It takes me roughly six months to write a novel. After launching the Kindle and paperback versions, I then turn to the arduous task of producing an audiobook. This means auditioning narrators, agreeing terms, managing the production process, and carefully listening to 100,000 words I’ve already read a hundred times. And then I have to pay the narrator for their time, which averages £1,500.
In short, turning my words into an audiobook costs a lot of time and money. It’s also a gamble because no author knows for sure if their investment will pay off. You upload your audiobook and then pray to the Audible Gods that you’ll at least cover your costs before Haley’s Comet returns.
Which brings me nicely on to the subject of this post: Audible.
Last month, Audible took roughly the time it takes to boil a kettle to inform every author on the platform what our investment will be worth to us. No consultation. No negotiation. Not even the courtesy of a clearly worded email.
And to be clear, Audible doesn’t own a single audiobook on its platform. Not one.
They own a website. They own an app. They own a recognisable orange logo and roughly two million customer email addresses. The audiobooks themselves belong to other people. Authors. Narrators. Independent publishers. Small studios run by one bloke who spends too much time in a foam-lined cupboard. The people, in other words, who actually made the things that Audible sells.
I should know, because I’m one of them. All of my novels are on Audible right now, recorded by narrators I chose and paid for out of my own pocket. And last month, Audible decided to tell every author on the platform what those products are worth.
By the close of 2026, authors and small publishing houses will have two choices. Either we enrol in their new royalty model, or we remove our audiobooks from the platform entirely. There is no third option. No “leave me on the existing terms, thanks.” No “I’ll wait and see how it shakes out.” No grandfathering.
This is the bit where I’m supposed to explain the deal.
So what is actually changing?
Here’s the carrot, which is the part Audible would like you to focus on. Royalties for exclusive titles rise from 40% to 50%. For non-exclusive titles, from 25% to 30%. Higher percentages. More money for authors. Fanfare, balloons, and a small man in a suit shaking everyone’s hand on a podium somewhere.
Here’s the stick, which is the part nobody at Audible seems keen to translate into plain English. Those percentages are no longer applied to your audiobook’s retail price. They’re applied to something Audible has christened “Member Value,” which is a pool built from subscription fees, credit usage, and total listening minutes across the entire platform, recalculated every month. My share of that pool depends on how much my audiobooks are listened to, relative to everyone else’s. Audible Plus listening goes into the same pot. Credit purchases go into the same pot. The line between paying for one book and streaming a bit of another has been quietly rubbed out.
A higher percentage of a number nobody can independently verify is, mathematically, a slightly different problem to a higher percentage of a known number.
The first absurdity (and the bit nobody at Audible will answer)
I notice I’m now eight hundred words into this post, and I haven’t yet told you what one Audible credit will actually earn me under the new system. That isn’t a writing failure on my part. It’s because Audible hasn’t told anybody. They’ve described the system. They haven’t disclosed it. There’s a difference, and the difference is everything.
The fact that I have to spend several hundred words explaining how authors get paid is, in itself, the case for the prosecution. Simple, transparent systems do not require this many words.
Let me put it in context, because I sell books in other formats besides audio.
When somebody buys one of my Kindle editions on Amazon, I know to the penny what I’ll earn from that purchase. I set the price. Amazon takes its cut. The maths sits on a single line in my dashboard. If my costs go up, I raise the price. If I want to run a promotion, I drop it. I am, in any meaningful sense, the person in charge of my product. The retailer is the retailer. The author is the author. Both parties understand the order of operations.
When somebody listens to one of my audiobooks on Audible from next year, I will have no idea what I’ve earned until the end of the month, when Audible runs the figures through a formula they haven’t shared, applies a multiplier they haven’t shown me, and tells me the answer. I’ll get a more detailed statement than before, which is nice. Nicer still would be the ability to check it.
These two systems are owned by the same parent company. Amazon offers independent authors granular, per-unit transparency on ebooks. Audible has decided we don’t need it for audiobooks. Pick whichever explanation appeals: a technical limitation, a philosophical disagreement, or the quiet contempt of a monopoly that’s stopped pretending.
(“Member Value” is, incidentally, the kind of phrase that sounds like it should refer to a points balance on a Premier Inn loyalty card. The fact a sentence containing those two words now governs the income of every indie audiobook author on the platform should be a national scandal. It is, instead, page two of the ACX blog.)
The second absurdity: opt in or piss off
The old royalty model goes away at the end of 2026. Authors must either enrol in the new model or remove their audiobooks. There is no negotiating posture available to anyone. You either submit or you leave.
Robin Sullivan, wife and business manager of Michael J. Sullivan, has done more than anyone to drag this issue into daylight. She points out that existing ACX contracts run for seven years with one-year auto-renewals. Audible’s announcement, therefore, looks rather a lot like a breach of contract for any author whose seven-year window hasn’t yet expired. Sullivan is currently preparing boilerplate paperwork for authors to file individual arbitration claims because Audible quietly disallowed class-action lawsuits in a recent update to its distribution terms.
Pause on that sentence for a moment. Audible blocked class actions. Then announced a unilateral change to royalties.
Brandon Sanderson, who is something of a folk hero to indie authors, hammered Audible on royalty transparency back in March 2024. Audible’s response amounted to a series of warm assurances and almost no substantive change. The petition Sullivan launched in August 2025, which asked Audible to keep credit-based purchases separate from streaming pool revenue, has been politely ignored. The Alliance of Independent Authors has raised the same concerns to the same response.
If a system is genuinely better for the people inside it, you do not need to ban their lawyers from teaming up before you announce it.
The communication failure
I’ve now spent the better part of a year following this story. I am, by professional necessity, in the very small subset of authors who read industry Substacks and watch publishing YouTube channels at half-eleven at night when I should be writing my next chapter.
I have not, in all that time, received a single direct communication from Audible explaining what is changing. Nothing in my ACX dashboard. No email. No “we wanted to talk to you first, as one of our authors.” Every piece of information I have on this story has come from Kindlepreneur, Dale L. Roberts’ Substack, Robin Sullivan, or an ACX blog post I had to actively go and find.
Imagine running the world’s largest audiobook retailer. Imagine being about to fundamentally change how every supplier on your platform is paid. Imagine genuinely believing the change makes sense for everyone. This is not the rollout strategy you’d pick. You would write to every author. You would publish a worked example showing exactly what the old model paid for a hypothetical credit purchase, and what the new one will pay. You would record a five-minute video. You would, at the very least, send an email.
The absence of that communication is the communication. It tells you exactly what they think of the people who produce the products that their system cannot exist without.
The principle nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s what’s bothering me, underneath the percentages and the formulas and the angry Substack comments.
Audible is a retailer.
A retailer does not, in any other industry on earth, get to wake up one morning and inform its suppliers what their products will sell for. If Tesco woke up tomorrow and told Heinz it had decided a tin of baked beans would now earn Heinz a variable share of a Member Value pool, calculated monthly based on how much fridge real estate Tesco had decided to allocate to the brand that week, Heinz would tell Tesco where to go. Within a fortnight there would be no Heinz beans in Tesco. Within a month there would be a queue of competing supermarkets offering to stock them on Heinz’s terms.
The reason this doesn’t happen anywhere else is because Heinz makes the beans. Tesco shifts them. Both parties understand the order of operations.
Audible has decided, after years of building a near-monopoly on audiobook distribution, that the order of operations no longer applies to them. They don’t make the audiobooks. They distribute them. But they’ve decided to behave as though authors are tenant farmers paying rent on a feudal estate, with the lord of the manor adjusting the tithe at his leisure.
I don’t think most authors are angry about the 50%. Or even about the streaming model itself, which has real merits in the right genres. They’re angry because the entire posture is wrong. We are not Audible’s employees. We are not their content suppliers in some loose, nebulous sense. We are the makers of the only thing on that platform anyone is paying for.
Authors deserve the same control over our products that any small business owner gets when they put their goods on a shelf. We have that on Amazon. We do not have it on Audible. The two companies have the same owner.
So what am I doing about it?
In short, fuck all… for now. I’m leaving my audiobooks on Audible. If I were to remove them on a point of principle, I’d lose a serious chunk of income. That’s the problem of dealing with a monopoly; they’ve got you by the balls.
I have written a ranty blog post, though, which is what you’re currently reading. Truth be told, I’m 99.999% certain that nothing I say will make the slightest difference to the outcome, but it feels good to vent.
And finally
I’ll leave you with the thing that keeps nagging at me, the one I can’t quite shake.
In every single transaction Audible facilitates, there is precisely one thing being exchanged that actually exists in the physical world. Not the credit. Not the subscription tier. Not the Member Value pool, whatever that quietly turns out to be in any given month. The book itself. The thing somebody sat down and wrote, that somebody else read aloud into a microphone, that somebody else still listened to on a long walk on a Sunday afternoon.
You’d think the people who created the only thing that allows Audible to exist might get a slightly bigger say in how that thing is priced.
Highlight Questions
What is Audible changing about its royalty model?
Audible is replacing its long-running per-sale royalty system with a pooled, streaming-style model based on a metric it calls “Member Value.” Royalty percentages rise (from 40% to 50% for exclusive titles, from 25% to 30% for non-exclusive), but those percentages now apply to a monthly engagement pool rather than the audiobook’s retail price.
When does the change take effect?
The legacy royalty model will be discontinued by the end of 2026. Enrolment in the new model opens to all ACX creators on 26/05/2026. Authors must either move across to the new model or remove their audiobooks from Audible distribution entirely.
Why are indie authors concerned about the new model?
Audible has not published a formula showing how “Member Value” payouts are calculated, which makes independent verification impossible. Income will fluctuate month to month based on listener behaviour across the platform, and credit purchases get blended with subscription streaming inside the same pool, removing the direct link between a paid sale and a payout.
Can Audible legally change the royalty terms mid-contract?
This is being challenged. Existing ACX contracts run for seven years with one-year auto-renewals. Robin Sullivan and others have argued that Audible’s forced migration may constitute a breach of contract. Audible has also disallowed class action lawsuits in its distribution terms, meaning any legal challenge must be filed individually through arbitration.
How can readers support indie authors directly?
Buying an author’s paperback or ebook directly through their website, or through standard retailers, typically returns a far higher proportion of the cover price to the author than an audiobook royalty under the new Audible model. Joining an author’s mailing list and leaving honest reviews also helps independent writers far more than most readers realise.