“Completely different every day” is how Kristin Lang ’92 describes her typical week as head of global Audible books acquisitions, the latest position in what she describes as a “nonlinear” career path in publishing. Back from a business trip to Japan, Lang sits at her desk, using her hands as she speaks. Her eyes widen as she tells a story, clearly energized by a mission “to set the stage” for Audible content that serves listeners around the world.
And it starts with hearing what the writer has to say. “I find I’m a more appreciative reader through listening,” says Lang, who earned a bachelor’s in American history at UAlbany. “A perfect sentence just stands out differently.”
Growing up in New York City as a selfdescribed “public school girl,” Kristin Lang never imagined driving to work from the suburbs of New Jersey, listening to audiobooks. After a “lifetime of public transportation,” the Bronx High School of Science graduate commutes to Audible’s headquarters in Newark listening to audiobooks. Without audio, Lang says, “I wouldn’t have been able to read nearly as many books as I do. I’m reading in the car, in the shower, wherever I can.”
Lang’s team recently acquired the audio rights for The Let Them Theory, the new title from bestselling author and motivational speaker Mel Robbins, currently sitting at No. 1 on Audible’s Bestselling Audiobooks list.
“Basically, everything our team does is tied to looking for what content we should be acquiring or developing,” she says.
“We do a lot of meetings and relationship building.” Lang’s team turned a longstanding relationship with Robbins into a multi-language global release. “She was already big,” Lang says. “But having the support of Audible behind the project gave it consistency across markets.”
Like many Audible titles, this was no ordinary narration — it was crafted for audio, with new material and stories not found in the print edition. “It’s been a total juggernaut,” Lang says. “Mel is such an audio-friendly creator, and the result really speaks to the power of the format.”
Over the years, Lang has had a front-row seat to audio’s transformation. Early in her publishing career, audio was “just a small part” of her job selling rights at a literary agency. “Back then, the deals were tiny,” she says. “But the audio people I worked with were a total delight.” One deal from 1999 that stands out involved licensing Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classics, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, to a fledgling company called Audible.
“Completely different every day” is how Kristin Lang ’92 describes her typical week as head of global Audible books acquisitions.
That experience planted a seed and drew her further into the audio space. After a stint at Macmillan Audio, she joined Audible, shifting over the years from U.S.-focused work to her current global role. Even after the switch, she had doubts. “I was a little afraid that maybe I was leaving ‘sexy publishing’ behind,” she says. “That absolutely was not the case.”
Searching for audio content on a global scale, Lang has discovered “that there are universal themes but also very big differences between what people want to listen to in, say, Germany versus Brazil or Japan.” In some places, the industry is still new. Of her recent overseas trip, where her group celebrated 10 years of Audible’s service for Japan, she notes, “There was a really low awareness of audio as a format for books until we came along.”
At Audible, she’s found a fast-growing segment and a bigger platform for connecting stories and listeners. Audible serves over 180 countries with content in more than 50 languages. In 2024, listeners consumed more than 5.4 billion hours of Audible content — including audiobooks, podcasts, Audible Originals and titles that defy genres and labels.
Lang arrived at UAlbany without a fixed plan but threw herself into activities: She joined student government, served as a Purple & Gold student ambassador, gave campus tours and interned at the New York State Assembly. “There was just so much opportunity,” she says.
One opportunity came from a camp counselor job after graduation, when Lang had a chance encounter with a fellow UAlbany alum who worked at Random House. “There was a job in the rights department,” she says, “and I got to bypass the typing test.” That break led to positions in scouting, agenting and, eventually, audio publishing — a career she says “definitely started with happenstance.”
As Lang’s career progressed, the less it felt like happenstance. When she moved over to audio, it felt like the next right move. “We used to be this creaky thing,” she says of audio’s old reputation. “But then it became where the digital publishing thing was really happening.”
Asked what she’d tell her younger self—the new grad unsure of her next move — she pauses. “Follow the things that interest you,” she says. That advice has shaped her own nonlinear path — one that proves careers, like so many stories, don’t always move in a straight line.