[axxl]

The twitter thread and the accompanying website don't quite tell me what's going on besides 'not as much money as expected'. But I can't quite see what the 'Net Sales' problem is, it's just stated as "less money" for no reason? Although I am tired so maybe something just isn't clicking. I don't doubt that the terms of the deal are poor though.

I had wondered for a while how the credit system worked, and if the increase in sales made up for the 'deal' off audiobooks. I get $50-$60 audiobooks for $15, there's something mismatched there. Either the audiobook was priced at an extreme premium, or, it seems, Amazon just isn't paying the price I would expect.

Edit: I found one response from an author that I think makes a simple point, if not perhaps what the thread describes (still can't tell). It's impossible for authors to calculate their expected royalties as there are so many varieties of discounts and price points that customers can pay for a single book: https://twitter.com/AdamEcclesBooks/status/14933236569105489...

Which makes sense to me, as there's purchases and credits and various subscription tiers and audible unlimited and these are just the things I can think up off the top of my head. But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased at full price.

[jsnell]

The site has more details in other articles. They're not worth reading. There's no substance just a lot of charged language. And I'm really annoyed at spending any time at all on reading this.

The narrators don't get paid by the retail price (and the contract doesn't suggest they would). Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on in proportion to the number of credits spent on that book, but weighted by the retail price. I.e. a credit spent on a long expensive book pays the narrator more than the same credit spent on a medium length book, even though the credit cost the same to customer.

There's an undocumented revenue floor for price tranche of books. If the revenues per copy would end up lower than the floor in a billing period due to e.g. some promotion that flooded the economy with cheap credits, Audible makes up the difference and pays the narrator at least that minimum amount per copy. Apparently that floor is being hit every time, i.e. Audible is paying them more than they are actually required by the contract. The author thinks this is a smoking gun that proves how they're being cheated, which is an odd take.

Since the credits are far cheaper than the retail prices, it should hardly be surprising that the effective sales price is cheaper than the retail price.

[axxl]

> there's no substance just a lot of charged language.

Yeah, this was my issue with all I could find so far. It seems like 'working as designed'. Perhaps those who publish on audible would like to be able to opt in or out of various sales/credits etc but as a customer I prefer that I can get anything with a credit.

> Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on, except weighted by the retail price

Is that all credits in the system (similar to how Spotify was weighting streaming subscriptions (to my understanding)), or per user. I would prefer the money from my credits to go to the books I purchase, not be weighted with purchases by all other users.

[jsnell]

Across the system, not per-user.

The only funky thing is that IIUC the computation of the total income across the whole system is done based on credits sold that month, rather than deferring the income from selling a credit to the month in which the credit is spent.

[Thorrez]

That funky thing sounds like it would work in authors' favor overall. I would guess there's some percent of credits that are sold but never used. So if Amazon only paid on on used credits, Amazon would be able to keep that money. If Amazon pays out on sold credits, the authors get it. Although the distribution between the authors can be wrong, leading to some individual authors losing out even if authors overall benefit.

Although if Amazon is always paying out some contractual minimum instead of the shared amount, then none of this makes a difference.

[tehwebguy]

I wonder if authors are the ones who pay for the free Audible subscriptions that American Express Platinum card holders get now?

There is a huge a “Hollywood accounting” problem that never really went away (it’s how Warner Brothers markets HBO Max for free, how bands on major labels & even indies never recoup, and now possibly know how Amazon grows audible at no cost to themselves).

[troupe]

Audible is specifically a service where you can get one book per month by paying $15 per month. If you want to sell your book for $50, then you should probably list it somewhere that all sales are for $50. Presumably this author thinks it is worth listing his book on Audible vs. the other ways he could sell it. Alternatively he might just not be very good at math or reading contracts.

[wyattpeak]

It seems pretty surprising to me. When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for it".

The terms on which Amazon want to offer Audiobooks are their business, but as I consumer I certainly wouldn't expect them to affect any downline incomes.

[prepend]

> When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount,

Yes, they do actually. They organize sales and have temporary reduced prices sold to customers and paid to suppliers. That’s why some cereals go on sale and others don’t. It’s not like they decide to take a loss only on Kelloggs cereal. The discount is because they pay less to manufacturers.

Similarly for audible, the contract stipulates this. So I think it would be wrong if Audible unilaterally decided to not pay authors. But they didn’t do that, they have a contract, signed by authors that lets them put books on sale and pay less.

[djrogers]

> When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for it".

No, they negotiate those things ahead of time. It does t matter though, as there’s a huge difference between an item that is infinitely reproducible and a commodity that has per-unit production costs.

[wyattpeak]

Nah, I disagree with you there. I don't think the nature of the product being sold affects my opinion or expectation of whether or not producers are expected to shoulder the cost of a discount given by a middleman.

For the record, I also disagree with your blanket claim that supermarket discounts are negotiated ahead of time. Some are.

[ShroudedNight]

> they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for it".

Not necessarily because of sales, but one of my parents' neighbours (he was previously a fairly senior guy at a flour manufacturer) spoke from experience of big supermarket retailers "renegotiating" unit price after the fact (and after delaying payment until duress) under the threat of removing all their products from sale if they don't accept.

[eru]

Aldi has such a good relationship with suppliers, because--despite driving rather hard bargains up front--they do stick to what they agreed to pay and don't pull shenanigans.

[matsemann]

> Apparently that floor is being hit every time, i.e. Audible is paying them more than they are actually required by the contract. The author thinks this is a smoking gun that proves how they're being cheated, which is an odd take.

You think it is fair that Amazon sets an arbitrary low price, and then makes the authors take the cost. That's an odder take. If Amazon wants to sell their tokens at price X, have a campaign or whatever, that's a cost they should take. Not just dictate what the price should be and pay royalties based on that.

[lolinder]

And why shouldn't Audible set the price? No one signed up as a creator on Audible thinking they'd get let out of the credits system. That system is Audible's business model. It's how they sell so many books.

I've bought many audiobooks for one credit that I never would have bought at list price. Most creators' net revenue from me would be zero if I had to pay the full list price.

[troupe]

If you want to sell your book for $25, then putting it on a site where people get one book per month for $15 is stupid. They are literally agreeing to sell it for less than the list price in order to have access to Audible's customer base--many of whom are there specifically as subscribers to get one book for $15 per month.

[gnicholas]

So this means Audible can have promotions ("first month free!") and basically share the CAC with the producers?

[estaseuropano]

Without having read the whole page, I understand form your summary that:

A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their price

B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the price, but in reality this credit system destroys that %% completely

C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each book, irrespective of the price sold.

D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they can, underprice all competitors with cheap credits, and overall corner the market to make sure producers can't get around them.

Total monopolistic practices with abuse of market power. In a competitive environment no producer would accept this.

[gwd]

> Total monopolistic practices with abuse of market power. In a competitive environment no producer would accept this.

Hasn't Audible's business model been basically unchanged since its inception? Everyone who puts their books on their knows the price of a credit, which is normally like $15, and so knows they'd get at best $6 per book sold on there. How would Audible become a monopoly if people didn't like those odds?

Furthermore, I don't see much of a "moat" here. Suppose there was a company called BetterBooks, which had the same business model and price per credit, but gave 60% commission instead of 40%. If publishers were genuinely unhappy with $6/book, they could list it on BetterBooks and get $9/book instead. The quality of books on Audible would drop, and nobody would buy them.

[LeonB]

The moat is massive.

Their existing market power means that by not being on audible you’re walking away from most of your potential readers. That bit doesnt seem too bad…

But then - they offer you a very low percentage if you sell your book anywhere else… and a not so terrible % if you go with them (not great, but not terrible).

For an individual seller it is worth taking that deal. So they do. But the consequence is that no other market can achieve comparable power.

Hence it’s an abuse of market power. Individual publishers choices won’t stop it- only government intervention. And further it would need to have international cooperation.

Which also explains why they’re lazy about fixing trivial temporary errors whether they are gaining or losing money — they own the market, and don’t need to worries about pennies.

[gwd]

> But then - they offer you a very low percentage if you sell your book anywhere else… and a not so terrible % if you go with them (not great, but not terrible).

Audible's network effects can only be dislodged by people not listing their books on Audible at all; so this shouldn't have much of an effect.

> For an individual seller it is worth taking that deal. So they do. But the consequence is that no other market can achieve comparable power.

Right; so the approach would be for BetterBooks, before launch, to talk privately to a large number of publishers, with an offer like, "You agree to drop Audible and only go with us for 3 years, if we can get 60% of publishers to agree to do the same." If Audible's deal is really as horrible as this person is making out, it should be easy for any individual publisher to agree to that; and easy to get 60% of publishers on board. Then when BetterBooks launches, they have loads of great titles which Audible is lacking.

[LeonB]

> Audible's network effects can only be dislodged by people not listing their books on Audible at all; so this shouldn't have much of an effect.

This isn’t quite right and misses most of what’s going on.

Since a book that’s exclusive to A can’t appear on B - B can never get any network effects and thus can’t compete with A.

And if B did begin to get any network effects - through an innovative technique ( Eg when book depository made ground by offering free shipping) — A would take notice and simply buy B before it was a big enough threat.

Hence again - individuals and normal market forces can’t displace an established monopolist.

And the moat is huge.

[LeonB]

if it was easy as you say… it would take a massive investment - and that’s a demonstration of a moat right there.

But it wouldn’t be that easy - because Amazon can afford to give better deals to the top 1% of popular authors and thus the cost to achieve what you’re saying would be far higher.

[jsnell]

> A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their price

Yes.

> B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the price, but in reality this credit system destroys that %% completely

No. They are not promised a rate of the retail price. They are promised a share of the net sales of credits, proportional to how many of the credits were spent on their books. They should know the key parts of the business model here: Audible sell the credits for significantly cheaper than the retail price, and the narrators are being paid based on the actual amount spent on the credits not based on the retail price.

> C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each book, irrespective of the price sold.

No. The minimum revenue per-book guarantee is being hit every single month. So the narrators are being paid a bigger share than the contract promised, and Amazon is paying that difference from their cut.

> D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they can,

And since the earlier points were incorrect, this conclusion doesn't actually follow.

[eru]

You don't have to put your audiobook on audible..

[mchusma]

I'd say the list price for audiobooks is deliberately high to make the subscriptions attractive. It worked on me.

[falcolas]

I haven’t dug into it too deeply myself, but here’s some numbers from late last year. Note that this as a producer sharing that 40% with the writer half and half (royalty share contract). One month saw 21 sales of a $19.99 audiobook. Amazon reported net sales of $76, so I made around $11.

EDIT: looking closer, 17 of the sales occurred in a market/purchase combination that resulted in no royalties at all. The invoice is less than clear on why those markets have 0% royalty rates. The US market is split in two, one with the expected rate, one with 0. No guesses on how the counts lined up.

So, around 2% real royalty rates, or 10x less than the contract stipulated.

It’s not something worth fighting against for me right now, I’m using it to build a resume. But between this and the rampant fraud they do nothing to curb, it’s not a stretch to call it a scam, both for the producer and the author.

But it’s Audible. What choice is there?

EDIT2: Going to bed. Its not that I don’t like you.

[HotHotLava]

> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?

I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily discounted price and still come out ahead.

If enough producers come together this way you could even create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop and account system.

[INTPenis]

Yeah the funny thing is that AWS, GCP, Azure and so on provide all the infrastructure to cheaply distribute audiobooks on your own.

All we need now is for someone to sit down and write an open source tool for it.

I'm a dreamer but I see a world where audiobook creators can create an account on a privately hosted instance, sort of like bookwyrm but with payment features, promote their work using ActivityPub in a federated way, and distribute the media p2p using something like peertube.

And consumers can hear the media in any of a number of clients.

[wccrawford]

It's not just distribution, but also the player. I tried other players in the past and had problems with them. When Audible's just worked and was reliable, I stuck with it. I can't be alone in that thinking.

Perhaps there are better players now, but if you're going to distribute the audio book on your own store, I think you need to be ready to recommend a good player for each OS your customer might be on. And it had better actually be a good player, or people will be upset with you, too.

[axxl]

Got it, so it seems like the contract is just heavily skewed in favor of Amazon, where the content is subsidizing all of the deals and discounts that Audible provides. Although how they can get a 0% royalty on certain sales in is baffling to me.

> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?

Yeah, they sadly seem to be lacking in meaningful competition. People on twitter are talking about libro.fm which has a slew of anti-audible articles, although I can't find any details on their reimbursements either.

[prepend]

> Although how they can get a 0% royalty on certain sales in is baffling to me.

Wouldn’t this be a situation where they gave out promotional copies through free trials and stuff like that?

[falcolas]

It looks like promotional codes are indeed the cause. That said, promo codes are also be sold through third parties. I think that's what's happened in my case.

[falcolas]

> Got it, so it seems like the contract is just heavily skewed in favor of Amazon, where the content is subsidizing all of the deals and discounts that Audible provides.

With how much guff Apple and Google get for their 30% cuts, and they don't offer all kinds of "unauthorized" discounts off the retail price... yeah, Amazon's being a bad actor here.

[throwthere]

Thanks for giving actual data. My take is many producers are surprised about the royalty share-- Amazon could be more upfront with expected revenue.

The terms are monopolistic, but I mean, they have a monopoly.

[falcolas]

The 60% cut is egregious and deserves more condemnation, especially with how much people gripe about Apple, Google's, and other parties 30% cut of payments.

Plus, I have yet to see a single retail price purchase. The biggest price someone has paid for a book I've seen a royalty payment on was $4.50.

[eyejay]

Does your contract have the retail price in it? Or were the net sales $76? I don't think both of those can be true.

[falcolas]

The retail price is on the storefront. It’s determined by the length of the finished audiobook. The net sales show no full priced retail purchases. 13 of the sales were from US customers using free credits, which were valued at $1 each. Of course, those also fell in the 0% royalties category to add insult to… well, I don’t know what to call it anymore.

[sdoering]

I couldn't agree more. Also this person scandalizing and stirring things up sounded to me like trying to weapponize public opinion for personal gain.

I know from other, let's call the traditional, authors that classical book royalties were more in the 10 - 20 percent range for printed books. The upper range if you were a long published best seller with bargaining power.

So I was already irritated when he stated that 40% exclusive royalty (as a not so well known author I assume) was very little earnings per book. Without providing context that already was him trying to weapponize my opinion (at least that was how it felt to me).

Publishing that one feels there is an error on Audibles side in calculating royalties is not only legitimate but appreciated by me. I want to know that errors occur and ideally how they are fixed. Trying to manipulate me into enragement "porn" and wesponizing public outrage might be good for business or might feel like a valid approach when feeling wronged by Goliath but is - at least on my side - just off-putting.

So I do wish for all authors to be compensated based on the contracts they have with Audible. But I couldn't care less about this person's vendetta.

[alphabetting]

> Also this person scandalizing and stirring things up sounded to me like trying to weaponize public opinion for personal gain.

What is the potential gain of going after audible as an author?

[lolinder]

They explicitly say in the thread that they're trying to get enough people angry that Audible changes the deal.

[djrogers]

> But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased at full price.

I’ve got ~300 audible books in my library, and I can safely say I’d have bought exactly none of them at full price.

[prepend]

Same here. The only time I’ve bought a book is when the price is less than $14.95.

The author seems disingenuous to propose that the retail price in audible is anything that anyone expects. I assume he’s not stupid and is aware of this so not bringing up this point is misleading.

It’s like if someone wrote a blog post enraged that BMG Record Club wasn’t paying them out a percent of retail prices without pointing out that BMG’s whole model was 10 CDs for a penny and then 2 for the price of one (or whatever the ridiculous price scheme was).

[83457]

You should listen to better books then.

[function_seven]

I think you're misunderstanding OP.

The way Audible book pricing works is a little byzantine. The "list" price of most titles is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50. Plus or minus.

But as a subscriber you're given one credit each month, for $15. So right there you can get the same title for much cheaper if it's your credit redemption.

But that's not all. If you buy the Kindle edition of a book, it's only $7.50 or so to add on narration with the purchase. The text copy of the title might be $9.99, so the total is still far less than the "naked" audiobook price.

I don't understand why they do it this way. Even if I'm out of credits, I can save $40 or so by getting the Kindle+Audio bundle vs. just the Audible version alone.

[degeberg]

If you run out of credits, you can also buy 3 extra for £18 (I'm not sure what the USD price is). That's significantly cheaper than buying 3 audio books at full price.

Credits with frequent 2-for-1 sales, £3 sales and £1 sales, there is just no reason to ever pay retail price on Audible.

[eru]

I suspect the retail price is just there as a psychological suggestion to make you think you are getting a good deal with the credits.

[gwd]

Back in the 90's I bought several audiobooks on tape for long car journeys; the retail prices listed on Audible seem similar to the price I actually paid back in the day. A lot of the titles are also available on iTunes as well, and the prices were comparable to the retail price listed on Audible. Audible really is a good deal.

[conjectures]

Yes, also because then it feels less like you're committing to buying N books per month from a particular vendor.

[83457]

Most of the audible books I buy are in the $25-35 range full price. There are a few I've listened to multiple times and now could certainly justify spending full price for them.

With that said, I do think I misinterpreted what they were saying, which was more speaking to the original outcome if full price than what they would do now regarding each book.

[matsemann]

And those promotions should be a cost of Amazon, not the authors. Weird how Amazon can take your product, sell it for a quarter of the price, and then claim they now owe you no money.

[gwd]

Audible's whole business model is to sell monthly credits on subscription for $15, which can be used to purchase any audiobook. That's not a "promotion", that's how Audible works.

Now they do also have sales where they sell books for like $5 or something; if those sales are not opt-in, of course that's a problem. But I have a hard time believing they're not opt-in.

[eru]

Eh, a company should be free to offer any bad deal they can dream up.

If you don't like it, your job is to turn down that offer.

[CraneWorm]

> If you don't like it, your job is to turn down that offer.

Sure, and disappear, because you're not listed by the bad deal company that has container-ships-of-money for marketing.

[eru]

Nobody is forcing you to work in that particular industry.

And you can put your spoken word content on eg Spotify or Youtube, too. There is competition.