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The Bizarre World of Scam Audiobooks
- Causality1 5y agoThe ACX system is a mixed bag even without the scams. Sure, you get audiobooks that might not have been produced otherwise but the quality is noticeably lower than professional narration, particularly the editing. Mispronunciations, double takes, and coughing tends to show up. Before I learned ACX existed I was getting worried that Audible's quality had taken a serious dive.
- pitspotter 5y agoYes, only today I noticed a fine free domain recording of a work by Rudyard Kipling has been appropriated by audible with the Librivox blurb removed and the narrator misattributed.
- delgaudm 5y agoIt's a mixed bag because the ACX Royalty Share[0] system is a horrible, horrible business case for narrators. The math just doesn't work. My guess that all those poor narrations are royalty share gigs. Most novice narrators have no idea how bad the proposition is, and by the end just don't care if it's good or not, because it was so much work just to get to the end and pass the technical checks. So once the mp3s pass the technical checks, they're done. I think many times the narrator realizes by the end that they'll never get paid for the effort. And it's clear the authors rarely check the work. We saw on HN this week that the numbers don't work for authors [1], and considering that audiobook sales are a fraction of print sales, the business case for narrators is far worse. [0] https://help.acx.com/s/article/what-royalty-is-paid-on-acx https://help.acx.com/s/article/what-royalty-is-paid-on-acx [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27106055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27106055
- pelagicAustral 5y agoThis sounds like something I can get really hooked-on merely for the cringe factor... My previous fix was to watch small, regional tv channels, I used to spend hours trying to migrate my expectations to tv shows about art exhibits in the middle of nowhere or news reports about missing cows. I get such an odd feeling with stuff like that, like my brain buzzes in a very relaxing way for some reason... bah!
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoSounds a bit like ASMR
- pavel_lishin 5y ago> My previous fix was to watch small, regional tv channels Where do you find access to those?
- pelagicAustral 5y agoAll I do is to check relatively small cities in outer regions of the country. Large enough to have at least a TV channel... Then I google for media sources. Most of them have some form of live streaming...
- pavel_lishin 5y agoIf you have any favorites, I'd love recommendations!
- FreshFries 5y agoAs a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_independent_television_stations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_independent_television...
- inanutshellus 5y agotl;dr - Audible incentivized author/narrator collaboration by only paying narrators when audiobooks sold, but instantly "paying" authors with 200 promo codes for any book successfully narrated. Those promo codes could then be sold to anyone. So... 1. baddies write programs to randomly generate content 2. baddies post it to Audible's ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) platform 3. Some bored guy with no standards on what he's reading narrates the gibberish for free 4. baddie gets 200 promo codes 5. and... baddie presumably sells the codes somehow.
- apples_oranges 5y agoGreat summary, thanks!
- impostervt 5y agoIt's not like that anymore though. You get 25 US and 25 UK codes, and they only work on your book.
- IshKebab 5y agoSo why do people still get weird random text narrated? There weren't really any conclusions from the article. Very incomplete.
- impostervt 5y agoDon't know. Some kind of new scam? Maybe they just want to sell books on amazon & audible and if they produce enough random garbage they'll get some sales?
- syllospri 5y ago"Audible would pay out a royalty whenever a code was redeemed." From the article, this is what the step 5 should be. They would just redeem the codes for free and then get paid.
- impostervt 5y agoI've published some books on Amazon and used ACX. Just to add on to the story - there's been a proliferation of new narrators on the system, which has naturally driven down prices being paid. Many of these new narrators seem to have seen a Youtube video, or something, about how to make easy money narrating books. I'm guessing that, due to Covid, the ability to make money from home has been very attractive. I can usually tell within 10 seconds of listening to their audition that they're new - really low volume and lots of background noise. Just a non-professional setup. There's also people who apply for my narration jobs using bots. As in they feed the narration script to a bot and have it read it. On their page they advertise how they can do male voices, female voices, and basically any kind of accent - which to them is just tweak a setting on the bot. ACX must be way underfunded. Especially during Christmas time they get several months behind on approving fully narrated books. Seems like Amazon just isn't investing much in the platform.
- delgaudm 5y agoI'm curious. For your books, do you offer the ACX narrator paid work per finished hour, or as a Royalty Share?
- impostervt 5y agoI pay per finished hour (PFH). Never seen a good reason to do a royalty split.
- cutenewt 5y agoWhat's a typical range for PFH?
- impostervt 5y agoPrior to the audition phase, the book owner (me) specifies a pay band. Lowest is $50-$100 per finished hour of audio. I think above that is $100-200, and there's one more above that. I go for $50-100 PFH and get dozens of auditions. My last book had like 50 auditions. Most were horrible. I got around 5 good ones.
- aasasd 5y agoMeanwhile Vice puts random unrelated links and even videos all over the article.