Brandon Sanderson did more this week than just create a crowdfund for his Words of Radiance leatherbound books which raised more than $17 Million as of this writing, he also took on the mega-corporation of Amazon against their bad business practices impacting thousands of authors via their Audible Books.
Amazon is a near monopoly in the book business, and they’ve been able to corral authors into giving up rights just to exist on their platforms. This happens with e-books with their Kindle Unlimited program, where authors get screwed to the tune of 1/3 of a book sale or less for the page reads involved, but their Audible program is even worse where audiobooks are both time-consuming and expensive to produce, and Amazon takes massive percentages that get even worse for deals if an author doesn’t go exclusive.
Brandon Sanderson took to this fight against Audible and Amazon a couple of years ago when people asked if his secret novels from Kickstarter would get audiobooks on the platform. He said that he saw royalties as horrible for authors and wouldn’t do so until he could get Amazon to change their Audible program for everyone.
Very few authors have as much clout in the industry as Brandon Sanderson to be able to take up such a fight. Most would get completely ignored by the company, but Brandon Sanderson has enough fame and eyeballs on what he’s doing to make Amazon and Audilbe move.
Now, on his blog, Brandon Sanderson has announced he’s achieved results.
He posted to his blog:
I’m happy to say that this stand has borne some fruit. I’ve spent this last year in contact with Audible and other audio distributors, and have pushed carefully–but forcefully–for them to step up. A few weeks ago, three key officers high in Audible’s structure flew to Dragonsteel offices and presented for us a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers.
This new structure doesn’t give everything I’ve wanted, and there is still work to do, but it is encouraging. They showed me new minimum royalty rates for authors–and they are, as per my suggestions, improved over the previous ones. Moreover, this structure will move to a system like I have requested: a system that pays more predictably on each credit spent, and that is more transparent for authors. Audible will be paying royalties monthly, instead of quarterly, and will provide a spreadsheet that better shows how they split up the money received with their authors.
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Then, Brandon Sanderson elaborated what this would look like for authors on Amazon or Audible with their audiobooks:
- What I’ve seen doesn’t yet bring us to the 70% royalty I think is fair, and which other, similar industries get.
- Audible continues to reserve the best royalties for those authors who are exclusive to their platform, which I consider bad for consumers, as it stifles competition. In the new structure, both exclusive and non-exclusive authors will see an increase, but the gap is staying about the same.
- Authors continue to have very little (basically no) control over pricing. Whatever the “cover price” of books is largely doesn’t matter–books actually sell for the price of a credit in an Audible subscription. Authors can never raise prices alongside inflation. An Audible credit costs the same as it did almost two decades ago–with no incentive for Audible to raise it, lest it lose customers to other services willing to loss-lead to draw customers over.
While he said this isn’t perfect, it’s a “step forward” and he looks forward to Amazon and Audible making commitments to actually helping authors.
What do you think of Brandon Sanderson moving and shaking Amazon via their Audible service? Leave a comment and let us know.
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