I wish audiobook samples were chosen to demonstrate the narrator, not just taken from the beginning
I've returned or abandoned enough audiobooks that I've started noticing how useless some store samples are.
I'm trying to decide whether I can spend 10, 20, sometimes 40 hours listening to this narrator, and the preview gives me four minutes of:
Publisher information.
A dedication.
Half a page of scene-setting.
Maybe the protagonist says one sentence right before the sample ends.
That tells me almost nothing I actually want to know.
I want to hear the narrator handle a conversation between two characters. I want one male and one female voice if the book has both. Give me an emotional sentence, a normal descriptive paragraph, a proper noun that's going to appear 600 times, and maybe thirty seconds of whatever accent they're using.
Basically, give me the audiobook equivalent of a test drive.
I've had narrators whose regular narration sounded great in the preview but whose character voices drove me insane once chapter two started. I've also almost skipped books because the opening sounded flat, only to discover later that the narrator becomes fantastic once there are actual characters to perform.
And with full-cast productions, sampling the opening can be even sillier because sometimes you don't hear most of the cast at all.
I understand why automatically using the first few minutes is easy, but audiobook samples seem like one place where manually choosing a representative 3-5 minute section would genuinely help people buy the right edition.
If you could design the perfect audiobook preview, what would you want included?