We collaborate with authors to create immersive excerpts of their nonfiction audiobooks, brought to life with voice, score, and sound design.
Our Pilot
Oprah Winfrey Feminism
From Leila C. Nadir’s forthcoming book, Afghan Americana: An Intimate Geopolitical Memoir.
Our Story
Bonus Chapter is an experiment.
Full-length nonfiction audiobooks can be amazing. But what if you also got a short audio teaser that fully exploits the sonic medium, plunging your established audience (and potentially a whole new audience) into your story’s world?
Send it to sites, podcasts, radio programs. Play it during book tours.
Bonus Chapter is a way to share your book in a whole new dimension.
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While the listener experience will vary wildly — and that’s on purpose — all Bonus Chapters will share a set of qualities:
Short: 30 minutes max, just enough to dip into a storyworld and draw listeners even further into the book.
Embodied: performed by the author, to spark the specific delight of meeting a writer you love.
Alive: punctuated by sound from the author’s archives and other untapped sources — an interview fragment, social media post, journal read-aloud, vintage news-reel, audio ripped from video the writer recorded as part of the reporting process, original sound design, etc.
Additive: faithful enough to the book that the audio experience produces a gorgeous feeling of recognition in a reader who gets to encounter some of the same material, expressed in two ways.
Scored: featuring a soundtrack to propel the story forward and land moments of emotional impact.
Insightful: candid talks with the author and behind-the-scenes tidbits that bring fans inside the creative process. -
Between Lissa and Sharif, we have 30-some years of audio experience, from creating series, to writing and editing, to producing and sound designing. Our work has reached millions of listeners; won awards including Peabody, Murrow, Kennedy, Gracie, Third Coast, IRE, NLGJA, and Pulitzer;) and has been featured on NPR, This American Life, 99% Invisible, Vox Media, Audible, Spotify, and Apple.
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There is huge, unrealized potential for inventiveness in short-form experimentation with nonfiction audiobooks. We take inspiration from all sorts of sources — the narrative podcasts we know and make, full-cast audio dramatizations in fiction, documentaries of all kinds, and more.
Bonus Chapter makes it possible for writers to co-create dynamic audio stories that take their books to new heights. -
If you’re a publisher or author and are interested in creating something together, get in touch!
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation generously funded our pilot.
“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.”
-Leila Nadir
Our Team
Lissa Soep
Lissa Soep is an editor, producer, writer, and researcher who started a career in audio storytelling after she finished a PhD, turned down a professor job, and instead joined Youth Radio (now YR Media,) a nonprofit newsroom in Oakland, California. Lissa has written several academic books and articles, and her narrative nonfiction book was published in April, 2024: Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations that Never End (Spiegel & Grau).
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Lissa Soep has co-produced and edited stories that have won Peabody, Murrow, Kennedy, Investigative Reporters + Editors, Third Coast, and other awards. Investigative projects for which she’s served on the senior team have advanced reforms in juvenile justice and child welfare.
She joined Vox Media in 2020 as a senior editor for audio and has worked on narrative podcasts including Little America, Hell or High Water, Land of the Giants, Up Against the Mob, and Tabloid.
She runs an audio storytelling speaker and workshop series and is a part of Language, Please — a Webby-nominated Vox Media initiative providing dynamic style guidance for journalists and storytellers covering evolving social, cultural, and identity-related topics.
Sharif Youssef
Sharif Youssef is a writer, editor, producer, designer, engineer, and artist working primarily in the media of sound and words (often at the same time!)
They love creating things that make people feel and collaborating with people to make their work shimmer.
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Their work has appeared on This American Life, 99% Invisible (where they were a staffer for 4.5 years), Vox Media, NBC, and New York Magazine (among others).
Shows, series, and episodes they’ve worked on routinely rank in the top ten of the iTunes Chart, have won awards (including a Pulitzer) and garnered praise from critics at The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vulture, and (occasionally) their father.
They have a BA in cognitive science from Yale University and were selected as an AIR Media New
Voices Scholar (2017) and mentor (2023) and were a member of the inaugural cohort of Edit Mode fellows.
They are from Wheeling, West Virginia by way of Alexandria, Egypt and now call Oakland, California home.
Our Collaborators
Leila C. Nadir
Leila Christine Nadir is an Afghan-American artist and writer whose work appears in literary and scholarly journals; in museums and galleries; and in forests, classrooms, and kitchens. She explores intersections of ecological destruction, colonial traumas, immigration upheavals, and family violence and how individuals and communities rebuild and grow after their worlds fall apart.
Leila’s Bonus Chapter is an excerpt of her intimate geopolitical memoir-in-progress about the wars that rage within families, in nations, and across the planet.
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Leila researches Life After Ruins and the ways that global geopolitics invade our private living rooms and the most intimate violences that reverberate across the planet. Her creative writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Khôra, Black Warrior Review, North American Review, ASAP, and Aster(ix), and has been supported by awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the de Groot Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Maine Arts Commission.
She is also an artist with her work in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum.
She holds a PhD in English and is the Founding Director of an Environmental Humanities Program in upstate New York.