One of the most common questions we get is – “Who sets the price of my audio book?” The answer is – you. That being said, one of the conditions that the platforms have is that from time to time they run sales and participants must participate in those sales. At first this seems a bit tough but you must understand that the big platforms, like Audible, spend more than anyone to drive traffic to the store and with that investment they need to control things.

In this months royalty statement cover letter Audible let us know that they are now running TV spots in the US which is great news. Here you have a company that is spending dollars to promote the audio book space. Sure they are doing it to build their business but none-the-less, they are promoting this channel and in my view that’s a great thing for all of us.

I have done a couple of blog posts in the past on how to set a price but the most important one is to look at what others in your category are selling their work for in iTunes and Audible and how long (time wise) is the audio book.

OK – moving on to the timing of royalty payments…

Getting your work from a printed or eBook version and into the platforms for sale and then producing income, even through us, is not a fast process. What I want to focus on though is how long it actually takes to get your first royalty income from the day that you submit the audio files to us (or the day our readers finish them).

Right now, we are running at between 3-5 days to process new audio files and prepare the applications and meta-data for the platforms. So that’s one week. Then it takes the platforms about 8-12 weeks to process the titles that we submit – in other words 2-3 months will pass between when we send the files and applications and when they appear for sale in the stores worldwide.

The next part is the timing of the royalty periods – the first payment can take a while. Here’s why…

The platforms pay quarterly and they only pay on FULL royalty periods. What this means is that if your work goes live in mid-January then you are in the first quarter royalty period which ends on March 31st. Even though you have been there “most” of that royalty period you have not been there for “all” of it so those royalties will accumulate against your first FULL period which will be the April – June (second quarter). You will then get your royalties from mid-January until June 30th. I hope that makes sense?

The last issue is the time it takes from the end of the royalty period to actually getting your money. On average we are receiving the royalty check 8 weeks after the end of the period. So July-Sep royalties 2009 only arrived here in the last week of November 2009. It then takes a week for us to clear the check and turn around and distribute the royalties to our authors because (believe it or not) Audible still has a paper-based system with no portal access.

So, in short, if you were to submit an audio book right now on December 10th 2009, you would most likely not get your first royalty payment until August next year – that’s if the book goes live sometime before the end of the first royalty period in 2010 (which is cutting it fine). The good news is that the first check will be the biggest and then they come regularly every 90 days (or so) after that. It’s a pain but it is just how it works at present.

I actually met with a senior VP of Audible in New York City a few weeks ago and they are working on providing online and real time access to sales reports etc and for me, that day can’t come soon enough.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 6:21 AM 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.