AudioBook SYNC Blog

During each week of the SYNC season, we place two thematically related audiobooks on offer and for keeps. Why a pair? We have lots of reasons and are sure you’ve discovered a few more, if you are a SYNC veteran.

We know teachers, librarians, and other group leaders who share information about and activities related to SYNC are busy, so each year, we create and update a Toolkit to help you in promoting the program and answering common questions.

We’re delighted to welcome Recorded Books and Tantor Media back to SYNC for the 2019 season! They are providing listeners with a total of four audiobooks that include three #OwnVoices titles, each tinged with traces of fantastic elements, and some nonfiction from a popular science author who tells fact as though it were hilarious science fiction.

As we plan each new SYNC season, we work to include a variety of performance techniques as well as subject matter. As much as possible, we search out brand new and older titles both, because we want to give teen listeners opportunities to experience audiobooks conveying as wide a range of possibilities as are available. To meet all that criteria, both Dreamscape and Hachette annually step up to give access to audiobooks that offer many experiential paths listeners can take.

Now that SYNC is entering its tenth year, we can look back and notice how some audiobook publishers have returned year after year and provided teen listeners with listening experiences they might still keep to hear again and again across the decade.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of AudiobookSYNC and our publishers are celebrating by offering a wide range of free audiobooks to build your personal listening shelf. In the coming weeks, we'll introduce the titles publisher by publisher (as soon as all the contracts are completed!). Today, however, we can give you a lot of details to feed your own and your teen listeners' anticipation.

In our upcoming season of AudiobookSYNC, we'd like to feature the work of teen photographers on our Instagram account. In January, we'll announce some of the weekly themes so the kids you know who are camera buffs can take and send us some work.

It's that wonderful season when "best of the year" lists of movies, books, and, yes, audiobooks, are blooming throughout the land. Some are long, others short. Find and use as many as you can for a rich and wide awareness of what all is available to read, hear, see, and discuss.

November brings multiple holidays which carry themes of gratitude, including Veterans Day and Thanksgiving in the US, as well as Diwali, the Hindu festival of light. We'd like to pause here to thank you, too.

When we collect a season's worth of free audiobooks to share with teens during SYNC, content is just one of two important factors we consider. Performance, we know at AUDIOFILE MAGAZINE, is what makes an audiobook an audiobook rather than a recording of someone simply reading aloud.