Back to the Future: Trends to Watch For

We’ve made it to the last post on “Cracking the Audiobook Market.” You made your choice to get into the audiobook market (Part 1), learned the generic steps any text takes on the journey to audio (Part 2), looked closely at the pros and cons of the four paths an author can take on that journey (Part 3), learned what resources are available to help you in a hybrid model (Part 4), decided whether you’ll go narrow or wide in distribution (Part 5) and explored various marketing strategies (Part 6). In this post we’ll peer into the near future. What is happening in the audiobook market that could make your job easier/harder? What market disruptors should you be watching out for?

The rapid proliferation of audio services and business models is making accessing the market easier and cheaper. You need to keep your eye out for what’s happening in recording/audio in general. There’s new stuff coming through all the time. Here are a few major trends to watch:

The rapid move to the subscription model for audiobooks. It used to be if you wanted a novel in audiobook format you went to Audible, bought a book, and downloaded it. It cost you between $25 and $40—sometimes more for really long books. Many audio readers have been moving towards the subscription model where you pay a monthly fee and you get access to X many books or X number of credits or a particular list.

This model is exploding and I don’t know how it will impact an author’s revenue. The individual royalty on any one book will probably go down, but if audiobooks are cheaper, it’s likely more people will buy. It’s too early in the game for me to run the numbers, but I should have a better sense of how this will affect revenue next year.

The role of AI and content creation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are market disruptors. In general, tools are tools and have no moral assignation–they are not “good” or “bad.”  Authors have been using some of these tools, such as spell and grammar checkers, for decades to improve their writing and cut down on editing time.

In the past few years, AI tools that can help with manuscript prep and quality control in audiobooks have come onto the market. These are being used more and more, especially by the big book publishers who are putting all their books out in audio at the same time as they publish the print book. It saves time and money and puts some editors and QC folks out of work. These tools are also available to small and indie publishers. Check out Cracking the Audiobook Market Resource Guide for links to resources.

Copyright issues are emerging with the use of AI tools to write books, develop advertising copy, create cover art, narrate books (see below) and many other tasks. There are a number of lawsuits that are currently making their way through the courts that might clarify whether the product created by an AI tool can be copyrighted. Stay tuned on that one.

A huge fight is brewing around he use of AI to narrate audiobooks. In January 2023, Apple Books came up with what they call Apple digital narration and have made it available to fiction authors. They trained their AI (“machine learning”) by taking audio books that have been narrated by real people without paying for the use.

I’m sorry to say, that FindawayVoices (the company I’ve favored for audiobook services) was complicit in that scheme. They inserted a clause in the contract starting in 2019, which said by signing the standard agreement, you made your files available to Apple for the purpose of machine learning, but not for sales. You didn’t get any royalties for sharing your files. The narrators didn’t get any compensation and were “training” their potential replacements.

Recently the union SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) got involved. They negotiated with FindawayVoices and got that clause out of the standard contract. However, Apple still got four years of free machine training. SAG-AFTRA put out a long piece that described what was going on and outlined how they will bargain around this issue in the future. Specifically they’re going to focus on obtaining fair terms around any future use of this kind of material for digital training, including appropriate consent. “Writers Beware” put out an excellent article outlining the controversy.

At this point, AI narrators are good, but not good enough for lengthy novels. Audiobook consumers can easily tell if the narrator is human or a bot and they prefer humans—for now. I can guarantee that AI narrators will improve to a point it will be difficult to tell the difference. But I don’t know when that will happen. Here’s a link to the Apple Digital books so you can check it out for yourself. They will take your fictional eBook and translate it into an audiobook, but it is clearly labeled AI narrated.

Project Gutenberg, which puts out free public domain ebooks, now has over 5,000 audiobooks available from public domain material. They are narrated by AI developed by Microsoft. A good article is available on that project from Freethink*.

Watch this debate closely. At this point, Audible will not sell an AI narrated audiobook. The unions are already involved. It’s likely that court decisions, regulators, and legislators will weigh in. Once the dust settles, AI narration could be a real game changer for anybody who wants to put out audiobooks. It also has the potential to put tens of thousands of people out of work. Stay tuned!

I hope you found this series interesting and useful. Please feel free to give me feedback or ask questions in the comments.

Faith L. Justice has nine books out in audio. She learned these lessons the hard way so you don’t have to. This series of posts is an expanded text version of a presentation she made to the New York City Chapter of the Historical Novel Society. The original video is here.

How to Help Readers Find Your Audiobook

You made your choice to get into the audiobook market (Part 1), learned the generic steps any text takes on the journey to audio (Part 2), looked closely at the pros and cons of the four paths an author can take on that journey (Part 3), learned what resources are available to help you in a hybrid model (Part 4) and decided whether you’ll go narrow or wide in distribution (Part 5). Your books are out there sitting on seller’s websites. How do you help readers find them? Now it’s time to look at marketing strategies.

The good news is that any marketing you do to your print or eBooks counts as marketing toward your audiobook. At most on-line sellers, all three formats show up on the same sales page, so folks interested in the book can buy it in the format they prefer. Last year I started advertising to one of my older titles in print and eBook resulting in a 17-fold increase in sales over my best year with no promotion. The gravy? Audiobook sales also increased although at a more modest 5-fold rate. So you can sell your audiobooks using your normal promotions and advertising strategies. But, let’s look at those extra factors that will help readers find and buy your audiobooks in particular.

Hire a celebrity narrator. I touched on this in Part 3 when I discussed the fact that fiction audiobook readers prefer professional narrators. Having a celebrity voice your book is a sure-fire way to generate sales—BUT—out of reach for most of us, unless you have a well-known actor in your friends and family circle who’s willing to do you a solid. The work-around to this is using a “celebrity” narrator in your genre. Look up the best sellers in your genre or category and make a note on who the narrators are. If a name keeps popping up, you might want to approach that person to narrate your book. They most-likely have a fan following and will promote your book, if they do the work. The downside is they will probably be more expensive than less-well-known narrators.

Launch your audio version with your print and eBook. This is related to the good news mentioned above. All your launch promotion activity not only sells your print and eBook but your audiobook, as well. Traditional publishers used to put out the hardback, then much later the paperback, then—reluctantly—the eBook usually priced higher than the paperback because they didn’t want to eat into those sales. What they didn’t realize was that folks have their favorite formats and want those books when they first come out. I didn’t have that choice for my earlier titles, but I will do a triple launch with my next book.

Use giveaway codes in exchange for reviews. Reviews can make or break a book. Most authors have their review sites, blog tours, and other review strategies set up before the launch. Follow the same practice with your audiobook and give reviewers who prefer audio their favorite format. You can also use a service such as Bookfunnel (for a small yearly fee) to provide the files directly to reviewers.

Schedule a price drop and advertise it on Chirp. Again same strategy as an eBook price drop, but different platform. Chirp is the BookBub of audiobooks. The catch here is that you have to be wide and have control over the price of your audiobooks. Here’s a good article on the uses of Chirp and how authors can take advantage of the platform.

Schedule a podcast tour and/or pay for podcast ads. As I mentioned in Part I, people who listen to audiobooks consume a lot of other audio material. Go where your audience is by researching podcasts on your topic or genre and pitching yourself as a guest. As an alternative, you can ask what their ad rate is (usually very low—this is a new market) and provide a short blurb or copy as they request.

In summary, with the exception of “hire celebrity narrator”—which most of us can’t do—the audiobook marketing strategies are based on the generic promotions an author would do for other formats. Look at what has worked for you in the past and do more of that, tweaked to the different format. If you’re a newbie, there are tons of free resources on the internet that walk you a through a successful launch or how to use an advertising platform (Amazon, Facebook, BookBub, etc.). I’ve listed a few in my downloadable Cracking the Audiobook Market Resource Guide

My next and last post in this series is “Back to the Future.” I’ll look at some market trends and opine on the changes we might see coming in the near future.

Faith L. Justice has nine books out in audio. She learned these lessons the hard way so you don’t have to. This series of posts is an expanded text version of a presentation she made to the New York City Chapter of the Historical Novel Society. The original video is here.

Distribution: Exclusive to Audible or Wide?

So you’ve made your choice to get into the audiobook market (Part 1), learned the generic steps any text takes on the journey to audio (Part 2), looked closely at the pros and cons of the four paths an author can take on that journey (Part 3), and learned what resources are available to help you in a hybrid model (Part 4). But what do you do with the completed files? How do you get them to audiobook sellers? Which ones?

Audiobook sellers get their product directly from you or from audiobook distributors. The best known distributor is ACX (audio creation exchange) which I’ve talked about before. They distribute to Audible and Apple and maintain the author dashboard tracking sales, revenue, and payments. If you want to update the metadata or upload new files, you do it through ACX.

If you want your book in other markets, you have to set up individual accounts with that seller OR use a distributor such as Findaway Voices (owned by Spotify) or ListenUp who—like ACX—maintain the author dashboard. In either case, when you have completed files, you set up an account with the distributor, provide meta data for your audiobook, a cover, documentation for payment, and sign an agreement laying out terms of service. (Cracking the Audiobook Market Resource Guide provides additional distribution resources.)

As in print and eBooks, there is an 800-pound gorilla in in the room: Audible (an Amazon company) which controls 63.4% of the US audiobook market. They offer incentives to authors to be exclusive, including higher royalties. The business decision you have to make is whether to be exclusive with Audible or “go wide.” That decision depends on your career goals and the popularity of your book. Let’s take a look at the pros of going exclusively with Audible:

• Audible offers higher royalties (40% vs. 25%) to authors who sell exclusively through them. If you go exclusive, you are locked in for five years before you can make a change. Here’s where math and the popularity of your book comes in. Can you make up that 15% difference in royalties with wider distribution? Does that matter to you, if your books are getting to a wider audience, including public libraries? (Audible does not distribute to libraries.)
• Audible offers a subscription service to its members which means their users might take a chance on an unfamiliar author if they like the book description/cover/narrator. (There is a shift in the market to more sellers providing subscription services which I’ll discuss in the final post.)
• You only have to deal with a single author dashboard/platform through ACX.
• Audible giveaway codes, used for marketing, are only available to those who go exclusive. They are the gold standard and many people won’t want to use other distributor’s codes.
• They are a trusted brand. With the lion’s share of the market, people know your book will meet their technical standards.

The cons of going exclusively with Audible are—not surprisingly—the pros of going non-exclusive. If you go wide:

• You can reach the over one third of the market that Audible doesn’t tap. There are dozens of additional audiobook sellers including Nook (Barnes & Noble) and Kobo. Another lucrative market is the subscription service Everand (formerly Scribd).
• Public libraries can get your books through specific distribution systems such as Overdrive and Hoopla rather than buy at market rate from Audible. This was the single most important factor for me in going wide with my novels. I’m a great supporter of public libraries and I wanted my books—paper and digital—available to library patrons.
• You can price your book as you wish for marketing purposes and change that price for sales. I set my prices comparable to the paperback costs. Currently Audible sets the price for your book and you have no control over it. This used to be strictly based on the length of the book. With pressures on their market like new streaming services, they have very recently (March 2023) reduced the prices on a number of titles. My novel-length books are now priced very similarly to the hardback. My shorter fiction is priced slightly lower than the paperback versions.
• Some distributors offer giveaway codes for marketing to replace the lost Audible codes.
• Going wide also means you can distribute directly to readers from your own website–an option many authors are increasingly taking because the returns are so great. The downside of this is setting up the shopping cart on your website and using a service such as Bookfunnel to deliver the files. Here’s an excellent step-by-step video tutorial, if you choose to add direct sales to your mix.

Besides losing the Audible giveaway codes when you go wide, there is the inconvenience of multiple dashboards. Most indie authors are familiar with eBook distributors (such as Draft2Digital) who consolidate distribution to the wider eBook market beyond Kindle. Audiobook distributors work the same way. You can set up accounts with individual markets, but it’s a hassle to track everything if you have many sellers. Most authors prefer to pay the distributors a small percent on every sale to keep all the paperwork in one place.

The problem with having a distributor provide your books to Audible is that they take their percentage out of your 25% royalty. Because Audible has almost two-thirds of the market, that small percentage can take a big bite out of your revenue. For that reason, I distribute to Audible through ACX to get the full 25% royalty and everywhere else through a distributor. I’ve personally found it manageable to have two dashboards. Your mileage may vary.

To summarize, there are significant advantages to either choice to go exclusive with Audible or tap into the wider market. What choice you make depends entirely on your career goals, popularity of your books, and personal values. I’ve made different choices for different books, so don’t think you have to take one route for all your books. Do what’s right for each one.

In Part 6, I talk about that bane of all authors—marketing. See you next week!

Faith L. Justice has nine books out in audio. She learned these lessons the hard way so you don’t have to. This series of posts is an expanded text version of a presentation she made to the New York City Chapter of the Historical Novel Society. The original video is here.

A Deep Dive into the Hybrid Model 

In the previous posts we explored why you should be in the audiobook market (Part 1), the generic steps any text takes on the journey to audio (Part 2), and the pros and cons of the four paths an author can take on that journey (Part 3). In this post we’ll take a deep dive into the fourth path—the hybrid model—and look at the resources available to authors to help them reach their goals. This is the path that offers the most flexibility in terms of investing time and money.

The cheapest way to go hybrid is to call on your network of talented family and friends. You can barter services or get volunteers to do a lot of the work for minimal overall cost.  My first projects were ridiculously cheap to produce as I learned my way around the requirements of producing and distributing a product. My family has roots in audio production. My husband ran a volunteer radio service for the blind for several years. He and I both recorded articles and our daughter edited our and many others’ contributions. When I wanted to put my toe in the water of audio book production, I had back-up.

To start, I recorded three collections of short stories and a children’s book. We already had the microphone, software, and linen closet/recording booth. As author, I prepped the text. My husband and I narrated the short stories and my daughter the children’s book. My daughter edited, I QC’d, and my husband mastered the files. I took care of the distribution and marketing. My husband did it for love (and laundry services). I paid my daughter a going hourly rate (she was in college) for editing and a royalty share for narrating the children’s book (more on that option later).

By the time I had finished these short projects, I had a good handle on the process and platforms. I was ready to tackle one of my lengthy novels. For this I wanted a professional voice. I put out a call to a couple of voice-over classes for auditions and hired a narrator who recorded at our home for a flat fee. Husband and child still contributed their talents and skills. I was very pleased with the product, but felt it was time to explore outside the family/friends network.

A second and more expensive way to go hybrid is to hire an indie narrator/producer. Most folks do that through ACX (audio creation exchange) an Amazon-run marketplace to help content creators find narrators. It is also a single point access to place audiobook files for sale on Audible. The platform and procedures are straight forward and there are tons of videos and chats to help the newbie post their project, sort through auditions, and negotiate a contract.

The key here is that the indie narrator/producer usually takes on four of the generic steps. Once you negotiate a contract, they record, edit, do retakes, and turn over to you final mastered files that meet Audible’s requirements. A key step that they might do for you, but I recommend you keep for yourself, is the quality control listen. You should hear the first run through and give notes to the narrator for retakes, then listen to the retakes as well. This is work for you, but this is your book. You don’t want any embarrassing mistakes. You should negotiate with the narrator, how many retakes they will do depending on whether the mistake was in the text or was their error.

The cost for using an indie narrator/producer can vary greatly. Some will work for a flat fee, but most charge a per finished hour rate anywhere between $200 to $800 depending on the experience of the narrator. A very few—mostly new narrators—will work for a half-share of the royalties. Those narrators have to believe your book will sell well to take on that risk. And you are stuck with Audible and Apple as sole distributors.

Of course, you don’t have to go through ACX to find a narrator/producer. If you know someone in the business that you like for your project, you can approach them directly. You might also want to do some market research. Some genres have “stars”—narrators that might not be famous, but are very popular. There are a number of audiobook fans that buy books in their favorite genre based solely on the narrator. You can look up the best sellers in your genre, see if the narrators show up in more than one project, and contact them.

A third way to go hybrid is by using an audiobook services company such as Findaway Voices (owned by Spotify), Listen Up, or AudioVista (check out Cracking the Audiobook Market Resource Guide for more companies). These companies are slightly different from a full-service audio company talked about in path 2: they have no studios and offer additional services. Like ACX, they help you find an indie narrator/producer, but they act as a middleman between you and the narrator. They curate a list of narrators based on your description of your project. When you and your preferred narrator agree, they provide and enforce a standard contract, collect the fee (based on the negotiated per finished hour rate), pay the narrator and deliver the mastered files. You still have to provide the new square audiobook cover formatted according to standard specifications.

If wanted, you can use these companies to distribute the files (even ones you have produced yourself) to audiobook sellers such as Kobo, Nook, and libraries. They offer over 40 sellers from which you can choose all or some. For that service they track, receive, and distribute royalties to you for a small percentage of the royalty. They distribute to Audible, but we’ll talk about the pros and cons of the that in the next post. The advantage here is having one dashboard to track sales of all sellers rather than setting up individual accounts at each.

To summarize: It’s your time or your money! Hybridization offers you the most flexible way to meet your budget, while maximizing your time. By using talented friends and family you can keep your costs low. You can also negotiate a wide range of up front costs (including free narration if you use royalty shares) by using an indie narrator/producer either through ACX or a more extensive audiobook services company.

Next up in Part 5: once you have your mastered files and new audiobook cover how do you distribute them to audiobook sellers?

Faith L. Justice has nine books out in audio. She learned these lessons the hard way so you don’t have to. This series of posts is an expanded text version of a presentation she made to the New York City Chapter of the Historical Novel Society. The original video is here.