A Day in the Life: Audible Employee Dorothea Martin
Follow along in the "Day in the Life" of one of our employees to get a glimpse inside Audible.
Dorothea Martin joined Audible in February 2018 to build up our Berlin team’s Audible Originals program. When she’s not in the office, she can be found out with friends, cooking fancy meals, playing around with her dog Paule or working on Adele’s Salon, a pen and paper adventure she creates with Simone Veenstra.
6:00 a.m.
My parents, especially my father, who’s an early riser himself, still can’t believe that I’ve turned into a morning person, getting up at 6 a.m. the latest. I love the morning hours to get some quiet time just for me and to prepare myself for the day ahead.
I usually start with some yoga, then have my breakfast while reading my (very old fashioned) book of the week. At the moment, that’s either Zadie Smith’s Feel Free or a book about Berlin in the Golden Twenties.
What I love about my role at Audible is that all the stories I read, watch or listen to feed into my job. It’s important to know what’s popular when building up a program of original audiobook stories—both with readers/listeners and within the industry. Which topics are on the rise and which will be in high demand a year from now?
8:00 a.m.
By this time, I’m on my way to work. I usually take the Tram—the Berlin Metro—so I can listen to some audiobooks or podcasts on the way. Or anyways, that’s my excuse for being too lazy to get on my bike…
Some of my current listens:
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
- Die juten Sitten by Anna Basener
- Mars Nation 2 by Brandon Q. Morris
- One of our Original Podcasts, German Liebe
9:00 a.m.
Once I get to the office, I usually settle in with a big cappuccino and try to get some focused work done. My role in the Original Content Creation team is to create Original audiobooks with a strong emphasis on audiobook series for fiction and non-fiction narratives.
Right now, I’m working on scaling up our audiobook production for 2020. The idea is to work with teams of authors, editors and narrators who will collaborate and develop ideas for series. I’m also finalizing our non-fiction initiative for lifelong learning—there will be some interesting new formats in 2020, so watch out for that!
10:00 a.m.
After some focused work, I usually spend the rest of my mornings in meetings. I meet regularly with our production team to brief them on projects and discuss the talent and narrators I’ve found for our series. I also discuss ideas with the marketing team, and make sure I’m on the same page as the whole content team in terms of what our next months and years will look like.
12:30 p.m.
Berlin lunch! Food is really important to me. Most of the time, I bring something home cooked for lunch and we’ll just sit together and chat. But sometimes we use lunch to catch up with colleagues, and we’ll often head out and try to find new places. There are definitely some established favorites and if you ever come to Berlin, these are our most popular ones: Kantine at Deutsches Theater, if you want to have cheap German cuisine and see some theater stars; Muckrackers, salads, pizza or pasta at a small Turkish-Italian place; CouCou, healthy bowls and salads; and Sabzi , because I love Iranian cuisine.
1:30 p.m.
My afternoons consist of more meetings—it could be planning our next Innovathon (hackathon) with a colleague at Audible France, discussing international projects, or meeting authors, editors, translators, or agents. When building up a content program, networking with local creatives is a very important part of the job.
3:00 p.m.
During my last few hours in the office, I try to read new content proposals and work on my emails, or discuss contract details with our Licensing and Rights Manager.
7:00 p.m.
I start my day with food and stories, and I usually end my day like that, too. I’m bingeing 4 Blocks, Elementary, and One Mississippi on television at the moment. If Paule the dog isn’t keeping watch over my partner and her writing, I’ll take him on a walk before going to sleep and dreaming up new story ideas.
