From the press release:
Audible.com, the world’s largest seller and producer of digital spoken-word entertainment, announced yesterday that it has established a $20 million fund for authors. Authors who sign up to participate in the Audible Author Services program will gain access to Audible’s marketing and merchandising expertise to help them enhance their audience. For each audiobook sold at Audible.com, Audible.co.uk or iTunes, enrolled authors will receive one dollar directly from Audible, over and above the royalty revenue streams Audible’s fast-growing sales are already generating. Audible will provide each participating author with a suite of quick-start tools, including audio samples and links, to deploy via social media and for promotion of their work, and will offer other awareness and audience-escalation services.
“Before I founded Audible.com, I made a living as an author and journalist for 20 years. But the economics of being a professional writer have profoundly changed. For new authors and for the majority of experienced authors as well, the days of sustaining the writing life by ‘just writing’ are over,” said Audible.com founder and CEO Donald Katz, speaking yesterday during a keynote speech at the London Book Fair’s Digital Minds Conference. “The good news is that in the digital era, authors have numerous ways to reach audiences and communicate more directly with them. We want to reward authors who are or want to become personally involved in growing their audience. At Audible.com, we have had great success working directly with authors to increase awareness of their audiobooks, and Audible Author Services will help us build on these accomplishments. Audible has achieved global growth by turning literate listening into a mainstream media format. This means that today, any book worth writing or reading ought to be available in audio. We hope this new program also helps us achieve this mission.”
“The astonishingly rapid growth of the digital audio segment makes audiobook listeners an increasingly important audience for all authors,” said acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood. “I’m thrilled that 10 of my books are available at Audible.com. I’m delighted to be able to connect more effectively with my audiobook listeners, and to build this audience through Audible’s exciting, helpful and creator-friendly new Author Services program. Now, more than ever, I’ll be working to make sure that the rest of my backlist becomes available in audio as soon as possible.”
Features of the Audible Author Services program include:
- Open access. Any author who has an audiobook available for sale at Audible.com or Audible.co.uk can enroll.
- Easy sign-up. Click to sign up in minutes.
- An array of tools through which authors can promote their work. Every author who participates in Audible Author Services receives a quick-start plan for easy and effective promotion of their work via social media and other channels. Authors will also gain access to free copies of their audiobook, links to their product-detail pages on Audible.com, the ability to address AudibleListener members on Audible.com product-detail pages, and personalized support from Audible’s teams.
- $1 per sale of the digital audiobook through Audible.com channels. After sign-up, every time Audible sells a digital audiobook through its regular channels, the author receives a dollar as an honorarium. One hundred sales equal $100; one thousand sales equal $1,000. These honorarium payments are made quarterly directly from Audible—in addition to royalties already in place in an author’s audiobook contracts and agreements.
Best-selling author and Hugo and Nebula Award winner Robert J. Sawyer hailed the program: “This is great! If this progressive program had been in place during the past two years, I would have made over $20,000 on top of my usual Audible royalties. I love having my books available through Audible, and I’ve found that audiobook sales also spur print sales. The spouse who listens to a book while commuting often gives his or her partner the printed book, and people who particularly enjoy an audiobook often get the print version, too, so that they can easily look up favorite passages. I’ve long wanted a program that would let me embed samples of my 15 novels at Audible into my website and blog, and to help me leverage my Facebook and Twitter presence into more listeners. Web 2.0 is all about multimedia, after all, and Audible Author Services is giving me the tools I need to stand out in that space.”
Authors with titles available at Audible can learn more about the Audible Author Services program, and sign up here. Authors whose books are not available at Audible are encouraged to visit Audible Author Services here to learn more about how they might get their books into audio.
