Breaking News: A Million Downloads of Better Reading’s Stories Behind the Story Podcast – Thank You!

We are thrilled – and rather proud – to announce that Better Reading’s Stories Behind the Story podcast has over 1,000,000 downloads. It’s quite a milestone.

As you know, podcasts have revolutionised the ways we engage with media – as a digital medium, they are informal, loose and tailored to specific interests and niches.

The Stories Behind the Story podcast brings conversations about reading and writing to your ears each week. Cheryl Akle chats to authors about how they came to tell us their stories. Authors share their writing process, influences and road to publication. Since its inception, Cheryl has interviewed the who’s who of the literary world, including guest authors Nigella Lawson, Dawn French, Matthew McConaughey, George Saunders, Julia Gillard, Malcolm Turnbull, Michael Connelly, Michael Mosely, Richard Flanagan, Kathy Reichs, Miriam Margolyes and Dr. David Sinclair – to name a few.

Podcasts are booming, and we’re excited to grow and expand with the medium. By 2020, 9 out of 10 Australians knew what a podcast was. By 2021, podcasts had 54% growth, reaching over 9 million Australians. Lockdown saw a huge surge in podcast listeners, with over 500 million downloads in 2021. Worldwide, at current growth, there will be around 424 million podcast listeners by the end of this year.

With the Stories Behind the Story podcast, we’ve seen big demographic shifts over the past twelve months, with a huge percentage of our listeners now in the 18 to 34-year-old age group. These people are readers, interested in our interviews with authors and other book professionals, including publishers and journalists. They are interested in STORY.

We look forward to the future, delivering more great author interviews and continuing to grow in this exciting area. We can do so because of you – because you listen, review (please review!) and continue to download every week. For this, we thank you.

A new Better Reading podcast is released twice weekly and is available to listen to on your device via Spotify, Apple and all other podcast platforms. Happy listening!