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How about Brandon Sanderson's criticism of Audible? [1] > If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on
by slowmovintarget 3y ago
How about Brandon Sanderson's criticism of Audible? [1]
> If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.)
> Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of reference, most brick-and-mortar stores take around 50% on a retail product. Audible pays indie authors less than a bookstore does, when a bookstore has storefronts, sales staff, and warehousing to deal with.
> I knew things were bad, which is why I wanted to explore other options with the Kickstarter. But I didn’t know HOW bad. Indeed, if indie authors don’t agree to be exclusive to Audible, they get dropped from 40% to a measly 25%. Buying an audiobook through Audible instead of from another site literally costs the author money.
What's worse is if the audio book goes into their subscription service, the author gets paid an even smaller fraction, as it is 25% or 40% of the fractional time on the subscription fee.
Amazon built the system to dominate the market, then used the dominant position to bully creators into a teeny tiny fraction of the profits Amazon makes on the work.
[1] https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022/ https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022...
- taeric 3y agoI covered this in other threads, basically. In truth, I was largely responding to this angle at the outset. DRM feels like a red herring that almost certainly exists due to demands from publishing houses. (I'll have to check to see if you can get any non-DRM files from libraries. My expectation is going to be a big no on that from any library that lends out audio books.) The odd complaint here is that the authors are upset at getting a smaller share of a smaller sell, that is in a much larger sea of sales. They acknowledge that they make more money from audio books sold at audible, even with this cut. This also does a shit job of showing the break down to the performers that are reading the book. If those are paid externally to the 40% that goes to the author, I really don't know how to take the complaints seriously other than greed on the authors that are talking about it.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoThe performers get paid up-front for the performance. This typically costs the author somewhere in the neighborhood of $10K to $40K including production costs. Amazon originally paid out 70% like most other digital goods purveyors. Once they cornered the market they arbitrarily pushed it down to 25% (you only get 40% if you agree not to sell anywhere else). This means that for many authors, especially indie authors, they lose money publishing the audio version of their book.
- taeric 3y agoReading online, it is looking more like there are royalty shares. And I'm not clear on how "produced by Audible" works factor in there. Seems silly that the narrator wouldn't also be entitled to a per sale value. I will also ack that I'm all for better legislation to help creators in a lot of this. I just don't know that this all is as clean a picture as you are making it. For an easy example, did audible drop their payout from 70 down to 20ish at the same time they dropped the average price that they sold at? That would change the story more than a little bit, if so. Do they also cover some of the upfront costs of production for some audio books?
- dendriti 3y agoYou sure do have a LOT to say about Audible, despite demonstrating here a clear lack of understanding of how the service works, its market position, how much it charges, and so on. JAQing off in defense of a monopolist is a bad look.
- taeric 3y agoI'll gladly laugh and accept the jab that I'm a little too active in this thread. I don't know why this topic got me today, but it clearly did. That said, please educate me on where I'm giving a clear lack of understanding on how it works. I'm basically seeing a couple big name authors that are effectively telling me I'm a bad person for buying audio books from Audible. But, far as I can see, every alternative is complete utter shite. Except the library, from which I still gladly get audio books on CD.
- sgregnt 3y agoSorry, I just don't understand the complaint, if you don't like audiable, then don't do business with them? You can sell your book yourself directly.
- mcv 3y agoThat's exactly what Cory Doctorow is doing (no idea about Sanderson). Not just directly, but on every platform that's not Audible. That doesn't make the complaint less relevant, though. The complaint is the explanation for why they're doing so.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoSanderson specifically went looking for platforms that don't just put the book on Audible. So Spotify and Speechify.
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoSorry, I don't understand your complaint. If you don't want to hear Cory Doctorow's complaints about Audible, then don't read his blog.