ACX/Audible reducing prices site wide

[cuberoute]

Received this email from ACX telling me they're reducing Audible prices site-wide.

**
ACX was founded to create and drive new revenue streams for creators, and this mission inspires everything we do. As we strive to ensure our listeners continue to engage with and enjoy a variety of content across our service, we periodically try out different pricing on content with the goal of improving customer satisfaction and interaction with our offerings—and driving sales of your titles.

Starting today, Audible is reducing prices on titles, including ACX titles, across the site. While we cannot make projections on a title-by-title basis, we anticipate that these price reductions will lead to increased sales for titles overall. In tandem, as the vast majority of Audible content is purchased with a credit, you should expect your average royalty per unit for credit sales to remain steady.

You can read more about how royalties are calculated in the ACX Help Center. For additional information on the terms and conditions that are specific to you, please also consult your applicable ACX agreements.

Our commitment to customers and creators is core to who we are and we remain focused on serving and supporting you. Please do not hesitate to reach out to our support team at support@acx.com with any questions.

Regards,
The ACX Team
**

While they are correct that most sales are via credit, that's not the case when prices are reduced. They ran a sale on my titles and I went from 97% buying with credits to 60%.

The drop was audible members who then chose to buy with cash at the discounted price. This cut my royalty by almost 60% overall. The extra sales didn't make up for it.

I'm guessing this is because Spotify has entered the audiobook game. With prices dropping, the next logical step would be the price for credits dropping too.

As for ACX's claim of increased sales - yes, there will probably be a bump before people adjust their price expectations. Also, if the total market for an audiobook is 200,000 people over five years, I'd rather sell them the book at the higher price than 200,000 people over three years at the lower price before it drops off.

[Bill Hiatt]

I wasn't pleased, either. I don't mind a distributor lowering prices if the royalty remains the same, but in situations in which I could lose money, I want to be able to set my own prices.

I keep wondering about converting the rest of my catalog to audio. This is certainly one reason not to.

The only ray of hope would be if the new pricing structure actually drew more people into audiobooks. In that event, it's conceivable that one might make up the difference in volume. But there's no way to know in advance whether or not such a thing would happen.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

My guess is that Audible is simply trying to encourage more sales outside of the credit system. Meaning, too many people ONLY use their credit ... they don't buy anything in-between and just wait for the next month and next credit. It's like KU — members just keep borrowing and never buy.
Plus vendors like Kobo etc allow you to name your price and be very aggressive in your marketing. Audible has maybe lost some ground to the competition.
This won't help though. When books are free, or 99 cents, paying $14.95 for a medium-length audiobook is a hard sell.
Mind you, if it reduces the prices, doesn't that also reduce the royalty paid on a credit/token purchase? Because that royalty is based on the retail price?

[cuberoute]

So, with the ACX report landing I can now quantify what Amazon/Audible just cost me with cutting the prices.

It's $4-5K per month. So somewhere in the range of $48-60K per year.

The unit price dropped overall. The volume did not increase. This line from their email "we anticipate that these price reductions will lead to increased sales for titles overall. In tandem, as the vast majority of Audible content is purchased with a credit, you should expect your average royalty per unit for credit sales to remain steady." was BS.

So hooray, good times, thanks Audible.

Can't wait for them to Spotify audible and reduce payments to fractions of a cent per stream and really gulp down all my royalties.

[LilyBLily]

[Bill Hiatt]

If Cuberoute's experience is typical, this seems to me to be a self-defeating strategy for Audible. Fewer authors are going to bother with audio conversions for their work if the returns keep dwindling. After all, the process is expensive unless one does one's own narration, and even then, it's expensive in terms of time and effort. Dwindling royalties mean a longer wait until a title earns out. Particularly with the stress on releasing books frequently, it makes more sense for an author to spend the time writing the next book.

[Lynn]

Sounds like a typical strategy for short term profits. Take a bigger cut now, worry about whether indie authors pivot their strategy later. It's possible this will hurt them more than they think it will because indie authors can pivot a lot faster than traditional publishing. But there are also a lot of indie authors out there who take the path of least resistance so maybe not. I'm not special. I haven't even bothered with audio because it's too much work.

[Bill Hiatt]

Strategic pivots take effort in some cases. But a decision not to do audio--or to wait to do it--is perhaps a little easier to do than some things.

Newbie indies and low-selling indies probably can't afford to do audio and/or don't know how to do it on their own very well. More experienced, higher selling indies will probably quickly do the same calculations Cuberoute did and notice that profits are now much lower. Aside from exceptional cases, like people whose primary audience is in audio, I think folks like that will start thinking twice about the investment in time and money.

[alhawke]

For my new book selling at $17 through Findaway, I calculated I'll be pulling in about $3.50 for a $20 book after Audible gives me 25% and Findaway takes 20% of that. I could be wrong there because I'm not sure if Audible honors the listing price by the author. ^^ from the above, it seems like the answer's no. Oh, and my book is supposed to be selling at $19.99, which is apparently higher than many books.

Good news: my new audio book's selling on Audible. Bad news:it seems to be selling only on Audible. I'll know for sure with my end of the month stats. I mean, I'd buy from Audible if I had the choice too. Because Audible dropped the price by over $3.

So the question is, should I have not entered into that 7 year contract with ACX? (Its beginning to become apparent why there's a seven year contract). Nope. Because some sales are better than nothing. But the audio market is very frustrating. But what can we do?  Is there another choice? Sell direct? Maybe. I can still do that because I'm nonexclusive. All this is why I waited so long to publish audio.

[cuberoute]

https://www.howtogeek.com/882973/audible-is-throwing-ads-in-your-audiobooks/amp/

I'm convinced Amazon is going to Spotify Audible.

Cut royalties, introduce ads. Next up we'll get an email about a per minute royalty for the above free ad supported accounts.

[Bill Hiatt]

Sadly, I think you could be right.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

Here's a slightly out of the box thought ... for the moment, ACX doesn't allow AI-narrated titles, right? But it can't be far away.

What if these kinds of policy changes are all about ACX thinking, "We're not going to pay decent royalties for content you don't actually create?" In other words, with both narration and writing, Amazon can foresee paying out royalties for audio and written titles that aren't actually created by real people, and it's already positioning itself to reduce royalties earned by AI generated content?

I still think that content created by, and (for this discussion) narrated by real humans will become valued in the market — although formulaic writing that's easily mimicked by AI will struggle — but just how that "human" content can be labelled and identified for any marketing benefit is a mystery right now.

Companies can make silly decisions, but on the whole, most policy changes like this one have been carefully thought out and have a targeted result that's not so apparent in the beginning. Or perhaps there's an added twist to come that will have us all saying, "Ah, that's what ACX is doing."

[Bill Hiatt]

Perhaps that's an overly optimistic assessment, but it's worth keeping an open mind.

However, it would seem more logical for ACX to roll out a different royalty structure for AI books shortly before it actually allows AI books if that's the issue it's trying to address. It doesn't make sense for Audible to start cutting royalties for non-AI works now in order to accomplish that goal.

[alhawke]

I don't get it. I'm thinking the market for audio is hurting. In order to improve $, ACX is dropping cost to sell more? It works in the short run.

Case in point: Findaway is dropping services. I just received an email today indicating that Findaway will no longer manage production of audio books. They're still distributing and they're still taking completed audiobooks. They're just ending their management service. The cost of helping writers produce audiobooks wasn't worth it for Findaway--or, most likely, the service was too expensive for authors and wasn't being used. It was too expensive for me. I'm moving to working with narrators directly. But for writers looking for new narrators, this kinda sucks. Because the initial cost was worth Findaway helping me find the right narrator.

Which all brings me back to ACX. Findaway is cutting a large service to cut costs. ACX is dropping retail costs. Seems audio is not doing so hot, folks.

As far as AI, my hope is that it's sold in a different market or area and labeled as such. Because I worry the technology will improve enough to create audiobooks that are as good as current narration in a decade or so. Then a flood of audio will come in and put all the voice actors out of business. But, maybe I need to accept the future?

[Bill Hiatt]

AI can be and should be labeled as AI.

Could the audio market be hurting? Perhaps. Part of the problem with making that determination is not having complete data on sales, profits, etc.

We all expected audio to really take off and be a growing market sector. People I know who have long commutes love audio. So do people without a lot of spare time. I know someone who listens to audio books while she cooks--and she spends a lot of time cooking.

But as far as ordinary readers are concerned, not everybody likes audio. A really great narrator might make it worth it. Certainly, a memoir read by the author has a lot to recommend it. But audio is a slower way to consume literature. I read much faster than I can listen. And I'm free to interpret the text as I wish rather than being nudged in a particular direction by the way the narrator reads it. Some people cling to print books for a variety of reasons, but I think an even bigger group clings to the written word over the spoken word. (And speaking as a former teacher, if most people started consuming books mostly in audio format, literacy would take a nosedive.)

I was thinking about really getting into audio and making all my works available as audio books. Now. I'm glad I didn't jump into it.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

The Findaway move is interesting. I'm guessing you're right that the hassle of production wasn't worth the ROI. Plus that production must be getting priced out of the market by small, independent narrators like myself who can work for like $150 PFH or even less because our overheads are minimal.
Worth considering too is how most successful authors are producing audiobooks as a matter of course now, and there is plenty of quality choice, so listeners aren't so drawn to midlist titles.
I don't know if the audiobook business is still booming, but it can't be shrinking. Probably, the bandwagon has gotten very, very crowded.
One of my books is still doing okay thanks to a FB ad campaign, and I've started production on the audiobook. I really should pull my finger out and get it done — I haven't released an audiobook that might benefit from a good ebook presence. It will give me a good indicator on the merit of all this.

[Bill Hiatt]

In my limited experience, there is a correlation between ebook sales and audiobook sales. It used to be said that audiobooks had the best chance of being profitable if the ebook sales were strong.

I checked the Findaway website to see how the new marketplace (where narrators offer their services) looked like. There are only about 16 in there so far, but of course, they just announced the change, so that's not too surprising. I notice Findaway is also now pushing an author profile to make us more attractive to perspective narrators.

The prices are definitely less so far than I paid before, I suppose in part because the narrators don't have to compensate for Findaway's cut. The only drawback I can see with this system is that if a narrator for some reason wasn't getting the job done, Findaway would push on them under the old system. Now, unless we already know a narrator we like, we're back to dealing with an individual who may or may not be reliable. But there must be a fair number of reliable narrators out there.

When I tried to get a narrator for my first book using Audible's pool of narrators, my project was greeted by crickets for months. I guess that was another advantage of Findaway's old system. Findaway would match you narrators who might be good for your project at a variety of price points, arrange for auditions from any you liked, and send you a whole different selection if you didn't like any. That saved a lot of legwork. Sigh!