As a Senior Director of Product, Justin Belmont heads a set of teams working to build and enhance products for our Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) marketplace, where narrators match up with authors and publishers to produce audiobooks on Audible. And that’s a whopping number of creators to serve: almost 1 in 3 titles in Audible’s million-title catalog (US) are published through ACX.

“We invest in independent creators quite a lot,” says Justin, who joined us about a year ago from a career leading B2B and creator products for tech companies. He designed user-facing products for medical practitioners, musical artists, and trucking professionals. Now he’s “happy to be back in the creator space,” he says. “It speaks to my soul.”

Justin’s teams have put several exciting new tools in the hands of creators, such as an enhanced sales dashboard with real-time data about sales, number of daily listeners, and where in the world people are listening. The team has also rolled out a more flexible earning model for creators, and ACX creators can now request to include their content in Audible’s “all you can listen” Plus catalog, so they can reach new listeners and turn them into fans, helping them earn even more.

He’s especially proud of the recent beta launch of Audible’s AI-generated voice replicas for narrators. This innovation solves a few problems. First, “we’re enabling narrators to leverage Amazon’s best-in-class AI capabilities to create a replica of their own voice, and then audition for and book jobs they might not otherwise have time for.” He explains that the aim of these tools is to “enable narrators to monetize their voice replicas and maximize their earning opportunities, while maintaining complete creative control over where and how their voice is used.”

Second, the vast majority of books do not exist in audio, due to the rather large barrier to entry involved in creating an audiobook. “Some estimate there are about 150 million books in the world, and only slightly more than one million in audio,” Justin says. Using AI and voice replicas would enable the rights holders of those books to create audiobooks and reach more people with them. 

Several of our teams recently connected with creators at Audible’s ACX Creator Summit, held in May, where they had the chance to hear their “wish list” for other tools and capabilities that they would like. Justin also met with independent authors, narrators and rights holders at the London Book Fair. “A lot of what they told us has influenced our roadmap for the products we’re shipping.”

The first audiobook that got Justin excited to work in the medium was Crazy, Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. “Lynn Chen really performs the heck out of it,” he says. He loves that narration has the power to create a whole new experience of a book, something that’s profound in its own way, such as Michelle Williams’s performance of Britney Spears memoir, The Woman in Me.

On ACX, that alchemy happens all the time, and it’s meaningful for Justin to have a role in facilitating the magic. “What’s really unique about ACX is the engagement an author has with a narrator—to spend a huge amount of time and effort writing this story and then connect with the right voice and build a very special relationship turning it into an audiobook.” 

A creative himself, Justin studied art in college before pursuing his MBA, and he writes and does photography in his spare time. The experience of the creative is always at the forefront of his work, as he divides his time between our hubs in Los Angeles, CA, Newark, NJ and Cambridge, MA. “As all of these new technologies emerge, the focus is: How do we put them in the hands of our creators, who are going to do incredible things with them?"