| Tweet |
Eileen Hutton has a lot of friends you might recognize, people with names like Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Danielle Steel, Harlan Coben and W.E.B. Griffin.
They’re friends she made during her decades of work with Brilliance Audio, an audiobook company that she helped shepherd from a five-person operation in western Michigan to a company of hundreds that produces audiobooks by some of the industry’s best-known authors. “Everybody was sure that audiobooks would always be a little tiny sideline thing, and today it’s a huge force,” she said.
Hutton started with Brilliance in 1989, when she and her husband relocated to Michigan. She had been in the market for a school librarian job — her background was in library science and business management (“I’m psychologically incapable of being anywhere without a book close by,” she said) — but found her interest piqued by an unusual ad in a nascent industry.
“I said, ‘OK, this is interesting’,” she said. “I’d never heard of an audiobook before, but I thought it was a cool concept. This was in the infancy of the industry.”
Hutton started in a clerical position, but in under a year she had moved up to a place where she was crisscrossing the country to sign authors, write contracts and recommend titles. Before long, she was in charge of the entire editorial process.
As the roster of big names grew — one of her early successes was landing Nora Roberts — so did the company. Hutton attributes that partly to Brilliance’s policy of publishing only unabridged versions of books — something she said that was anathema to the industry at the time. “(The major publishing houses) would do two cassettes, three hours, period,” she said. “They would have James Michener — an 1,000-page book — and it would be reduced to ‘He said she said they did it they broke up they did it again and they got married.’ I thought, ‘Who wants to hear an incomplete novel?’”
She was also instrumental in addressing a demographic that wasn’t being pursued by the conventional wisdom: Female readers. No, really. “That was a big fight internally. The entire board of directors thought I was crazy for signing women's fiction. Everybody knew — in bold, in quotation marks — that audiobooks were the purview of the man in the gray flannel suit.”
Of course, the opposite proved true. “I argued that no, women read a lot more than men, that they buy more books every year than men — a fact that’s still true. And as far as I was concerned Nora was the creme de la creme of women’s fiction authors and finally wore them down. She was hugely successful for us.”
More authors followed, as did more acclaim: Hutton has been director of the national Audio Publishers Association, a consultant to the Library of Congress on the digitization of its recorded content, and a lecturer on audiobook publishing at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. In 2009 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the industry.
But in 2006, after years of resisting overtures from the major publishing companies for fear they’d prune Brilliance’s then-185-person staff, she and her partner, Mike Snodgrass, accepted an offer to sell to Amazon in 2009. “I called (my partner) in Hawaii on vacation and said we’re selling the company. And he said, ‘OK, tell them they’ve got a deal.’”
The move paid off. These days, Hutton is fully retired with her husband in Moss Creek (“The last time we saw snow was in our rearview mirror,” she laughs. “Never want to see it again”). But books, of course, are still her life: Currently she’s judging Best Novel of the Year for the International Thriller Awards, staying active with the local American Heart Association and hosting a regular series of local and national author events in Moss Creek. “It’s a way of keeping my friends close,” she said.
