This is the stuff I love. Sanderson doesn't _have_ to take a stand against Audible , and yet he does. Of course he is in a position of privilege to be able to do it, but so many other people are too and act very differently.
Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That's insane.
Props to Sanderson, and props to all the other people with integrity.
> I’ve made enough on this Kickstarter. I don’t need to squeeze people for every penny—but what I do want to do is find a way to provide options for authors.
This is a kind of sentiment I wish was not exceptional. People often talk about how one day they may have enough, and _then_ they'll help others -- but it's rare to see someone (especially with less than a billion dollars) say out loud that they did it, and in the same breath they start helping. (At a certain time, Kaladin wouldn't believe this kind of guy exists!)
I think it's important to realize just how rare a position Brandon Sanderson is in, really. Publishing and the literary scene outside of the major publishers has always been people using the little money they make to try and keep it alive outside of the dominant system that's creeping towards a monopoly in NA. Most stuff just doesn't have the huge marketing capability that Sanderson does and usually fails. Frankly, most authors are barely able to make a living doing it. Sanderson is far from the only person trying to help authors in publishing, but his 0.1% level financial success in publishing likely means he can accept much more risk than even more well known authors.
That said, I do find it kind of ironic that he made a secret deal with Spotify, which has its own pitiful history of payouts to artists. But atleast free accounts get access to the books as well.
If anything, I think you're overselling it. Most authors make at best a very small amount of money from their work and are nowhere near being able to make a living from it. Most books simply don't sell much at all (200-300 for an average author), to the point where even 100% of sticker price wouldn't pay for a person's living expenses.
A generous assumption is hardbacks at $25 a pop. That would put an average author at 5k to 7.5k in a year... under the very improbable assumption of 100% of sticker price going to the author.
Spotify and the music world has a distinctly different problem. Last I read, the vast majority of their revenue is going to their licensing deals. The license-holders then don't pay much to the artists. You can blame Spotify for this if you choose, and many artists like to publicly, but as with many things in music it comes back to the labels.
Important to consider that most books range from barely readable to trash. I think the book distribution of quality is more concentrated among elite authors, whereas music is a lot more linear -- the average musician is a lot closer to elite musicians.
> whereas music is a lot more linear -- the average musician is a lot closer to elite musicians.
Gosh, I don't know. This is quite a claim.
First off is the obvious question: who is a musician? High school band? Play Friday nights at the local pub? Or are we talking "survives exclusively on record sales" / "is a member of a symphony"? That's a lot of selection bias. Almost nobody publishing rubbish is surviving off that income.
Second, "musician" is actually conflating two things: songwriting/composition and performance. Composition is the thing that really bears direct comparison, and I'd venture a guess you've not even heard all the awful songs out there because nobody with any talent is interested in performing them (unlike the ease with which anyone can publish total rubbish).
Finally, if you consider the size of the corpus -- all songs vs all English text -- it's pretty clear which one is easier to curate (covers in music are super common, which is probably not an accident).
Just anecdotally, I saw a video on reddit the other day of an African dictator casually wetting himself. But what was really striking to me was how absolutely awful the state band was.
Not only is it rare for someone to experience success like Sanderson, it's even rarer for an author to so consistently put out high quality work. The man practically writes a 1,000 page novel a year. He's lucked (and hard-worked) into a lot of leverage here.
I worked for a few years at Audible as a dev. Based on my experience, I'd say the culture at the company was good, in that we were not trying to exploit people, neither externally nor internally.
One thing that was pretty clear was that our audiobooks were at the mercy of publishing houses / content owners, and a lot of restrictions came from licensing deals (geographic reastrictions, time-based, formats, etc), so I'm inclined to assume that the low cut for authors may be due to publishers wanting a big cut of the sales.
That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor, so there could have been a whole other side to this company that I was not exposed to.
I still remember when the kindle first came out, it would read to you. Before publishers threatened to sue. With modern text to speech getting so good, there really is no reason an inference model couldn't run on every device to read to us. I guess book readers were the first to have their jobs replaced by AI, but contracts didn't let it happen.
I don’t know. I’ve been listening to an unabridged audiobook of the Count of Monte Cristo. The single narrator has done a fantastic job of giving a different voice to every single character. Even if a particular character hasn’t appeared for tens of hours, when they do reappear, I remember who they are from their unique voice.
Plus, the narrator does a great job of pronouncing names with a french accent (at least, it sounds legit to me, a non-french speaking person). I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?
Absolutely. There's a world of difference between a professional voice actor narrating an audiobook, and AI/amateur. Personally I can't listen to anything narrated by anyone other than (good) pro voice actors, it just kills the enjoyment.
On a similar note, Sanderson's own books in "graphic audio" format (multiple voice actors, sound effects, music, etc) are a wonderful piece of art and is my preferred way to consume audiobooks when possible. I don't see that being replaced with AI any time soon.
> I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?
If you can get a synthesized voice to speak French in a French accent, you can also get it to speak English in a French accent. That part's easy.
> Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?
I like Neil Gaiman's quote in there, and I agree if you record someone reading a book you can copyright that, but that copyright has no bearing on the copyright status of the recording of a another person or machine reading the book. If I own the content, I can format shift, that is actually in law in the US. Audio is a format.
I think what actually happened is that they convinced Amazon that there was more money in audiobooks than they thought, and it wasn't worth using it as a feature to sell kindles. Now Amazon knows how much money is in audiobooks and they aren't sharing. Are they surprised?
Copilot and chatgpt are going to replace me, so I say this with all humility, don't protect jobs from AI. They are saving us effort we can spend on other things. This is just industrialization taken another step.
My worry is that you could do something 60% as good for 1% of the cost, at which point a well-narrated audiobook becomes an extreme luxury good. Most people will pay $5-$10 for the "good enough" algorithmic version, and there aren't enough people who care to pay the fixed cost of Michael Kramer doing a version.
Chat gpt can already parrot back some idea to you in the written "voice" of any famous historical figure you care to name, and remembers context from earlier in your session to inform its written inflection as well. Presumably this implies we have "line of sight" to doing something analogous in the audio space, at least in this generation. Certainly if you fed a whole book into chat gpt that it had never read before and asked it to describe the intonation of a character's voice it would have some level of accuracy (e.g. "husky" vs "meek") so I think we would want to do something similar for the AI reading. It could also probably pick up on context in what it's reading and read it with emotion.
In 2007 the state of playback was pitiful. Of course the authors guild saw the trend lines, but even in 2022, we know Siri/Alexa don't sound human at all (my pre-teens make fun of them).
It's all possible but I doubt it'll be here in 10 years.
> That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor
Is it just me or is this nuts? The only time I've seen restricted access is when there are security concerns (national security, special equipment, etc).
I've often wished it were the other way around. Engineering was a floor that sales weren't allowed into without special invite. I've had two good experiences with open floor plans, but the open floor was spacious and dedicated to development. The one bad experience we shared the open floor with sales and they were... loud.
>Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative.
Also, who are the creators? I mean, does the author of the book have to share that piece of the cake with the narrator as well? that makes the cut even lower.
why would anyone give a % of income to a narrator? That's a service you pay for once and thats it. They don't have to read it again for each customer. They just get hired to read and record it the first time.
This feels contrived. And is in the face of, for example, how Disney tried to not pay a Star Wars writer.
I agree it feels like this could be easy to argue one way or another. I am willing to assert it is often not simple and many of the complications are from pushing simple solutions.
the star wars writer is just a contract worker. He doesn't own star wars etc. But he should still get paid according to the agreement disney inherited.
Contrived because, "primary owner" of a story is somewhat silly. It kind of works for one off books, but even there has issues. Get into performances and collaborations, and it falls hard.
You will quickly get into situations where corporations own things, and then all semblance of personal ownership and control are questionable, at best.
If you release of a cover (ie a performance) of a song someone else wrote you own the copyright on the recording of that performance and are entitled to compensation for use of that recording.
There's not real any intrinsic difference between a recorded performance of a song someone else wrote and recorded narration of a book someone else wrote. The audiobook recording has its own copyright, which can be owned by the narrator. It's usually not though, being recorded for hire with the narrator ceding all rights.
> If you release of a cover (ie a performance) of a song someone else wrote you own the copyright on the recording of that performance and are entitled to compensation for use of that recording.
negative. if you're covering a song in copyright you need a license agreement from the owner if you intend to monotize it. You own a copyright to your version but you can't make money from it.
Not true in the US due to compulsory licensing. [0] There's no permission required to publish or monetise a recording of an existing musical work - you just have to provide notice to the copyright holder and pay a statutory royalty. The mechanical rate for the sale of a recording is the greater of 9.1c for the song or 1.75c per minute of playtime. Streaming royalties are handled by blanket agreements with companies like Spotify.
The narrator is similarly inseparable from the performative work (as, say, an orchestral recording of a symphony), the only difference seems to rest in who has the power and incentive to claim royalties.
None of this explicitly follows from first principles, it's all just negotiation for what, through the vehicle of contract law, will get enforced by social convention and the fist of the government.
>None of this explicitly follows from first principles, it's all just negotiation for what, through the vehicle of contract law, will get enforced by social convention and the fist of the government.
Absolutely. But there are many more people who can voice audiobooks than there are high quality writers, and the writer's work is being the primary author of the work. It doesn't make any sense for the owner to give % of the profit unless the narrator would attract business on their own.
Actually, this is my favourite way to find new authors.
As an example, R.C. Bray narrated The Martian by Andy Weir, and I loved his narration so much I looked for other books that Bray had narrated. One such book was Planetside by Michael Mammay, which was Mammay's first and only book at the time. I have since read all 5 of his books, and he's now one of my favourite authors.
almost always the songwriter sells or licenses the music, or otherwise retains controls of it. but they have complex contracts with other terms involved because the industry is complicated by record label contracts.
What prevents anyone from building a company that gives authors 50% or even 75% cut? From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. One may host and serve audio files via any Bandwidth Alliance[1] CDN and keep the bill quite low, it is just audio, in the end. I'd say, a viable prototype is just a couple of months of work for a team of two-three people with day jobs.
> From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat.
With adequate DRM? It definitely is a big feat.
Just distributing the files, without any type of encryption, is far from trivial. The fact you link to Cloudflare demonstrates you know you can't host the servers yourself =)
Almost anything for ten users is trivial, doing it at scale is hard work.
I wonder about DRM. With Audible taking such a big cut, it would be interesting to see a platform that gives creators an 80-90% cut of DRM-free sales. Does piracy represent such a large threat to sales that making >2x more per sale wouldn't be worth it?
Sanderson is distributing raw audio to all backers, so he clearly doesn't think so.
There are a lot of providers who sell DRM-free audiobooks. Until Spotify bought them Findaway was the biggest "distributor" for a lot of these companies. I don't personally look forward to yet another industry locking away content behind a proprietary, subscription streaming service.
I link to Bandwidth Alliance to emphasize that there is a way to lower a CDN bill. On my previous job we served video via AWS CloudFront and even negotiated a special price for that and S3.
Any CDN with their own object storage will hanlde heavy lifting of audio, it is not a big deal and not that expensive to the point of making a garden variety CDN on Digital Ocean or other cloud provider nonsensical.
I have to research about DRM, but isn't it goes out of the box on Android and iOS?
I would assert that network transfer costs for audiobook sales are a vanishingly insignificant part of the total cost of running an audiobook publishing business. Rounds to zero, I suspect.
This is based on a good knowledge of the size of audiobooks, good knowledge of the price of network transfer, and a reasonable guess on the number of books sold.
Licensing the rights to sell the books people want to listen to probably has way more strings attached. Especially for startups that don't have any leverage.
If the 25% cut is over three times the sales... I don't know that I agree it is bad. :(
I'd feel much more comfortable talking about net profits for everyone involved here. Audible got me hooked, specifically, by not expecting me to pay 40+ for a book.
Of course 25% is bad. The original post talks about how that compares to other digital products (games and apps) which are almost all at 70% for creators. There’s nothing special about audiobooks that can justify Audible’s percentage other than the fact that they have a near-monopoly.
"of course" is a dangerous line of reasoning. Many things believed, in that way, are not given.
Audible has pushed margins to near zero. Not just the cut to the artists, but also theirs. Before audible, if I wanted an audio book, it was easily 50 or so bucks. Nowadays, I usually pick up the audiobook for 7 or so as an add on to the book purchase. If that were to go back, I'd stop buying audiobooks. I'd wager I'm not alone in that. Yes, even $15 may be high enough to make me stop.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm very interested in knowing what the net cut for artists is, through audible. If the artists could get 70% of a cut, but that causes sales to drop to 10%, suddenly it doesn't sound so good to get a larger cut.
And it would be one thing if the publishing world wasn't known for artificial price inflation. But, that ship sailed a long time ago.
Edit: I big brained and wrote this whole thing while thinking Spotify. I believe my thoughts on the matter stand, though. So I’ll just correct the wording. P.S. I don’t hold this opinion strongly. I’m eager to hear other thoughts on the matter.
I’m not a fan of this perspective because it can sound like people believe it’s the company who is behaving wrongly, and they want a form of charity from it. They want Audible to give up profit because they don’t l feel it’s fair. If Audible isn’t worth 60-75%, don’t use it to distribute your media. Which is probably not a viable option. I think this leads to the real complaint candidates:
“Audible has a monopoly over audiobook creation/distribution by breaking laws, and should be dealt with by the government.”
“Audible has a monopoly without breaking laws but I think there should be laws.”
“I don’t like how capitalism works.”
“Capitalism isn’t working in my favour this time.”
Audible isn’t the right audience for any of these complaints.
If Audible’s service isn’t worth anywhere near that much, they either are acting in a way where government should intervene, or there’s a deliciously ripe opportunity for another business to thrive if they can overcome the inertia of the incumbent.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the creators should take home the bulk, and I bet, on intuition alone, that there’s plenty of money to run a music service at a fraction of the take.
Critcizing and/or boycotting Audible is probably the strategy that's most likely to effect change.
Yes, I do think the government should intervene, but is that realistic? How often does the US file antitrust suits against big tech companies or their subsidiaries? I've seen lawsuits to block mergers/acquisitions, but the last time I remember actually breaking up an existing monopoly as an option on the table was Microsoft over 20 years ago.
I dont see any deliciously ripe business opportunity here. If you want to compete with Audible, you need to attract authors to your platform. Yes, you can try luring them with a more generous share of the profits. But you will run into a brick wall because the sheer size of Audible's user base means that authors have bigger potential earnings there even though Audible takes an extortionate cut. And you won't be able to match Audible's user base until you have a similarly large/diverse selection of authors and works to choose from.
The only way to break the chicken and egg problem is to come with a huge amount of capital that allows you bribe authors/users onto your platform by selling at a loss while you build up volume. Which, of course, is exactly how Audible built its monopoly in the first place. But back then it was an emerging market and the competitors were smaller and less entrenched. Audible feels comfortable taking an extortionate cut now precisely because it knows that no one else has both the capital and the will to compete with them. This is not something that I would bin under "the free market working as it should."
I'm surpised that some people still don't recognize the playbook. This is 20th century tech strategy. Amazon was already doing this with physical books in the 90s - it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that they are doing it again with digital audiobooks.
This strikes me as market absolutism - if you are participating in a market then you have to believe that the market will solve all of your problems or else they aren't valid. People can believe a company is behaving "wrongly" even if it profitable and successful.
But there are almost always other social dynamics at play, true free markets are rare. You can generally "like how capitalism works" and not believe that markets will optimally solve every problem all the time.
Also, "the market" is an abstraction. What actually kills companies? People stop using their product. Criticism/boycotting is a market force. Capitalism requires informed consumers and this is consumers sharing information.
Markets also take time. Even if you believe the market will solve a problem, it will take time for the "bad" company to die and other firms to take it's place.
"Capitalism only works well if there is sufficient competition"
That's the valid complaint here. There's not enough competition for Audible, so they can afford to charge extortionate prices. More competition is good, so that's what Sanderson invests in. Sounds like an awesome move to me.
Perhaps I’m muddied in semantics, but I don’t think the complaint can be “Audible exploits people.” I think it is, “someone needs to exploit the opportunity Audible has presented by charging so much.”
I think "Audible exploits people" is a perfectly valid complaint. But it's important to understand that it's the natural inclination of corporations to exploit people whenever they can, and if you want them to stop, you need to make it harder for them to do so.
There's a lot of ways you can do that. By introducing regulation, competition, empowering people, or even banning corporations. The first two seem to be the most popular in our society.
That's the option I like too, but it's easier said than done. We have these quasi-monopolies popping up around digital intellectual property of nearly every sort: charge a lot. Everybody uses Microsoft Office. There's only a handful of Hollywood studios. Etc. Etc.
It seems that for some combination of legal and technical reasons it's very hard to beat an incumbent in these industries. Maybe it's just that the economies of scale are so good, I don't know. but when you think about it, everything involved is man-made, the very concept of intellectual property itself is a human invention. Patents, copyrights etc. all just stuff we cooked up. If we have defined it to be a self-reinforcing monopoly-generating thing, maybe we should redefine it.
Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That's insane.
Props to Sanderson, and props to all the other people with integrity.