There Can Be Only One: How Our Editors Choose the Top Listen of the Year

The votes were in, the title mostly decided—but contenders for Audible’s top listen of the year still kept coming. They trickled into the inboxes of our editors, who had been listening, assessing, debating, and narrowing the field for several months. They were almost ready to declare a number one; that is, until a few exciting new releases sent them back into deliberations. Emily Cox, who leads the team as senior director, says that at some point an editor joked, “The most dangerous words for me during this process are, ‘Oh! What about…?’.”

But at last our editors have confidently proclaimed Audible’s top pick for 2022 as (drumroll, please) All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir. This breathtaking novel of young love, generational wounds, and forgiveness is the winner of a National Book Award, and its author is a cherished, bestselling Pakistani-American Young Adult author. But it’s the narration by Deepti Gupta, Kamran R. Khan, and Kausar Mohammed that vaulted this title into Audible’s most prestigious slot.

“These are such awesome performances,” says Cox. “They take the experience to the next level, and that’s what we’re looking for with our number one pick.” She cites last year’s selection, Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir (The Martian), as one whose voice performance and audio effects catapult the listening experience to a higher level.

That’s the deciding factor for first place: a superior listening experience. The performances and/or sound design has to add something essential that raises the bar. So how, from the tens of thousands of titles that were released in audio this year, do Audible’s editors home in on the performances they think are the best? Tricia Ford, associate director of editorial, oversees the process. For starters, she explains, “we are all listening throughout the year and thinking about which listens are rising to the top.” The team checks out new releases, meets with publishers and our content team to learn what’s coming, and uses data and Audible customer reviews to be aware of what listeners have been responding to and what’s trending.

Each editor has a specialty genre or genres—some have declared themselves for romance, some memoir and true crime, others fantasy and sci-fi. Cox’s personal favorites are literary fiction, sci-fi, and romance. (A former English major, she’s a big Jane Austen fan with strong feelings about the correct best-to-worst ranking of Austen’s novels.) But no matter what kind of content a listener wants to discover, the editors are right there with them, continuously sharing their standouts across every genre via Weekly Picks, Editors Picks, the Audicted podcast, quarterly newsletters, and more.

Cox explains, “Our aim is to elevate our customer experience with a real human voice that says, ‘We think you’ll love this listen, and here’s why.’” That humanity is evident in the editors’ thoughtful, personal introductions to our Hear My Story collections, which are part of Audible’s initiative to amplify underrepresented voices and to surface content that deepens listeners’ understanding of cultural moments and current events. “We are a collection of individuals who are vulnerable and personable in what we write,” Cox says. “That builds trust.” That, and of course her team’s encyclopedic knowledge of Audible’s catalog.

These personalized suggestions go both ways, as well. When Ford started at Audible in 2010 as a customer care representative, she was on a call with a listener who taught her the merits of “Scottish Highlander romance” (think Outlander) as a subcategory made for listening. “I appreciated her passion for that genre and began listening to things like mysteries and thriller. Same with memoir,” says Ford. Although these had not been genres she normally gravitated toward, she found “getting immersed in a story by listening offers another, transcendent experience,” and now she listens to them all the time.

When it comes time to whittle editor favorites down to one choice, the team gets together to passionately argue their cases—a process that was virtual for the past two years, but this year, says Ford, “getting together in person for deliberations was a welcome return, and so much fun!” Are there ever clashes? “Oh sure, we all have our hills we’d die on for a title,” she says, “but most things are debatable, and we really do want to hear how others felt about it.” Cox adds, “The title does have to have a majority vote, and no strong ‘againsts’.”

By June of each year, the editors have published a Best of the Year So Far list. Ford says, “The Audible listener is our primary focus when composing this list. We know what our customers like as much as we know what we like. The goal is to celebrate both the best sellers and the hidden gems that folks may have missed.” Come fall, the team has nearly closed ranks on its long list, with a few clear finalists for best of the year. But given that fall is also when publishers tend to release the most highly anticipated content, it becomes a serious crunch time. Cox says, “We’re sending each other titles all day, going ‘what about this, have you listened yet?’”

In the end, the goal of the Best Of list is the same as the goal of everything the editorial team does: to help customers discover the listen they’ll find the most transformative, illuminating, and entertaining, no matter their preferences and tastes. In other words, to help each Audible listener discover their own personal audiobook of the year.