Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by impostervt 905 days ago
KDP, the part of amazon that lets you publish your own books, now has a beta program to create audio books using virtual voices.

https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/article/Invite-Only-KDP-Beta-...

1 comments

Neat feature. I assume is AWS Polly under the hood. This caught my eye though:

> Authors can set a list price between $3.99 and $14.99 and will receive a 40% royalty

Do they mean you get 40% of the work you created and they ran their model on? Oh lord. Let me run this through a TTS myself and publish it like that. Not sure if they even allow that though.

That's the standard payment when publishing your audiobook using ACX (how independents get their books on Audible) - and then only if you go exclusive with Audible. If you're not exclusive, you get 25%.

Audible's market share is like 60%, so you loose out on a lot if you don't publish there.