19 ms·

This is the stuff I love. Sanderson doesn't _have_ to take a stand against Audible , and yet he does. Of course he is in a position of privilege to be able to d

This is the stuff I love. Sanderson doesn't _have_ to take a stand against Audible , and yet he does. Of course he is in a position of privilege to be able to do it, but so many other people are too and act very differently. Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That's insane. Props to Sanderson, and props to all the other people with integrity.

O__________O 4y ago
Worth noting that Audible has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008, so it’s basically just Amazon exploiting creators: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible_(service) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible_(service)
wcarss 4y ago
> I’ve made enough on this Kickstarter. I don’t need to squeeze people for every penny—but what I do want to do is find a way to provide options for authors. This is a kind of sentiment I wish was not exceptional. People often talk about how one day they may have enough, and _then_ they'll help others -- but it's rare to see someone (especially with less than a billion dollars) say out loud that they did it, and in the same breath they start helping. (At a certain time, Kaladin wouldn't believe this kind of guy exists!)
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  I think it's important to realize just how rare a position Brandon Sanderson is in, really. Publishing and the literary scene outside of the major publishers has always been people using the little money they make to try and keep it alive outside of the dominant system that's creeping towards a monopoly in NA. Most stuff just doesn't have the huge marketing capability that Sanderson does and usually fails. Frankly, most authors are barely able to make a living doing it. Sanderson is far from the only person trying to help authors in publishing, but his 0.1% level financial success in publishing likely means he can accept much more risk than even more well known authors. That said, I do find it kind of ironic that he made a secret deal with Spotify, which has its own pitiful history of payouts to artists. But atleast free accounts get access to the books as well.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    If anything, I think you're overselling it. Most authors make at best a very small amount of money from their work and are nowhere near being able to make a living from it. Most books simply don't sell much at all (200-300 for an average author), to the point where even 100% of sticker price wouldn't pay for a person's living expenses. A generous assumption is hardbacks at $25 a pop. That would put an average author at 5k to 7.5k in a year... under the very improbable assumption of 100% of sticker price going to the author. Spotify and the music world has a distinctly different problem. Last I read, the vast majority of their revenue is going to their licensing deals. The license-holders then don't pay much to the artists. You can blame Spotify for this if you choose, and many artists like to publicly, but as with many things in music it comes back to the labels.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pirate787 4y ago
      Important to consider that most books range from barely readable to trash. I think the book distribution of quality is more concentrated among elite authors, whereas music is a lot more linear -- the average musician is a lot closer to elite musicians.
      - nwiswell 4y ago
        > whereas music is a lot more linear -- the average musician is a lot closer to elite musicians. Gosh, I don't know. This is quite a claim. First off is the obvious question: who is a musician? High school band? Play Friday nights at the local pub? Or are we talking "survives exclusively on record sales" / "is a member of a symphony"? That's a lot of selection bias. Almost nobody publishing rubbish is surviving off that income. Second, "musician" is actually conflating two things: songwriting/composition and performance. Composition is the thing that really bears direct comparison, and I'd venture a guess you've not even heard all the awful songs out there because nobody with any talent is interested in performing them (unlike the ease with which anyone can publish total rubbish). Finally, if you consider the size of the corpus -- all songs vs all English text -- it's pretty clear which one is easier to curate (covers in music are super common, which is probably not an accident). Just anecdotally, I saw a video on reddit the other day of an African dictator casually wetting himself. But what was really striking to me was how absolutely awful the state band was. I found the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/znske2/south_sudan_president_salva_kiir_pees_on_himself/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/znske2/...
optymizer 4y ago
I worked for a few years at Audible as a dev. Based on my experience, I'd say the culture at the company was good, in that we were not trying to exploit people, neither externally nor internally. One thing that was pretty clear was that our audiobooks were at the mercy of publishing houses / content owners, and a lot of restrictions came from licensing deals (geographic reastrictions, time-based, formats, etc), so I'm inclined to assume that the low cut for authors may be due to publishers wanting a big cut of the sales. That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor, so there could have been a whole other side to this company that I was not exposed to.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I still remember when the kindle first came out, it would read to you. Before publishers threatened to sue. With modern text to speech getting so good, there really is no reason an inference model couldn't run on every device to read to us. I guess book readers were the first to have their jobs replaced by AI, but contracts didn't let it happen.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Really not nearly as close as you’re implying. Human narrators do things like use different inflection depending on who’s speaking.
    - atorodius 4y ago
      That is probably easily possible with a bit of engineering.. Can't be too hard to figure out who's speaking with some NLP?
      - r00fus 4y ago
        In 2007 the state of playback was pitiful. Of course the authors guild saw the trend lines, but even in 2022, we know Siri/Alexa don't sound human at all (my pre-teens make fun of them). It's all possible but I doubt it'll be here in 10 years.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Edit: I big brained and wrote this whole thing while thinking Spotify. I believe my thoughts on the matter stand, though. So I’ll just correct the wording. P.S. I don’t hold this opinion strongly. I’m eager to hear other thoughts on the matter. I’m not a fan of this perspective because it can sound like people believe it’s the company who is behaving wrongly, and they want a form of charity from it. They want Audible to give up profit because they don’t l feel it’s fair. If Audible isn’t worth 60-75%, don’t use it to distribute your media. Which is probably not a viable option. I think this leads to the real complaint candidates: “Audible has a monopoly over audiobook creation/distribution by breaking laws, and should be dealt with by the government.” “Audible has a monopoly without breaking laws but I think there should be laws.” “I don’t like how capitalism works.” “Capitalism isn’t working in my favour this time.” Audible isn’t the right audience for any of these complaints. If Audible’s service isn’t worth anywhere near that much, they either are acting in a way where government should intervene, or there’s a deliciously ripe opportunity for another business to thrive if they can overcome the inertia of the incumbent. Don’t get me wrong, I think the creators should take home the bulk, and I bet, on intuition alone, that there’s plenty of money to run a music service at a fraction of the take.
- vageli 4y ago
  Audible is not a music service but an audiobook and podcast service.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Omg I’m thinking Spotify. Thank you. Let me correct my comment.
- mcv 4y ago
  "Capitalism only works well if there is sufficient competition" That's the valid complaint here. There's not enough competition for Audible, so they can afford to charge extortionate prices. More competition is good, so that's what Sanderson invests in. Sounds like an awesome move to me.
  - 4y ago
torben-friis 4y ago
>Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. Also, who are the creators? I mean, does the author of the book have to share that piece of the cake with the narrator as well? that makes the cut even lower.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  why would anyone give a % of income to a narrator? That's a service you pay for once and thats it. They don't have to read it again for each customer. They just get hired to read and record it the first time.
  - taeric 4y ago
    This is silly. You could use the same argument for the writer. And, indeed, this is done. If I'm remembering correctly, Hardy Boys and such were done this way, with the actual writer paid in a different way.
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      when the writer is not the primary owner of the property it would make sense. When the writer is the primary owner and creator it does not.
      - taeric 4y ago
        This feels contrived. And is in the face of, for example, how Disney tried to not pay a Star Wars writer. I agree it feels like this could be easy to argue one way or another. I am willing to assert it is often not simple and many of the complications are from pushing simple solutions.
        LegitShady 4y ago
        >This feels contrived How so? >how Disney tried to not pay a Star Wars writer. the star wars writer is just a contract worker. He doesn't own star wars etc. But he should still get paid according to the agreement disney inherited.
ProAm 4y ago
> Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That's insane. It's Amazon, what do you expect? They can't make an Amazon Basics of a book you wrote and steal all your profit so they have to do it this way.
Helmut10001 4y ago
In another genre, photography, istockphoto (Getty) pays exclusive photographers 30%. I think this is common (not saying this is good).
SergeAx 4y ago
(not sarcasm, geniunely interested) What prevents anyone from building a company that gives authors 50% or even 75% cut? From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. One may host and serve audio files via any Bandwidth Alliance[1] CDN and keep the bill quite low, it is just audio, in the end. I'd say, a viable prototype is just a couple of months of work for a team of two-three people with day jobs. [1]https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
- SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
  What prevents most of these kinds of ideas from happening is something super mundane; a person to see it through. That’s it. You could definitely create this service, but you’d have to be very good at building a company in a market with big incumbents. Maybe “pay creators more” is enough, or maybe consumers don’t really care where their money goes. You’d have to figure that out! But are you willing to dedicate the next 3-5+ years of your life to this problem? Is anyone?
- Shorel 4y ago
  > From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. With adequate DRM? It definitely is a big feat. Just distributing the files, without any type of encryption, is far from trivial. The fact you link to Cloudflare demonstrates you know you can't host the servers yourself =) Almost anything for ten users is trivial, doing it at scale is hard work.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    I link to Bandwidth Alliance to emphasize that there is a way to lower a CDN bill. On my previous job we served video via AWS CloudFront and even negotiated a special price for that and S3. Any CDN with their own object storage will hanlde heavy lifting of audio, it is not a big deal and not that expensive to the point of making a garden variety CDN on Digital Ocean or other cloud provider nonsensical. I have to research about DRM, but isn't it goes out of the box on Android and iOS?
hooloovoo_zoo 4y ago
Hard to believe audible is taking a 75% cut and still has so many syncing glitches on iPhone. What are they doing with the money?
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  For years now, the “Explore Spanish language titles on Audible Latino” button on the main iOS screen doesn’t even do anything.
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  What else do you do with an unregulated quasi-monopoly? Pay out to shareholders
taeric 4y ago
If the 25% cut is over three times the sales... I don't know that I agree it is bad. :( I'd feel much more comfortable talking about net profits for everyone involved here. Audible got me hooked, specifically, by not expecting me to pay 40+ for a book.
- MattRix 4y ago
  Of course 25% is bad. The original post talks about how that compares to other digital products (games and apps) which are almost all at 70% for creators. There’s nothing special about audiobooks that can justify Audible’s percentage other than the fact that they have a near-monopoly.
  - taeric 4y ago
    "of course" is a dangerous line of reasoning. Many things believed, in that way, are not given. Audible has pushed margins to near zero. Not just the cut to the artists, but also theirs. Before audible, if I wanted an audio book, it was easily 50 or so bucks. Nowadays, I usually pick up the audiobook for 7 or so as an add on to the book purchase. If that were to go back, I'd stop buying audiobooks. I'd wager I'm not alone in that. Yes, even $15 may be high enough to make me stop. As I've said elsewhere, I'm very interested in knowing what the net cut for artists is, through audible. If the artists could get 70% of a cut, but that causes sales to drop to 10%, suddenly it doesn't sound so good to get a larger cut. And it would be one thing if the publishing world wasn't known for artificial price inflation. But, that ship sailed a long time ago.

O__________O 4y ago

Worth noting that Audible has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008, so it’s basically just Amazon exploiting creators: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible_(service) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible_(service)

wcarss 4y ago

> I’ve made enough on this Kickstarter. I don’t need to squeeze people for every penny—but what I do want to do is find a way to provide options for authors. This is a kind of sentiment I wish was not exceptional. People often talk about how one day they may have enough, and _then_ they'll help others -- but it's rare to see someone (especially with less than a billion dollars) say out loud that they did it, and in the same breath they start helping. (At a certain time, Kaladin wouldn't believe this kind of guy exists!)

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
I think it's important to realize just how rare a position Brandon Sanderson is in, really. Publishing and the literary scene outside of the major publishers has always been people using the little money they make to try and keep it alive outside of the dominant system that's creeping towards a monopoly in NA. Most stuff just doesn't have the huge marketing capability that Sanderson does and usually fails. Frankly, most authors are barely able to make a living doing it. Sanderson is far from the only person trying to help authors in publishing, but his 0.1% level financial success in publishing likely means he can accept much more risk than even more well known authors. That said, I do find it kind of ironic that he made a secret deal with Spotify, which has its own pitiful history of payouts to artists. But atleast free accounts get access to the books as well.
- Kalium 4y ago
  If anything, I think you're overselling it. Most authors make at best a very small amount of money from their work and are nowhere near being able to make a living from it. Most books simply don't sell much at all (200-300 for an average author), to the point where even 100% of sticker price wouldn't pay for a person's living expenses. A generous assumption is hardbacks at $25 a pop. That would put an average author at 5k to 7.5k in a year... under the very improbable assumption of 100% of sticker price going to the author. Spotify and the music world has a distinctly different problem. Last I read, the vast majority of their revenue is going to their licensing deals. The license-holders then don't pay much to the artists. You can blame Spotify for this if you choose, and many artists like to publicly, but as with many things in music it comes back to the labels.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pirate787 4y ago
    Important to consider that most books range from barely readable to trash. I think the book distribution of quality is more concentrated among elite authors, whereas music is a lot more linear -- the average musician is a lot closer to elite musicians.
    - nwiswell 4y ago
      > whereas music is a lot more linear -- the average musician is a lot closer to elite musicians. Gosh, I don't know. This is quite a claim. First off is the obvious question: who is a musician? High school band? Play Friday nights at the local pub? Or are we talking "survives exclusively on record sales" / "is a member of a symphony"? That's a lot of selection bias. Almost nobody publishing rubbish is surviving off that income. Second, "musician" is actually conflating two things: songwriting/composition and performance. Composition is the thing that really bears direct comparison, and I'd venture a guess you've not even heard all the awful songs out there because nobody with any talent is interested in performing them (unlike the ease with which anyone can publish total rubbish). Finally, if you consider the size of the corpus -- all songs vs all English text -- it's pretty clear which one is easier to curate (covers in music are super common, which is probably not an accident). Just anecdotally, I saw a video on reddit the other day of an African dictator casually wetting himself. But what was really striking to me was how absolutely awful the state band was. I found the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/znske2/south_sudan_president_salva_kiir_pees_on_himself/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/znske2/...

optymizer 4y ago

I worked for a few years at Audible as a dev. Based on my experience, I'd say the culture at the company was good, in that we were not trying to exploit people, neither externally nor internally. One thing that was pretty clear was that our audiobooks were at the mercy of publishing houses / content owners, and a lot of restrictions came from licensing deals (geographic reastrictions, time-based, formats, etc), so I'm inclined to assume that the low cut for authors may be due to publishers wanting a big cut of the sales. That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor, so there could have been a whole other side to this company that I was not exposed to.

galangalalgol 4y ago
I still remember when the kindle first came out, it would read to you. Before publishers threatened to sue. With modern text to speech getting so good, there really is no reason an inference model couldn't run on every device to read to us. I guess book readers were the first to have their jobs replaced by AI, but contracts didn't let it happen.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Really not nearly as close as you’re implying. Human narrators do things like use different inflection depending on who’s speaking.
  - atorodius 4y ago
    That is probably easily possible with a bit of engineering.. Can't be too hard to figure out who's speaking with some NLP?
    - r00fus 4y ago
      In 2007 the state of playback was pitiful. Of course the authors guild saw the trend lines, but even in 2022, we know Siri/Alexa don't sound human at all (my pre-teens make fun of them). It's all possible but I doubt it'll be here in 10 years.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Edit: I big brained and wrote this whole thing while thinking Spotify. I believe my thoughts on the matter stand, though. So I’ll just correct the wording. P.S. I don’t hold this opinion strongly. I’m eager to hear other thoughts on the matter. I’m not a fan of this perspective because it can sound like people believe it’s the company who is behaving wrongly, and they want a form of charity from it. They want Audible to give up profit because they don’t l feel it’s fair. If Audible isn’t worth 60-75%, don’t use it to distribute your media. Which is probably not a viable option. I think this leads to the real complaint candidates: “Audible has a monopoly over audiobook creation/distribution by breaking laws, and should be dealt with by the government.” “Audible has a monopoly without breaking laws but I think there should be laws.” “I don’t like how capitalism works.” “Capitalism isn’t working in my favour this time.” Audible isn’t the right audience for any of these complaints. If Audible’s service isn’t worth anywhere near that much, they either are acting in a way where government should intervene, or there’s a deliciously ripe opportunity for another business to thrive if they can overcome the inertia of the incumbent. Don’t get me wrong, I think the creators should take home the bulk, and I bet, on intuition alone, that there’s plenty of money to run a music service at a fraction of the take.

vageli 4y ago
Audible is not a music service but an audiobook and podcast service.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Omg I’m thinking Spotify. Thank you. Let me correct my comment.
mcv 4y ago
"Capitalism only works well if there is sufficient competition" That's the valid complaint here. There's not enough competition for Audible, so they can afford to charge extortionate prices. More competition is good, so that's what Sanderson invests in. Sounds like an awesome move to me.
- 4y ago

torben-friis 4y ago

>Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. Also, who are the creators? I mean, does the author of the book have to share that piece of the cake with the narrator as well? that makes the cut even lower.

LegitShady 4y ago
why would anyone give a % of income to a narrator? That's a service you pay for once and thats it. They don't have to read it again for each customer. They just get hired to read and record it the first time.
- taeric 4y ago
  This is silly. You could use the same argument for the writer. And, indeed, this is done. If I'm remembering correctly, Hardy Boys and such were done this way, with the actual writer paid in a different way.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    when the writer is not the primary owner of the property it would make sense. When the writer is the primary owner and creator it does not.
    - taeric 4y ago
      This feels contrived. And is in the face of, for example, how Disney tried to not pay a Star Wars writer. I agree it feels like this could be easy to argue one way or another. I am willing to assert it is often not simple and many of the complications are from pushing simple solutions.
      - LegitShady 4y ago
        >This feels contrived How so? >how Disney tried to not pay a Star Wars writer. the star wars writer is just a contract worker. He doesn't own star wars etc. But he should still get paid according to the agreement disney inherited.

ProAm 4y ago

> Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That's insane. It's Amazon, what do you expect? They can't make an Amazon Basics of a book you wrote and steal all your profit so they have to do it this way.

Helmut10001 4y ago

In another genre, photography, istockphoto (Getty) pays exclusive photographers 30%. I think this is common (not saying this is good).

SergeAx 4y ago

(not sarcasm, geniunely interested) What prevents anyone from building a company that gives authors 50% or even 75% cut? From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. One may host and serve audio files via any Bandwidth Alliance[1] CDN and keep the bill quite low, it is just audio, in the end. I'd say, a viable prototype is just a couple of months of work for a team of two-three people with day jobs. [1]https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
What prevents most of these kinds of ideas from happening is something super mundane; a person to see it through. That’s it. You could definitely create this service, but you’d have to be very good at building a company in a market with big incumbents. Maybe “pay creators more” is enough, or maybe consumers don’t really care where their money goes. You’d have to figure that out! But are you willing to dedicate the next 3-5+ years of your life to this problem? Is anyone?
Shorel 4y ago
> From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. With adequate DRM? It definitely is a big feat. Just distributing the files, without any type of encryption, is far from trivial. The fact you link to Cloudflare demonstrates you know you can't host the servers yourself =) Almost anything for ten users is trivial, doing it at scale is hard work.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  I link to Bandwidth Alliance to emphasize that there is a way to lower a CDN bill. On my previous job we served video via AWS CloudFront and even negotiated a special price for that and S3. Any CDN with their own object storage will hanlde heavy lifting of audio, it is not a big deal and not that expensive to the point of making a garden variety CDN on Digital Ocean or other cloud provider nonsensical. I have to research about DRM, but isn't it goes out of the box on Android and iOS?

hooloovoo_zoo 4y ago

Hard to believe audible is taking a 75% cut and still has so many syncing glitches on iPhone. What are they doing with the money?

hombre_fatal 4y ago
For years now, the “Explore Spanish language titles on Audible Latino” button on the main iOS screen doesn’t even do anything.
wardedVibe 4y ago
What else do you do with an unregulated quasi-monopoly? Pay out to shareholders

taeric 4y ago

If the 25% cut is over three times the sales... I don't know that I agree it is bad. :( I'd feel much more comfortable talking about net profits for everyone involved here. Audible got me hooked, specifically, by not expecting me to pay 40+ for a book.

MattRix 4y ago
Of course 25% is bad. The original post talks about how that compares to other digital products (games and apps) which are almost all at 70% for creators. There’s nothing special about audiobooks that can justify Audible’s percentage other than the fact that they have a near-monopoly.
- taeric 4y ago
  "of course" is a dangerous line of reasoning. Many things believed, in that way, are not given. Audible has pushed margins to near zero. Not just the cut to the artists, but also theirs. Before audible, if I wanted an audio book, it was easily 50 or so bucks. Nowadays, I usually pick up the audiobook for 7 or so as an add on to the book purchase. If that were to go back, I'd stop buying audiobooks. I'd wager I'm not alone in that. Yes, even $15 may be high enough to make me stop. As I've said elsewhere, I'm very interested in knowing what the net cut for artists is, through audible. If the artists could get 70% of a cut, but that causes sales to drop to 10%, suddenly it doesn't sound so good to get a larger cut. And it would be one thing if the publishing world wasn't known for artificial price inflation. But, that ship sailed a long time ago.