In dealing with authors and content owners day in and day out, the biggest complaint we hear is – “Why do iTunes, Amazon and Audible take so much of the pie?” By any measure, taking between 80% and 88% of the sale price for a digital product for simply adding it the platform, facilitating the transaction and enabling the download seems outrageous – especially through the eyes of the person who spent the months or years making the item being sold. What takes the author years takes the platform seconds yet the revenue share is anything but reflective of this.

I am not going to defend the profit share in this post. Personally I think it is not right and I would love to see a viable competitor in the space although I doubt this will happen any time soon. Personally, I think the only model that would come anywhere near to touching the astounding traffic numbers being achieved by the big three audio book platforms would be a platform that offered the content free and then somehow generated ad revenue that was shared with content owners – but again, I can’t see that happening. iTunes, Audible and Amazon are behemoths selling well over 1 Billion audio files every month (including music) – the horse has bolted and its unlikely we will see anyone well funded enough or crazy enough to make a serious play at these guys.

That being said, what I will try to do in this post is provide a more palatable way to frame the transaction if you choose to go through these channels, particularly in regard to audio book content.

Unlike print books or eBooks, audio books are usually not considered by most authors. For the millions of books Amazon carries, it only has around 60,000 audio books, a tiny fraction of the market. Since the iPod exploded onto the scene, a whole new era of audio downloads began and traditional writers are yet to wake up to the opportunity.

With this in mind, the sale of your content as an audio book should be seen as ‘additional to’ whatever plans you have for your work. I am yet to meet someone who has specifically built an audio book and then considered converting back the other way to print or eBook format. So whatever revenue you can earn through your work in this additional format should be seen as a bonus – and as far as bonuses go, it can be very worthwhile.

Our first client now earns well over a thousand dollars every pay period on each title she sells through these platforms. She is an indie author who prior to coming to us had made nothing from her work, even when she was marketing it herself and keeping 100% of the revenue. Now that she has four titles we are talking thousands and thousands of dollars per year, even after giving away 80% of gross sales to the platforms. Further, she is building a fan base at the rate of hundreds per month with no outlay and no marketing.

While the platforms do take the lion’s share, they also get the results we all ultimately want which is sales. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but with a royalty check it makes it that much easier.

Tags: amazon, audible, audio book, audiobook, itunes, marketing, mp3, publish, publishers, publishing companies, publishing houses, self publish, sell audiobook

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 1:53 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.