In past issues of The Hot Sheet, we’ve reported on sales increases for digital audio; it’s considered a major growth area for publishing, possibly stealing revenue away from ebooks. But is the opportunity mainly for traditional publishers, rather than self-publishing authors?
Indie author Mike Wells (author of the bestselling Lust, Money & Murder series) raised this question with us because he has a six-figure income from his fiction, but his ebook sales outnumber his audiobook sales 200 to 1—despite his entering the digital audio market in 2012, with seven audiobooks on the market. Wells has tried all the same approaches to promote his audiobooks as his ebooks, and so far nothing has worked to boost his sales.
In addition to speaking with Wells, we checked with a few other well-known indie authors on this issue, and we so far can’t find anyone cleaning up on audiobook sales. Even the most successful indie authors we’ve asked don’t see audiobook income representing more than a single-digit percentage of their total royalty income. Part of the challenge is that indie authors have no control over Audible’s pricing of their work, and Audible is known for heavy discounts. Also, ACX—the portal for indie authors to distribute their audiobooks—reduced royalty rates on audiobooks in early 2014.
Bottom line: Wells concludes, based on his experience and research, that the Big Five have the same kind of dominance in the digital audio market that they have in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Currently, Audible has the corner on digital audio distribution, and it has enjoyed that lock on the market even prior to the ebook revolution. “For a vanity project, audiobooks are fine, and I did enjoy hearing all mine narrated by pros,” Wells says. “It’s a shame, really, because the narrators are the ones who really get screwed if they produce through ACX and choose the 50-50 shared royalty option…. It’s going to take my poor audiobook narrator partners about 100 years to make their investment back on the audiobooks they narrated for me. I sure wish I would have reasoned all this out better from the beginning, but back in 2012 I got caught up in the hoopla about the ‘explosion’ in audiobooks.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
