Print has been good to Jeffery Deaver. During the past 26 years, Deaver, a lawyer-turned-thriller writer, has published 35 novels and sold 40 million copies of them globally.

But his latest work, "The Starling Project," a globe-spanning mystery about a grizzled war crimes investigator, isn’t available in bookstores. It won’t be printed at all. The story was conceived, written and produced as an original audio drama for Audible, an audiobook producer and retailer. If Deaver’s readers want the story, they’ll have to listen to it.

"My fans are quite loyal," Deaver said. "If they hear I’ve done this and that it’s a thriller, I think they’ll come to it."

"The Starling Project," which came out in mid-November, will test the appetite for an emerging art form that blends the immersive charm of old-time radio drama with digital technology. It’s also the latest sign that audiobooks, which have long been regarded as a quaint backwater of the publishing industry and an appendage to print, are coming into their own as a creative medium.

Just as original TV series like "House of Cards" and "Orange Is the New Black" transformed Netflix into a content creator as well as a distributor, Audible is aiming to distinguish itself in the booming audiobook market with original audio dramas that are written specifically for the form.

So far, Audible has commissioned and produced around 30 original works, as varied as a serialized thriller about a conspiracy that drives India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war, and original short stories set in the world of Charlaine Harris’ vampire novels.

"You have this massive opportunity when you don’t have to fight for people’s eyes," said Donald Katz, chief executive of Audible. "It’s time for us to move from sourcing content that can produce fantastic audio, on to imagining what the aesthetic of this new medium should be from the ground up."

Some are shunning the term "audiobook" and trying to rebrand their content as "audio entertainment" or "movies for your ears." "The Starling Project" runs to a little over four hours and has 29 actors performing in 80 speaking parts, with the English actor Alfred Molina in the lead role.

Next year, the audiobook producer GraphicAudio will release its first two original series, including a Western crime drama and a full-cast epic fantasy that’s complete with elaborate sound effects and recorded in surround sound.

Some see the current audio renaissance as a modern version of the Golden Age of radio drama – a rare instance when technology is driving the evolution of an art form, rather than quashing it. Along with the surge in audiobooks, podcasts have become a surprising new form of popular entertainment, with some programs drawing audiences that rival those of cable shows. One standout example, "Serial," a true-crime saga that re-examines the 1999 murder of a teenage girl in Maryland, unfolds in weekly episodes and has been streamed or downloaded more than 5 million times since its introduction in October.

"You can create a picture in your mind with sound that’s every bit as vivid as a movie," said the novelist Joe Hill, whose eerie comic book series, Locke & Key, is being adapted into an audio drama for Audible, with 30 actors and sound effects that were recorded in a historic mansion in Maine. "A lot of filmmakers who work in horror say what’s really scary is hearing, not seeing."

It’s no surprise that authors are eager to make their mark in the medium. As the print business stagnates, digital audiobooks are booming. In the first eight months of this year, sales were up 28 percent over the same period last year, far outstripping the growth of e-books, which rose 6 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, hardcover print sales for adult fiction and nonfiction fell by nearly 2 percent.

Audiobook publishers, scrambling to meet rising demand, released nearly 36,000 titles in 2013, up from 6,200 in 2010, according to the Audio Publishers Association. Audible, which Katz founded nearly 20 years ago and sold to Amazon in 2008 for a reported $300 million, still dominates the market, with more than 170,000 works, including 18,000 produced this year alone.

But the company faces growing competition as more companies seek a foothold in this fast-growing corner of the digital media marketplace. This month, Penguin Random House’s audio division introduced its first app, Volumes, which allows listeners to sample free content, play audiobooks from their digital libraries and buy audiobooks with one click from the iBooks Store. Barnes & Noble just released an audiobooks app for its Nook tablets and Android devices, with more than 50,000 titles.

Other newcomers jostling for a slice of the audiobook market include the e-book subscription platform Scribd, which recently added 30,000 audiobooks to its digital subscription plan, and Skybrite, a new streaming audio service that has 10,000 titles and an all-you-can-listen to membership for $10 a month.

To foster binge-listening and attract new users, Audible needs to provide a constant stream of new content. And original works from well-known authors like Deaver could be a potent new weapon in the battle for people’s ears.

Audible began a push for straight-to-audio works a few years ago, focusing on popular genres like science fiction, mysteries and thrillers. "The Starling Project" is one of Audible’s most prominent and ambitious audio dramas to date. Deaver said that when Audible approached him about writing an original story for them, he was excited and a bit daunted.

"It was like a nonvisual play," he said.

Deaver had collaborated on two other original audio works for Audible, with more than a dozen other thriller writers. But he had never written something start to finish from scratch.

First, he created a flow chart outlining a plot about a retired army intelligence officer, Harold Middleton, who is recruited to stop a shadowy mass-murder plot called "The Starling Project." The action spans the globe, with scenes in Mexico, Washington, London, Marseille and central Africa.

Deaver quickly ran into problems, though. It was tricky to establish geographic locations through dialogue in a way that didn’t seem hokey (he opted for a flight attendant’s announcement in one scene, welcoming travelers to France). He struggled to incorporate sound effects without muddying characters’ conversations with blaring motorcycle engines and machine gun fire. Without an omniscient narrator, he had to find new ways to establish relationships between the characters.

"You don’t want to write too on the head and say, ‘I don’t like you, you did something bad back then,’" he said.

A sex scene also proved challenging.

"I didn’t have a clue how to handle that," he said. "Do we have a zipper sound? Two shoes falling to the floor?" (They went with swelling music instead of sound effects for that scene.) But Deaver adjusted his writing style to the medium, and he finished the book in about five months.

Deaver says he has no plans to turn "The Starling Project" into a traditional book. Instead, he’s hoping the project will help him build a new audience of listeners.

"There are so many time-wasting alternatives to reading out there, and authors are up against formidable competition with things like ‘Assassin’s Creed,’ ‘Minecraft,’ ‘Angry Birds,’" he said. "This is an easier way for people to get access to good storytelling."

© 2014 The New York Times Company