Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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