Amazon already has several other publishing imprints based in Seattle and New York. But, a company spokeswoman told me, “When we considered launching an inspiration imprint, we looked at our overall publishing program and determined Grand Haven was a natural home for this business. We expect to expand our efforts on this area soon.”

Grand Harbor Press’s tagline is “Be inspired. Be enlightened. Be happy” and its first title is Happy This Year! by Will Bowen, a minister who published his previous books, A Complaint Free World and Complaint Free Relationships, with Random House’s Doubleday. Happy This Year! will be published on April 9, 2013 and will be accompanied by a smartphone app. “Brilliance worked closely with me at every stage, listened to my feedback, and treated me like family. It was a great experience, and I’m so proud to be part of this launch,” Bowen said in a statement reminiscent of those included in Amazon Publishing press releases.

Gary Krebs, Brilliance associate publisher, will handle acquisitions for Grand Harbor. Krebs, who was previously VP, group publisher at McGraw-Hill and publisher at Globe Pequot Press and Adams Media, said in a statement, “We will be looking for exciting new thoughts and ideas from both established best-selling authors and talented newcomers. Most important in our criteria is the author’s depth of passion for helping solve the problems and concerns of readers.” The imprint plans to publish 10 titles in 2013.

“The Guardian Audio Edition,” available for download from the Guardian, Soundcloud, iTunes and Audible, will “showcase the very best of news, culture and opinion pieces as published in the Guardian each week.” It will also include

“weekly reviews of spoken-word content from Audible.co.uk, highlighting the best of genre fiction and non-fiction available to download. Reviews will be hosted by Claire Armitstead, Guardian News & Media’s books editor, Guardian books writer Richard Lea, and invited guest reviewers. As well as reviewing and critiquing each audiobook on its literary merits, the audiobooks panel will also discuss how narrative performance enhances the quality of the books.”

Audible has had a busy year. In April it launched Audible Author Services, a program that pays audiobook authors an extra $1 for every audiobook they sell at Audible.com, Audible.co.uk and iTunes. (The program was originally slated to run through December 31, 2013, but the company tells me it will continue “for the foreseeable future.”) The program drew from a $20 million fund and is scheduled to run through December 31, 2012 (I’ve asked the company if it will continue after that). The company is also striking deals with literary agencies and publishers — most recently the AP Watt agency in the U.K. and publisher Diversion Books in the U.S. — to create digital audio editions.

Audible’s partnership with the Guardian gives the newspaper a way to subsidize its books content, but it could also be a good way for Audible to promote the exclusive audio content that it is signing up elsewhere. However, a Guardian spokeswoman told me that Audible has “absolutely no editorial input” and “will have no influence over the books that are reviewed within The Guardian Audio Edition.”

To sign up, authors must make their titles available as audiobooks through Audible.com. (Audible encourages them to do this via ACX, the audiobook rights marketplace it launched last year.) Once they enroll their books in the program, Audible says, they will:

• Receive an honorarium of $1 per unit sold at Audible.com, Audible.co.uk, and iTunes, and increase awareness of their book in audio format; [LHO note: Downloads via subscriptions count as sales]
• Obtain samples and links from Audible for use in social media, blogs, or on their websites – wherever they communicate most easily with their fans – as part of our “quick start” audio awareness plan;
• Gain direct interaction with Audible marketing and merchandising teams; and
• Obtain a free copy of their audiobook from Audible.

Authors get an “honorarium,” publishers get nothing

Significantly, the audiobooks’ publishers are cut out of the deal — the $1 per unit payment is an “honorarium,” “a direct payment from us to you, a way for us to reward you for promoting your work. Sharing the payment with your agent is at your discretion.” Audible continues to pay regular royalties on each audiobook sold.

While Audible encourages authors to market their audiobooks, they can get the $1/sale payment without doing any extra marketing at all. The authors get $1 whether the audiobook is sold outright or downloaded as part of a monthly or annual subscription.

The fund runs through December 31, 2012. After that, “If you want the program to continue in 2013, please help us by signing up and raising awareness of your audiobooks.”

“People buy a Neil Gaiman, not a HarperCollins or a Simon & Schuster”

As you may have imagined, Audible is not just doing this out of the good of its heart. CEO Donald Katz tells the Guardian, “The fact is people buy a Neil Gaiman, not a HarperCollins or a Simon & Schuster, so it is for us to connect with the writers and hopefully wake them up to what they can do. If it works it can become a channel of membership and sales.”

The site says “we want to foster direct relationships with more authors…authors whose books are unavailable in audio are disenfranchised from an exponentially growing audience for their work. Through Audible Author Services, we hope to increase awareness among those authors and encourage them to get into the game.”

Or, as Katz tells the Guardian roughly 1 million times more bluntly, “This is an era of self-reliance which is there for the taking. This is the last generation of authors who can think of themselves as Victorian gentlemen living above the marketplace, because publishers and agents don’t have the wherewithal to support them.”

Just as Amazon encourages authors to self-publish through KDP (and pays them extra for making their e-books available exclusively through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library), Audible may hope that authors will self-publish their audiobooks through Audible instead of through a traditional publisher. Audiobook rights in publishing contracts are negotiable, so an author does not have to give away those rights to a traditional publisher.

Ultimately, of course, Amazon and Audible may hope that authors will simply self-publish their books — in all formats — through Amazon.

Audiobooks.com charges users $24.95 per month to listen to an unlimited number of audiobooks from a catalog of around 11,000 titles. Compare that to Audible.com, which has a catalog nearly ten times as large — over 100,000 titles for individual download — and requires users to purchase download credits. At Audible, one credit generally corresponds to one audiobook and a one-credit monthly plan is $14.95 (after an limited-time introductory rate).

Audiobooks’ pitch is that users can listen to as many audiobooks as they want “with no need to return audio books, no long-term contracts and no time constraints on audio book use.” The audiobooks sync automatically, so a user can stop listening on one device and pick up the story again later on a different one. The service works on iOS and Android as well as laptops and desktop computers. “There are no storage constraints because the content resides on the cloud,” the company promises, “and users can access and play audio books instantly with no downloading necessary.”

Yet as anybody who has tried to use the Pandora (NYSE: P) app on a 3G connection while walking around knows, streaming content can be a hassle without a WiFi connection. Since many people listen to audiobooks while they’re on the move–in the car or on the train, for example–relying on a cloud-based streaming service seems less than ideal, and in many cases it would be impossible. Sure, cloud-based streaming means the content isn’t taking up space on mobile devices, but many audiobooks are at least several hours long and so on a 3G plan data usage would be considerable. “This is a tricky question because audio book titles vary in size. “We suggest having at least 150MB of storage available,” the company says.

Audiobooks.com general manager Ian Small says “the cloud-based service delivers the book in parts so it will allow some time for lost connection–average a few minutes but we can increase this based on customer feedback.” And he says a Q2 2012 update to the Audiobooks.com app “will have the logic for ‘airplane mode’ preparation where the end user will be able to download the title to the app on their phone over WiFi and not need a 3G connection.” Overall, he says, “we’re limiting how much in advance we put on the portable device to save using up too much of their data plan.”

The service is clearly in its early stages and the selection is limited compared to Audible’s, but Audiobooks.com says titles from “Recorded Books, Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS), HarperCollins Random House Audio and Blackstone Audio” are available and more are being added. I have asked the company for more details on how publishers are compensated and will update the post with the new information.