Should Indie Authors Produce Audiobooks?
I had a conversation the other day about how indie authors sometimes try to produce audiobooks, only to give up because the audiobooks don’t sell or don’t turn a profit.
This is quite understandable. Audiobook self-publishing is like the Hard Mode of ebook self-publishing. Everything about the process is slower, harder, and more expensive. Especially the more expensive part. As I’ve blogged before, with a bit of work it’s possible to produce an ebook entirely with free software. Audiobooks, if you want to hire a really good narrator, are going to cost between $200 to $400 per finished hour.
So some basic math will demonstrate the difficulty. At ten hours long, an audiobook of your novel might cost you around $3000 to produce. If you sell it exclusively via ACX (which means Audible, Apple, and Amazon), you will probably get an average of $5 per sale, which means you have to sell about 600 copies to turn a profit. If you sell it through wide distribution (which means you can sell on stores other than Audible, Apple, and Amazon), you will probably get around $2.40 for an ACX sale, though what you will get on the other stores can range from anywhere like $1 on the library services to almost $6.50 on Chirp and Google Play, depending on your sale price. So just on ACX sales alone, you would need about 1,240 sales to get back your money.
Therefore if you are an indie author and you are thinking about audiobooks, it’s a good idea to take a hard look at your finances and business plan and think about whether it’s really a smart idea or not.
All that said, I have turned a profit on several of my audiobook projects. FROSTBORN #6 through #11 have all made back what I spent on them, and so have about six of the eighteen GHOSTS books. I’m pretty sure they’ll all eventually earn back what I spent. I am unsure if the CLOAK GAMES/MAGE ones will earn back, which is why I haven’t done any more of them for a while.
With all that in mind, here are seven tips I’ve found that help make audiobook production profitable.
1.) Deductions
Depending on how you have organized your publishing business, you may be able to take the production cost of your audiobooks as a business deduction on your taxes, which could reduce your total tax liability (ie, how much you owe the government) when you file taxes.
Note that I am not an accountant or a lawyer, and you should obtain tax advice from an accountant qualified for your jurisdiction and legal advice from a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.
That said, the whole idea of “deductions” sometimes gets sneered at by people ignorant of how taxes actually work, like it’s some sort of trick rich people use to buy themselves caviar. But in most taxing jurisdictions, you can deduct business expenses from your taxes, though what qualifies as “business expenses” will vary depending on where you live and what sort of business you actually have.
Basically, business deductions are a government’s way of saying “spend this income on something on our list of approved expenses to benefit the economy, or we’re going to take it as taxation.”
So, in my specific situation and business structure, audiobook production is a deductible expense, which is very beneficial when it comes time to file taxes for the year. But again, consult with a qualified accountant regarding your specific situation.
Of course, there are still taxes on audiobook payment. I have to file 1099 forms for my narrators, which means they have to pay taxes on the payment as income when they file taxes, and then any sales of the audiobook count as taxable business income, to say nothing of state sales taxes the customer pays when buying the audiobook. Uncle Sam has centuries of practice at getting his cut, and he’s very, very good at it.
In my frank opinion, it’s wisest just to figure out what you legally owe (preferably with the help of a qualified accountant) and pay that. A lot of otherwise smart people have brought themselves a lot of woe by ignoring that obvious truth.
2.) Finishing a series
I’ve noticed that in fantasy and science fiction, readers really dislike a unfinished series. I had originally planned to make SILENT ORDER open-ended with a sort of a “adventure of the week” format, but that didn’t really work out. I think you can do a more open-ended series structure in like mysteries, thrillers, and regional crime, but SF/F readers have come to expect a complete series arc with a definition and satisfying conclusion at the end.
Audiobook SF/F listeners have that as well, but it’s even more intense. Selling just one audiobook that isn’t part of series is an uphill climb. I have noticed a definite uptick in sales once an audiobook series is complete. Listeners really like to be able to start a series and just listen straight through to the end.
That said, getting to a finished audiobook series is a lot of work and money. FROSTBORN was fifteen books long. THE GHOSTS and GHOST EXILE together were eighteen books. The last few books in all those series were longer than usual, which means they were more expensive to produce. So if you’ve written a really long series, getting the entire series in audiobook can be a huge commitment of time and money.
As an example, the first FROSTBORN audiobook I self-published was FROSTBORN: THE DARK WARDEN in late 2018, and the final book finally came out in June 2022, almost four years later. Why the delay? Money ran short on occasion, or I didn’t have time to work on it, or there were health difficulties, and then Covid happened in the middle of all that. But! Now the series is complete, and it consistently one of my best sellers. Audiobooks #1 through #5 were produced by Tantor, and then I did #6 through #15 myself. #6 through #11 have all earned back what I spent, and I expect #12 through #15 to reach that point sometime in 2024.
So it was worth it to put them all out, but man, it was a lot of work to get there. And I didn’t even do the actual narrating!
That said, if you write shorter series and books than I do, putting them all into audio will obviously be less expense and effort.
3.) Ebook advertising
Basically, if the ebook of your book sells well, then odds are the audiobook is going to also do well.
I’ve experimented a lot with this, but I haven’t found very many good ways of directly advertising audiobooks (more on that below). It’s easier to advertise ebooks than audiobooks, at least in my experience. So rather than trying to advertise audiobooks, it’s generally better to advertise the ebooks attached to the audiobooks.
As an example, I’m advertising THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE at $0.99 cents right now. For every 10 or so sales of the ebook, I seem to get one sale of the audiobook. Of course, the ebook gets about $0.35 a sale, while the audiobook does roughly between $5 and $5.90 per sale, so the audiobooks really do help with the profitability of any advertising, especially on a discounted ebook.
Interestingly, this means that if you have an ebook series that is also available in audiobook, that means it becomes easier to profitably advertise the series because you will also have money coming in from the audiobooks. I’ve had a couple of months where 40% of the profit on advertising FROSTBORN and THE GHOSTS came from the audiobooks.
Though as we’ve said, getting the entire series in audiobook can be a significant challenge.
4.) Bundles
One thing I’ve found that works well for audiobook sales is bundling. Like, THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE, which I mentioned above, is a bundle containing CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, GHOST IN THE FLAMES, and GHOST IN THE BLOOD, along with the short story GHOST ARIA. This lets me have the nice quartered cover with four different titles on it that looks very good on Audible.
Audible is basically the reason ebook bundles work so well. There have been some changes in recent years with the addition of Audible Plus, but Audible still mostly works on a subscription credit system. That means you subscribe to Audible and you get your credit a month, which you can use to buy any audiobook on the store. Since you have the one credit, it makes sense to get the longest possible audiobook you can for your credit to maximize value. THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE was the first bundle I did in March 2020. I wasn’t expecting much to happen because a lot of other stuff was going on in March of 2020 as you might recall, but THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE was thirty-nine hours long, which made for an attractive value for your credit. It did really well, and was my first audiobook title to sell more than a thousand copies in total.
I’ve since had good luck with other bundles – the rest of the GHOSTS and GHOST EXILE series, and then the MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES audiobook.
5.) Going Wide
It might be worthwhile to go “wide” with your audiobooks, which means having them available on platforms other than Audible, Amazon, and Apple.
ACX, Amazon’s audiobook creation platform, has a bit of a nasty hook to it. If you set your audiobooks exclusive to ACX, you can get 40% royalties, but if you go non-exclusive (which is what “wide” means in this context), you get 25%. Sometimes, depending on promotions and so forth and the weird way ACX’s accounting works, in practice it turns out to be around like 12%. For a lot of writers, it’s worthwhile to go exclusive with ACX because the money will be better and Audible/Amazon is the dominant for in audiobook publishing.
That said, it is in fact possible to make more money at other stores. Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, and Spotify all offer better royalty rates than ACX, even if they don’t have the number of users that Audible does. Going wide also allows you to to offer “direct” sales – ie, selling off your own Shopify or Payhip store (or other similar ecommerce platform). Part of the reason I can offer 75% off audiobooks for my Coupon Of The Week promotion for my Payhip store is because even with the massive discount, I still make almost as much as I would with a non-exclusive sale off of ACX.
Another advantage is that you can get your audiobook into the various library services. The way most of these work is that the library (or library system, most likely) gets access to a big catalog of ebooks and audiobooks, and the library system only gets charged if someone actually checks out one of the titles. The rate per-checkout for the author is pretty low – usually around $1.30 USD – but someone who is checking your audiobook out from the library probably wasn’t going to buy it themselves, and $1.30 is still better than $0.00.
We mentioned earlier how if an ebook sells well, the attached audiobook will probably sell as well. If you have a lot of ebook sales on the non-Amazon stores, then it is definitely worthwhile to think about going wide with your audiobooks.
6.) Chirp Deals
Additionally, going wide offers access to the one effective way I’ve found of directly advertising audiobooks – Chirp deals.
Chirp is owned and run by Bookbub. If you’re familiar with Bookbub, you know they send out a daily email newsletter containing links to free or discounted ebooks, and authors and publishers pay for spots in those newsletters. However, Bookbub could never promote audiobooks because Audible was the dominant force in audiobook publishing, and Audible doesn’t let authors or publishers set the price for any audiobooks.
To get around this problem, Bookbub started its own audiobook store, Chirp Books, where they could sell audiobooks. Chirp offers a daily email newsletter with a list of discounted ebooks, and I’ve had good results with CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, GHOST IN THE COWL, and CLOAK OF DRAGONS. The reason those three audiobooks worked well is because they all have a long tail of sequels – eight each for CHILD OF THE GHOSTS and GHOST IN THE COWL, and five after CLOAK OF DRAGONS.
Usually, for a Chirp deal, the first audiobook in the series is $0.99, and then I set second and third books to $2.99 for the duration of the $0.99 promotion on the first book, which lasts a month. Obviously, I will sell the most copies of the $0.99 audiobook, and I get about $0.35 a pop for those sales. But I get just under $1.50 for each of the sales on the $2.99 books, and if someone likes them and goes on to get the entire series through Chirp, the later titles in the series can generate $5.50 per sale, depending on price.
This works so well that CLOAK OF DRAGONS has actually made more from its Chirp deal than it did from the entire time it has been on ACX.
So if your audiobooks are wide and you have a series of them, it is definitely worthwhile to apply for a Chirp deal. That said, if you just have one or two audiobooks, you probably would get much benefit from it.
7.) Time and chance
The more audio titles you have across more platforms, the more likely it is that something will take off or do unexpectedly well.
I had a good example of that in July – my payment from Findaway Voices was unusually high. I dug into the data, and found out that the GHOSTS series had experienced a very good month on Storytel. It’s one of the stores you can access through Findaway Voices distribution. They’re based in Sweden, and mostly distribute in European and Asian countries. I honestly had only a vague idea that Storytel existed at all, but because my audiobooks were available there, I had a very good audio month in July thanks to Storytel sales.
Granted, “plan on getting lucky” is not good planning and should not be in a business plan.
However, for good luck to happen, it does take time and effort. Luck is like lightning, and the more lightning rods you build, the better the chance of catching some lightning.
It’s just that audiobook “lightning rods” take a long time to build. ACX famously offers “royalty share” audiobook productions, where instead of paying the narrator, you split the royalties from the audiobook for seven years. If you do pay for production, it’s not unrealistic to project seven years or so to make your money back. Like, we started on FROSTBORN audiobooks in fall of 2018 and finished the series in audio four years later in the summer of 2022, and like I mentioned above, six of the ten books recorded in that time have turned a profit, which is actually really good in terms of the timeframe.
8.) Beware of reviews
If you’re new to the audiobook space, one thing to watch out for is the overall hostile tone of the negative reviews. I think some indie authors have gotten spooked by negative reviews that weren’t actually indicative of how the audiobook was selling or was perceived.
I have a theory that the easier a form of media is to consume, the nastier the reviews will be. Like, a book takes some amount of mental effort to read, but it’s less effort to listen to an audiobook, and even less effort to watch a video or play a video game. So you are more likely to find over-the-top negative reviews the easier a form of media is to consume, which is why you find things like people posting seven-hour video reviews of why they hate STARFIELD or the PlayStation or something. I have a theory this is one of the unfortunate side effects of social media – negativity always gets more likes and clicks, so people become even more negative to get likes and clicks, which sets up a vicious cycle.
Anyway, what this means in the audiobook space is you could have the most perfect book ever written, narrated by the most beautiful and charismatic voice ever to speak a human language, a voice that would have made kings and emperors listen enraptured in ancient days, and people will still leave long angry reviews because they didn’t like the way “weather” was pronounced.
So when you publish your audiobook, be aware that it’s going to get some negative reviews, and don’t panic when you do. It’s simply inevitable and part of the process. Your audiobook will not be for everyone. The challenge is connecting your audiobook to the audience that will appreciate it, which is why we were talking about marketing so much above.
9.) Selling AI Audiobooks Is Even Harder
Because audiobook production is expensive and AI voice technology has advanced so much in the last few years, people have been experimenting with creating and selling AI generated audiobooks.
This will not be the solution to the challenge of audiobook production.
People seem to either love AI or hate AI, and I definitely have a strongly negative personal opinion about generative AI. That said, it won’t be as amazing as its advocates think nor as dire as the doomsayers believe.
People who hate AI or who love AI both have a vision where someday you will be able to type in a prompt like “LitRPG book where Luke Skywalker and Sherlock Holmes team up to fight Sauron on Muppet Treasure Island” and the AI will spit out a perfectly crafted book, movie, or game that matches the prompt. But this is as much a fantasy as Lysenkoism or the Whig Theory Of History. Or of faux-Rumpelstiltskins attempting to generate infinite wealth by spinning straw into fake gold. As much as people like Bob Iger and David Zaslav would like to get rid of all these annoying actors and writers and replace them with AIs, the technology isn’t good enough, and the courts generally don’t seem to be in favor of copyright AI generated material, but that’s a larger discussion beyond the scope of audiobooks.
For the specific area of AI audiobooks, the problem is that the AI can generate a voice that sounds like an almost perfect human voice fluently reading the text. This has the unfortunate side effect of triggering the uncanny valley effect and making it difficult to listen to the audiobook for a long period of time because the voice swiftly becomes boring. You know the voice narrating the drug side effects at the end of a commercial? Imagine listening to that voice narrating a nine hour romance audiobook. The performative aspect of audiobooks is hard to quantify, but it undeniably has a strong effect on the finished audiobook.
I experimented with AI audiobooks on YouTube a bit over the last two years. Google Play came out with a program where you could automatically convert one of your ebooks to AI-narrated audiobook. Since I never had any intention of turning SILENT ORDER into audiobooks, I felt comfortable experimenting with the program for that series since it wasn’t screwing anyone out of a job. I didn’t think the results were good enough to sell, though I did post them on YouTube for free (though to be fair, I did make some money from attached ads).
What did I learn?
First off, there isn’t a lot of money in it. In the time I’ve had AI-narrated audiobooks on YouTube, I made about 60% of what it would cost to turn SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND into an audiobook.
Second, people really, really hate AI voices.
This is one of the things that the AI advocates never seem to accept – is that people generally hate the AI generated stuff. Like, people have no problem using generative AI to write their homework assignments or doing unpleasant writing tasks they don’t want to do, but when it comes to actually consuming entertainment media, most people hate AI. Like, “this sounds/looks/reads like an AI did it” has become a common insult online. The Marvel show SECRET INVASION got a lot of flack because they used AI-generated images for the opening titles, though to be fair, that show had a lot of other problems.
So I don’t really think AI is a way to lower the cost of audiobook production or to generate a viable audiobook for sale. I think the eventual use of the technology will be to integrate with ereaders. Like, say you want your phone to read a book aloud to you. You’ll select the voice and accent you want, and the ereader app will read a book to you. In fact, you can already do that on many devices, just with voices that aren’t quite as advanced. That’s a big win for accessibility for visually impaired readers, but I don’t think it’s going to replace human narration.
THE CONCLUSION.
Producing audiobooks can be very satisfying and help you reach an audience that otherwise wouldn’t encounter your work, but they’re definitely not a get-rich-quick scheme, and they are unquestionably a lot of work.
If you are an indie author, should you turn your books into audiobooks? The answer has to be individualized. You have to take a good honest look at your finances, business structure, and goals, and decide if audiobook production will work for you or not.
That said, it is nice when you get the emails from listeners saying they listened to the entire series on a cross-country drive or while doing something difficult and unpleasant.
And with that in mind, thank you all for listening to so many of my audiobooks!
-JM