5 million, while its unit sales may double to 600,000 taped books, Viner said.

The company, with 17 employees, has a catalogue of 140 taped books for sale that it has produced, and has about 30 more in production. The eclectic author list ranges from Howard Cosell to Charles Dickens. Dove also distributes an additional 50 to 60 titles that were produced by other companies.

It helps that Viner, 45, who also is a movie and TV producer (Sheldon’s “Windmills of the Gods” for TV) has close ties to the entertainment world. He’s been married to actress Deborah Raffin (“Death Wish 3”) for 14 years, who also has narrated and produced some of the tapes. Viner’s Hollywood links have helped attract such stars as Roger Moore and Roddy McDowall to narrate Dove’s books for a modest $2,000 fee, plus royalties. He contends that Dove stands apart from the competition by using higher quality tapes and production.

Tough Competitor

Dove’s rivals naturally disagree that Dove’s tapes are superior, but Dove looks for any edge it can find. The audio-book market has several competitors, notably publishing giants Simon & Schuster, a unit of Gulf & Western, and Random House, a subsidiary of Affiliated Publications.

Daniel Roth, vice president of Simon & Schuster’s audio division, claimed that his company and Random House are the biggest players in audio, while Dove is among the largest independent competitors. For Dove, Simon & Schuster and Random House are formidable foes simply because of the huge marketing clout they already have with bookstore chains.

“Our ability to cross-promote our audio cassettes with the hard-cover division or the paperback division is a considerable advantage,” Roth said. “That’s very appealing to an author. Your product comes into one house and is marketed successfully in three different venues.”

Even so, Simon & Schuster and Random House also distribute some of their audio books through Dove to reach a wider audience.

Much of that audience listens to books in their cars. “Americans drive over 2 billion miles a year,” and 70% of U.S.-made cars are now sold with cassette players, Roth said. When stuck in a traffic jam, drivers can forgo the news and listen to Joan Rivers reading her autobiography, “Enter Talking,” or Terry Southern reading his book “The Magic Christian.”

“You’ve got a very captive audience with a high degree of penetration,” Roth said.

The major bookstores, such as Waldenbooks and B. Dalton/ Barnes & Noble, have racks devoted to audio books. Most of the books are condensed to fit on two 90-minute cassettes, which are sold in one package that retails between $9.95 and $14.95.

Taping a book can certainly pad an author’s bank account, although it pales compared to possible six-figure paperback rights. A best seller on tape can earn an author such as Hawking or Sheldon an extra $30,000, but the payoff more often is between $5,000 and $15,000, Viner said.

Aiding Blind

Sheldon, who has made plenty from his books, said money is “not a primary reason” that he likes books on tape. Rather, he enjoys entertaining people who are blind or incapacitated. “There are people sitting in rooms who are blind, they have no access to TV or other entertainment, and they can sit and listen to any of the books on tape,” Sheldon said. “It can change their whole lives.”

But getting the books out to the public on tape involves lots of production and financial steps.

Once Viner or his staff has selected a book for tape, Dove must purchase the audio rights.

“Publishing houses have about three-quarters of the rights themselves,” Viner said, while the most popular authors have kept the oral rights to their works. “The Sidney Sheldons, the Tom Clancys, etc., will be selling them through their own agents,” Viner said.

To land the rights, Dove must pay an advance and a royalty on sales. The advance can range as high as $10,000, with royalties typically at 10% of the tape’s wholesale sales for a veteran author. Viner said the average wholesale price for a twin-cassette book is about $7.50, so an author might pick up 75 cents per copy. A big-name author, though, can command up to 10% of the tape’s retail price in royalties, he said.

1-Day Recording

Once Dove owns the book’s audio rights, the staff edits the book to fit a tape’s time limits and finds a narrator. The reader’s fee is typically a $2,000 advance and 2% of the tape’s wholesale sales, Viner said, for what is usually an eight-hour day of reading the abridged book in a recording studio that Dove leases.

Although Dove has used many celebrity readers, such as Academy Award winners Paul Scofield and Julie Andrews, sometimes it signs up the book’s author. Most readers, Viner said, need several hours to compensate for pronunciation errors and other mistakes. One exception was sportscaster Howard Cosell, who read a three-hour version of his own book, “I Never Played the Game,” in three hours and 6 minutes. Viner said Cosell “made seven mistakes in the whole tape and updated his book while he read. It was the most phenomenal reading I have ever seen.”

After the master tape is produced, Dove sends the tape out to be mass-produced and distributed to the bookstores.

Costs, Profit

So the $7.50 average wholesale price of a Dove tape probably would include 75 cents to the author, 20 cents to the reader, and $4.50 in production, advertising and overhead costs, Viner said, leaving him about $2.05 in gross profit.

But Viner said some of Dove’s top bookstore customers get a hefty discount on the price for big orders, so that the $7.50-per-tape average--and Dove’s profit--is actually less. Bottom line: Dove tries to earn an average pre-tax profit of $1.50 per tape.

Viner, who said he and Raffin have invested in the “high six figures” in Dove, grew up in Washington. He attended Georgetown and other universities but never earned a degree.

While in his early 20s, producer Aaron Rosenberg hired him as an assistant at 20th Century Fox and two years later Viner went to MGM Records, where he made his mark in 1971 by producing the “Candy Man” album by Sammy Davis Jr., another old friend.

Meeting Contacts

While an executive at MGM Records, Viner produced the entertainment for President Richard Nixon’s second inauguration in 1972, which introduced Viner to other celebrities and led to new ventures.

In the past decade he has produced episodes of “Circus of the Stars”; the TV movie “Willa” in which Raffin appeared, and the TV version of Sheldon’s “Windmills of the Gods,” also featuring Raffin.

He got the idea to start Dove after an uncle was seriously hurt in an accident, and Viner, looking for a gift, bought him some books on tape. Intrigued by the tapes, Viner asked Sheldon and another Beverly Hills neighbor, author Norman Cousins, if any of their books had been converted to tape. They had not.

“There was obviously money to be made in that field,” Viner said.

Viner tends to be low-key, the opposite of the stereotypical glitzy Hollywood promoter. While Dove is doing well and Viner believes there is “steady, long-term growth ahead,” he added, “The danger is to think that the industry is going to increase three- or four-fold overnight.”