Audiblegate, the easy exchanges fiasco and Audible

At the moment, not all my books are on Audible. It's just the K'Barthan Series - the four separate books and the box set - plus Unlucky Dip.

Please accept my apologies for the lack of Hamgeean Misfit books. There are sound business reasons behind my decision not to publish those until the entire series is complete. Let me explain:

First up, a point of order. Audible's back end so to speak, is called ACX but this is really just a name for the interface through which authors and narrators find one another (if they choose to go that route) and through which they upload their books to Audible. The two are the same organisation so I have called it all Audible. Right then off we go.

Returns policy and lack of accurate sales figures:

You may know this but, for a long time, Audible pushed 'easy exchanges'; encouraging users to treat it like a library by allowing them to return audibooks for up to a year after buying them (even if they'd read them all the way through) and swap them for a new book on the same credit. What they didn't tell readers was that Authors and narrators weren't paid for these 'borrows'. Instead, Audible quietly clawed back the cost of any books returned or exchanged from the author by deducting a sale from the next month's royalties.

Clearly, if a reader doesn't get on with a book or a narrator, or if there's a quality problem, they jolly well should return it. This wasn't like that though. Audible did not inform its partners what was happening and hid its actions from them by only providing net sales figures. As more and more books were being returned, the producers of books saw their sales fall and couldn't understand why. They upped their advertising and promotions spend and still their sales figures were dropping. In fact, their sales weren't dropping, it was the number of returns that was rising.

In late 2020 Audible made an error, its practises were exposed and it had to come clean. Some authors discovered up to 50% of their sales were being returned. Under pressure Audible agreed that from January 2021 it would to pay audiobook producers for any returns made after seven days but it would still expect the producers to pay for books returned within seven days, including those which had been read all the way through. Audible also agreed to improve the sales information it gave.

However, Audible still refuses to give any data as to the extent of returns before January 2021 and even now, refuses to give gross sales figures. Thise means I do now see 'qualified returns' ie those returned within seven days, which is an improvement, but I still have no idea what the total number of books I have sold is because any other returns are not declared to producers like myself. As I mentioned, the 'qualified returns' are still clawed back from us producers, even if the book has been read all the way through. Yes, that's exactly like buying a pair of knickers, wearing it for a week, then taking it back to the shop and getting a refund, no questions asked. Quite an unusual approach. Definitely a unique approach in the world of book/audio sales too.

I find the fact Audible still refuses to share gross sales worrying. What else are they hiding? And how can I market books effectively if I don't know how many I'm selling?

Scams:

Stories of people putting pamphlets on Audible as 'books' and of authors discovering that someone else has already recorded their books in audio are legion. Audible polices these infractions with as little human intervention as possible. That means an AI system that is probably the single, most convincing argument yet posited that AI will fail spectacularly in any bid it makes for world domination. But Audible's apparent ambivilance to scammers, the fact that when it does crack down, it seems to ban more innocent parties than guilty ones and it's heavy-handed treatment of those accused of policy violations are legendary. In short, Audible relies on some extremely shonky AI which is not policed by humans at all and when the company does act, it does so without the remotest nod to fairness, dilligence or sadly, on many occasions, the actual facts.

Contract:

Audible/ACX's contract with producers is very one-sided, naturally. I was advised by my solicitor to refrain from putting more books on Audible until I have some liability insurance. However, his biggest worry is that 'qualified' returns are not defined. This means Audible can easily change the definition without being in breech of our agreement. It can revert to a policy of clawing back the cost of returns without officially breaking its word. Also, the contract is worded so that producers pretty much waive any rights they have to contest Audible's future actions. We also appar to agree, in advance, that it can do whatever it wants without consultation. A contract is an agreement. This is dictated terms. You sign whether you agree or not, or you don't. Right now ... I don't.

Royalties:

Gareth and I know we are sharing 25% - 25% instead of 40% as a punishment rate for having the temerity to publish our stuff elsewhere, because that conficts with Audible's pursuit of market domination - but 25% of what? The cover price? The price of a credit? It seems to vary without rhyme, reason, explanation or logic.

Certainly, there are projected royalty tables for payments on credits against the length of the book, but is that what we are paid? It's hard to tell. You can find an article explaining how Audible probably works it out here.

Pricing:

Audible/ACX do not allow producers to set the prices of their books. Again, this is mainly because to do so would bring the marketing strategies of producers into confict with Audible's pursuit of market domination. Where it is particularly bad is in shorter books. Audible is about attracting subscribers at all costs. As a result their prices to buy outright are huge. This means that short books are pretty much unsellable. Nobody who can buy my 63 hour box set for one credit is going to be interested in purchasing my 2 and a bit hour shorter books for one credit. Likewise, nobody will pay $24 for one of my novels or '$7 - $10' for one of my 2.5 hour stories when the box set is on sale for $28. The two hour books might have been more attractive if I could offer them for say, $3.99 or even offer the first for 99c. But I can't because Audible sets the price.

Yes, I've stuffed up there. It isn't all them being gits. Some of it is me being dim. My bad, and once I get my liability insurance in place, I do hope to put the Hamgeean Misfit books on Audible, once it's complete, and I can work out the best way to box them up. Why do I have to wait? In case I make a mistake, and this is my final hurdle to publishing more books with Audible ...

Total lack of flexibility:

An important part of selling books as an independent author is being able to change things. Audible doesn't allow that. If I want to change the metadata, add something to the blurb, or if the book has won an award for example, I need to contact Audible customer service, send them the changes, and if they are approved, they'll add them. If I want to add a 30 second afterword to the 63 hour audiobook, I have to resend them all 235 chapters or whatever it is, with the afterword on the end. Then the entire 235 chapters, plus the afterword, have to go through Audible's QS process, which took 6 months last time I uploaded a book - that was the box set and by that time all four of the books in it were for sale on Audible, which meant, essentially, that they took six months to approve the 20 second opening and closing credits files for the box set.

They refuse to add single files and unlike every other distributor I use, they do not allow producers to edit their audiobook listings once they are posted for sale. This is quite plainly an absolutely bats way of going on. For example, they changed the way I write my name; M T McGuire to M. T. McGuire on one book and then changed the subtitle from 'a sci-fi comedy story' to 'a aci-fi comedy story'. It took a huge backwards and forward to their customer services to get the 'aci-fi' corrected and they refused to take my word on the way I write my name. It's still M. T. McGuire 'because that is Audible company policy.' But only for that one book it would seem, since all the others are as I wrote them, minus the full-stops.

This lack of flexibility means I should finish the next series before I divide it into box sets and upload it to Audible because I want to ensure I get it right. And of course, I need to buy that insurance.