Sanderson and Speechify look to break the Audible Monopoly

Brandon Sanderson looks to team with the audiobook seller to give authors a better paying alternative.

Screenshot via Sanderson’s YouTube channel.

Good guy Brandon Sanderson, bestselling author of . . . well, a lot, ended 2022 with his customary State of the Sanderson blog post and video on his website. In it, he covered quite a wide variety of updates for his famous “secret novels” and other upcoming projects in the pipeline for 2023. One item in particular that’s been getting a lot of attention was his scathing criticism of Audible’s practice of lowballing author payouts. Sanderson notes that the going rate for most forms of digital media is 70% for the creator- it’s the standard payout rate for an ebook on Kindle, an app on the the App Store or a game sold on Steam. Most brick-and-mortar bookstores offer 50% for a book’s physical copy. But an audiobook on Audible? A mere 40% at best. Says Sanderson:

“I knew things were bad, which is why I wanted to explore other options with the Kickstarter.  But I didn’t know HOW bad.  Indeed, if indie authors don’t agree to be exclusive to Audible, they get dropped from 40% to a measly 25%. Buying an audiobook through Audible instead of from another site literally costs the author money.”

Sanderson says he was approached by Speechify, creators of the popular text-to-speech reading software, in addition to being an audiobook seller. They offered him an incredible deal, which Sanderson, to his immense credit, bargained down in exchange for for offering the same deal he was getting to other potential creators:

“…they came to me and said—full of enthusiasm for the project—they’d give me 100%. I almost took it, but then I asked the owner (who is a great guy) if this was a deal he could give other authors, or if it was a deal only Brandon Sanderson could get. He considered that, then said he’d be willing to do industry standard—70%—for any author who lists their books directly on Speechify a la carte. So I told him I wanted that deal, if he agreed to let me make the terms of our deal public.”

Sanderson further notes that he won’t be listing his "secret novels” on Audible for “a year, maybe more,” and takes pains throughout the post to make it known that while he enjoyed working with Audible, they’re “a good company doing bad things”, that has a “near-monopoly” on the format and that their “unconscionable” treatment of authors will only lead to stagnation.

I’ve attempted to contact someone at Speechify to verify the terms of the arrangement on their side and when it will be scheduled to take effect. They have not contacted me at the time of this post but I will update the article if that changes. For now though, here’s hoping that 2023 presents a great opportunity for indie authors to flourish on the audio platform.