Bonus Chapter

A New Literary Sound 

What if your favorite full-length, nonfiction audiobook came with a short, riveting segment where a bit of the story sprang to life with voice, score, and sound? This is the thought-experiment that launched Bonus Chapter: New Literary Sounds. I established the project in 2024 to reimagine text-on-the-page by smuggling the best elements of a narrative podcast episode into the audiobook experience. 

Bonus Chapters can be embedded inside full-length audiobooks or work as stand-alone, immersive trailers that are native to the audio landscape but shareable outside the audiobook paywall, connecting authors with producers and audiences in powerful ways to drive engagement. The finished product is like a friend telling you about the book they can’t put down, only you’re hearing directly from the author, enhanced by clips, sound design, and score.

For the project pilot, I teamed up with two award-winning artists: producer Sharif Youssef and author Leila Nadir, to create a Bonus Chapter for Nadir’s forthcoming geopolitical memoir, Afghan-Americana, where she explores the battles that raged within and beyond her family during the 1980s Cold War. Reflecting on the process, Nadir said: “I assumed that Bonus Chapter would be an illustration of my story, but instead, I’ve realized that activating the ear in this way, I’m not just listening to the words now, but I’m actually feeling them. It’s turning this excerpt of my book into something that’s almost bodily. Collaborating with you all awakened my awareness to a layer of experience —  like a sonic ecosystem within my writing — that I hadn’t imagined before.” 

As someone who’s spent most of my career making stories with sound, I feel real urgency around the timing of Bonus Chapter. Artistically ambitious programming that investigates risky subjects, centers emerging and underrepresented voices, and experiments with original formats is at serious risk. There is huge, unrealized potential for boundary-breaking in nonfiction audiobooks that do something meaningful, maybe even magical, with sound. You can find out more about Bonus Chapter in my LitHub essay, The Sound of C: On Giving Voice to the Words of Others.