I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe).
Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were being calculated correctly. They weren't. We eventually figured out something was wrong and went through a very annoying process of learning about royalties and how they interplay with prices, discounts, and other factors and then set things right.
Still, if I were paid by Amazon royalties in any capacity I would carefully double check their math and read the fine print.
Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running. There's also high turnover, so it's very easy to be the person on your team with the longest tenure and also be mostly in the dark about how your services should and do work. As I say, maybe it's greed, but I would never rule out the people responsible just not understanding (or doing) what they should be doing.
I think it happens a lot more than people want to acknowledge.
I worked on a discount calculating service with no prior knowledge.It was supposed to replicate an existing system, so we went through the oroginal specs and general litterature to get a sense of what we were supposed to make.
First day of test with a employee in the field, and it appears that they have specific calculation rules that are so obvious to them that it didn't warrant to be written. Welp. And a few iterations after we were still hitting blocks of "what ? didn't you know that in case of X you do Y?" due to us being outside of their field.
Real world systems are hard. I'd still blame Amazon for not having caught these issues very early in the process, that's on them. But bugs and gross calculation errors are par for the course.
This is a universal problem, it's so universal that there's even a field of development which solves the problem - Domain-Driven Design.
It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).
You are describing incompetence born from undirected malice. While it is true the malice did not lead directly to the greedy behaviour, it leads to an absolute lack of continuous knowledge (due to employees constantly leaving the company). The fact that this is not addressed in a way that actually works makes it at least indirectly purposeful. In that sense, Amazon as an entity is in fact being greedy and it is also not an accident.
Anecdotally, I've heard lots of negative things about working at Amazon, no positive. In contrast I've known many people who work at Google and they seem generally happy with their jobs, have been there for years. The people I know who work in tech and are more desirable candidates would never choose Amazon as their first pick. I'm surprised that Amazon works as well as it does, as a company. There's a real cost to high turnover.
I guess on the flip side, I was receiving 100$ per month in AWS credits for about 2 years for an Alexa skill I had disabled. This was also incompetence in this case.
The nature of these kinds of errors is that when the error favors Amazon (or whatever company), it's "keep the lights on" mode. If it's the company losing money then alarm bells ring, and it's "all hands on deck" to fix the issue.
OP clarified the opposite here. As former amazon retail I can confirm we commonly lost money to vendors, sellers, and customers. Funny example was prime day promo fat fingered, with several expensive lenses shipped for $99.
Honestly, even that hasn't been my experience. I've seen multiple situations where there are known, significant under-billings but resourcing a project to clean that up somehow never materializes. Intuitively it doesn't make sense.
> Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running
I worked for Amazon as well, and I'd say it is greed, not in that the behavior was purposely designed to be malicious, but in the way they don't properly fund developers to work through their tech depts, and spend proper time and effort to make sure all the systems work, have been thoroughly tested, have lots of test coverage, that the teams manages to keep subject matter expert around, etc.
Amazon doesn't because it's too expansive to have dev resources doing all that, so most projects get released using the bare minimum, and get maintained using the bare minimum.
I'm always amazed that people can't see this as greed. If the CEO of a medical equipment company said: "screw all these expensive software engineers, physicists and testers, I have a 14 year old niece who can code up our radiation therapy machine for nickels" no one would be blaming incompetence of devs. I don't see how all the lack of solid requirements, software development process, testing and means of recourse are any different, apart from the potential consequences being non fatal, obviously.
But this goes to the heart of problem at Amazon: "Customer Obsession". Which really means "we only care about people paying us money".
If Amazon cared about creators, they would have built an automated system that monitors royalties and ensures that no matter what changes occur, creators are being paid fairly, correctly. They'd have a small product manager team who are experts in royalties because it's their job to be.
But that doesn't benefit a customer, so none of that exists. Because only people paying Amazon money are worthy of such attention.
It's not theft because it was "accidental" every single time in our favor is a new one. Don't think many courts would view it favorably if you don't have the extremely high priced lawyers Amazon will use to deter and defend this.
You can't make mistakes like this any more than you accidentally burn one of Bezos' house to the ground "accidentally" trying to get proper restitution ringing his doorbell and it all going wrong somehow. It's just not an accident in any meaningful interpretation of that word. It's a level of incompetence that we don't accept as any kind of defense.
Actually, in the case I experienced we were overpaying publishers. The error was going against Amazon and we decided not to ask for our money back because we thought it would hurt customer trust. (This decision not to do anything about the amount we already overpaid was made above my paygrade, but that's my understanding of it).
I don't like this saying because it generalises too much.
For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a unit test?
Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness. No one should have shipped the service without knowing if the calculations were correct!
What happens in reality is someone writes the spec as "40% of the unit price" or something, and that gets taken from some DB table at Amazon that has "unit price", but the meaning is different from what the spec refers to as "unit price".
Meanwhile both sides of the interaction (Amazon and the publishers) are using words they recognize, but with different meanings behind them! And both sides are so used to seeing the words that _of course_ it's the right thing (until it's not!).
Of course the reality is probably more subtle than this, but spec documents don't save you from domain knowledge (or lack thereof) 100% of the time. Definitely helpful as a reference document, of course! And it eliminates a large class of discussions.
One problem with high turnover is that the people who have developed an understanding for how the systems should work, and which documents are definitive, are long gone and if you're lucky you know the people who knew them.
A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing here is that the people who were using the tool were using it incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers available to specific customers in certain conditions) did not understand the nuances of the different price values on offers and how they connected with royalties.
I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into our tool and they just populate two of the three different "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool still would've failed because the people using it didn't really understand the system either.
> Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a unit test?
Most companies now-a-days don't write spec up front. That's called Big Design up Front (BDUF) and it was seen in this industry that this was prone to failure which could cause the whole project to fail. That's because it's impossible to know everything up front and often during the project the requirements will change as the stakeholders learn of the consequences of their decisions.
In fact most companies don't do a "spec document" at all they design their system in small iterations called "sprints" typically 2-weeks and the "spec" is a ticket in a system like Jira (others are available). This process is part of Agile Project Management methods
> Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness
There are some industries where they still do that kind of thing (BDUF) for example government work, defence, oil and gas. These are older industries that just haven't changed the way they approach projects. Amazon here is a bit a front runner when it comes to updating it's practices to be more leading edge so they likely adopted an Agile approach here learning about what was required as they go through the project.
1. I doubt errors of this magnitude are tolerated for long when the financial beneficiary of the error is not Amazon, and if I'm correct in this, a systematic selection pressure of this kind is indistinguishable from greed in this context
2. I am no less uncomfortable with monopolistic publishers who exploit creators out of incompetence after becoming the only game in town and making any ability to walk away from negotiations with them a Hobson's choice at best than I am with ones where all of that is true except the harm is due to greed/malice instead
3. Corporations aren't people and even if you believe (as I don't) that they can meaningfully have intentions in the same sense that people do, those intentions do not matter in a context where the behavior is on the scale of an organization, and so separating incompetence from malice is a distraction in the first place
I self-publish on Amazon and there are so many recurring instances of royalties not being properly recorded and paid out, mostly in Kindle Unlimited. Page reads don't get recorded due to some apparent incident (sometimes admitted by Amazon, other times completely ignored despite it being obvious that something is off in reporting on a large scale), and when the problem is fixed and we start seeing proper reads again we just have to accept that we're collectively out of luck and will not be compensated for the missing hours/days of page reads. Trying to contact Amazon about this has been completely useless.
This is one of the reasons for the uptick of new and experienced authors ditching (or making plans to ditch) Amazon KU exclusivity and going wide.
I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a buyer downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much) before calculating royalties could possibly be anything other than shady accounting. That's not just a couple engineers confused about the specs.
> Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated
I really don't see how this is a valid excuse. "How the royalties should be calculated" is a lawyer's domain, an engineer should never have had anything to do with the decision, and any engineer who was tasked with coding the calculation without proper guidance should have pushed back.
>I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a buyer downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much) before calculating royalties could possibly be anything other than shady accounting.
One of the things I will never understand is software companies' insistence at throwing engineers at any and all problems, and leaving them to their own devices. For example: accounting problems, for which society has accountants.
That's where I assume the greed comes in. They threw software people at an accounting problem, and when the numbers were wrong in their favor, they looked the other way.
Since you're so willing to share your experience, was your initial product overall saving Amazon royalties or causing them to pay out more in royalties?
We were overpaying royalties. Contrary to the ideas in this thread, I think most of the people working at Amazon really do believe in earning customer trust and customer obsession. I never experienced anything even remotely like someone saying "We could earn a bit more by cheating!" And if I had, I would have felt complete confidence in raising a red flag to literally anyone above me in the org chart (though, of course, I would've gone in order). Conversely, I did experience many, many genuine people expressing earnest opinions about what they thought was best for the customer.
I would not be surprised to learn that there are harsh or exploitative terms for audiobook publishers. In that sense I think Amazon would consider that serving the customer means securing better prices. I would not be surprised to learn that some element of the people responsible for getting this working correctly were not doing so in some way (either because they didn't understand, bugs in the system, or they were too busy doing other stuff). I would be really surprised if they were intentionally cheating Audible publishers out of relatively small sums of money though.
Setting up teams to fail to calculate royalties correctly could be deliberate. I'm not saying you intentionally set out to defraud anyone, but supplying technically correct information that could be misinterpreted may have been a way for Amazon management to engineer the errors they want.
Treating the staff responsible with the sort of contemptuous malice you describe does not somehow absolve the company of culpability. Amazon set up these conditions and is happy for them to continue.
This is an important cliche to keep in mind, but the problem is that "games" play out. Incompetence can become willful or even strategic. Even if it doesn't start or develop as a mustache twirling plan, a year later someone might look at it and say "looks like it makes money, why fix it."
I'll just copy my comment from another leaf of this thread:
I don't like this saying because it generalises too much.
For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
The twitter thread and the accompanying website don't quite tell me what's going on besides 'not as much money as expected'. But I can't quite see what the 'Net Sales' problem is, it's just stated as "less money" for no reason? Although I am tired so maybe something just isn't clicking. I don't doubt that the terms of the deal are poor though.
I had wondered for a while how the credit system worked, and if the increase in sales made up for the 'deal' off audiobooks. I get $50-$60 audiobooks for $15, there's something mismatched there. Either the audiobook was priced at an extreme premium, or, it seems, Amazon just isn't paying the price I would expect.
Edit: I found one response from an author that I think makes a simple point, if not perhaps what the thread describes (still can't tell). It's impossible for authors to calculate their expected royalties as there are so many varieties of discounts and price points that customers can pay for a single book: https://twitter.com/AdamEcclesBooks/status/14933236569105489...
Which makes sense to me, as there's purchases and credits and various subscription tiers and audible unlimited and these are just the things I can think up off the top of my head. But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased at full price.
The site has more details in other articles. They're not worth reading. There's no substance just a lot of charged language. And I'm really annoyed at spending any time at all on reading this.
The narrators don't get paid by the retail price (and the contract doesn't suggest they would). Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on in proportion to the number of credits spent on that book, but weighted by the retail price. I.e. a credit spent on a long expensive book pays the narrator more than the same credit spent on a medium length book, even though the credit cost the same to customer.
There's an undocumented revenue floor for price tranche of books. If the revenues per copy would end up lower than the floor in a billing period due to e.g. some promotion that flooded the economy with cheap credits, Audible makes up the difference and pays the narrator at least that minimum amount per copy. Apparently that floor is being hit every time, i.e. Audible is paying them more than they are actually required by the contract. The author thinks this is a smoking gun that proves how they're being cheated, which is an odd take.
Since the credits are far cheaper than the retail prices, it should hardly be surprising that the effective sales price is cheaper than the retail price.
> there's no substance just a lot of charged language.
Yeah, this was my issue with all I could find so far. It seems like 'working as designed'. Perhaps those who publish on audible would like to be able to opt in or out of various sales/credits etc but as a customer I prefer that I can get anything with a credit.
> Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on, except weighted by the retail price
Is that all credits in the system (similar to how Spotify was weighting streaming subscriptions (to my understanding)), or per user. I would prefer the money from my credits to go to the books I purchase, not be weighted with purchases by all other users.
Audible is specifically a service where you can get one book per month by paying $15 per month. If you want to sell your book for $50, then you should probably list it somewhere that all sales are for $50. Presumably this author thinks it is worth listing his book on Audible vs. the other ways he could sell it. Alternatively he might just not be very good at math or reading contracts.
It seems pretty surprising to me. When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for it".
The terms on which Amazon want to offer Audiobooks are their business, but as I consumer I certainly wouldn't expect them to affect any downline incomes.
> Apparently that floor is being hit every time, i.e. Audible is paying them more than they are actually required by the contract. The author thinks this is a smoking gun that proves how they're being cheated, which is an odd take.
You think it is fair that Amazon sets an arbitrary low price, and then makes the authors take the cost. That's an odder take. If Amazon wants to sell their tokens at price X, have a campaign or whatever, that's a cost they should take. Not just dictate what the price should be and pay royalties based on that.
Without having read the whole page, I understand form your summary that:
A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their price
B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the price, but in reality this credit system destroys that %% completely
C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each book, irrespective of the price sold.
D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they can, underprice all competitors with cheap credits, and overall corner the market to make sure producers can't get around them.
Total monopolistic practices with abuse of market power. In a competitive environment no producer would accept this.
I haven’t dug into it too deeply myself, but here’s some numbers from late last year. Note that this as a producer sharing that 40% with the writer half and half (royalty share contract). One month saw 21 sales of a $19.99 audiobook. Amazon reported net sales of $76, so I made around $11.
EDIT: looking closer, 17 of the sales occurred in a market/purchase combination that resulted in no royalties at all. The invoice is less than clear on why those markets have 0% royalty rates. The US market is split in two, one with the expected rate, one with 0. No guesses on how the counts lined up.
So, around 2% real royalty rates, or 10x less than the contract stipulated.
It’s not something worth fighting against for me right now, I’m using it to build a resume. But between this and the rampant fraud they do nothing to curb, it’s not a stretch to call it a scam, both for the producer and the author.
But it’s Audible. What choice is there?
EDIT2: Going to bed. Its not that I don’t like you.
I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily discounted price and still come out ahead.
If enough producers come together this way you could even create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop and account system.
Got it, so it seems like the contract is just heavily skewed in favor of Amazon, where the content is subsidizing all of the deals and discounts that Audible provides. Although how they can get a 0% royalty on certain sales in is baffling to me.
> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?
Yeah, they sadly seem to be lacking in meaningful competition. People on twitter are talking about libro.fm which has a slew of anti-audible articles, although I can't find any details on their reimbursements either.
I couldn't agree more. Also this person scandalizing and stirring things up sounded to me like trying to weapponize public opinion for personal gain.
I know from other, let's call the traditional, authors that classical book royalties were more in the 10 - 20 percent range for printed books. The upper range if you were a long published best seller with bargaining power.
So I was already irritated when he stated that 40% exclusive royalty (as a not so well known author I assume) was very little earnings per book. Without providing context that already was him trying to weapponize my opinion (at least that was how it felt to me).
Publishing that one feels there is an error on Audibles side in calculating royalties is not only legitimate but appreciated by me. I want to know that errors occur and ideally how they are fixed. Trying to manipulate me into enragement "porn" and wesponizing public outrage might be good for business or might feel like a valid approach when feeling wronged by Goliath but is - at least on my side - just off-putting.
So I do wish for all authors to be compensated based on the contracts they have with Audible. But I couldn't care less about this person's vendetta.
Same here. The only time I’ve bought a book is when the price is less than $14.95.
The author seems disingenuous to propose that the retail price in audible is anything that anyone expects. I assume he’s not stupid and is aware of this so not bringing up this point is misleading.
It’s like if someone wrote a blog post enraged that BMG Record Club wasn’t paying them out a percent of retail prices without pointing out that BMG’s whole model was 10 CDs for a penny and then 2 for the price of one (or whatever the ridiculous price scheme was).
And those promotions should be a cost of Amazon, not the authors. Weird how Amazon can take your product, sell it for a quarter of the price, and then claim they now owe you no money.
It's terrible for the narrator too. In many cases the narrator makes a bad decision to record the Audiobook not for a per-finished-hour rate, but as a "Royalty Share" where they only earn on the Royalty -- that's 20% (50-50 royalty split with the author) on the audiobook version.
In most cases a narrator will never earn even close to minimum wage for the effort to create an audiobook. And it's more effort than you might guess. A skilled narrator might produce a finished hour of audio in 5 hours, and a less skilled narrator may take 10 to 12 hours to create that same finished hour. So for a 10 hour audiobook a narrator will have between 50 and 100 hours of work, depending on the material and the production skills of the narrator.
It can take literally years to earn $500 to $1000 in royalties -- thats $10/hr -- on a book. And most books never sell enough audiobook copies. And that's why any narrator who understands this should never accept and ACX / Audible exclusive Royalty share audiobook deal.
Now with this Audiblegate revelation it's all to clear that we narrators are destined to never make our money back.
My housemate is an audiobook recording engineer. I just asked him about it. He says in the best case, with a skilled narrator, an hour of audiobook can take only 1 hour 10 minutes to record. In the worst case it can take up to three hours. I asked him if it could ever take up to five hours and he said no way, never.
Your housemate doesn't re-listen the recorded book, doesn't make edits, doesn't clear up passages, cut and rearrange unwanted silences? He is either wildly underestimating it by only taking the "talk into a microphone" part in consideration, or I feel terribly sorry for anyone listening to his audiobooks.
Your housemate is wrong. Or, not thinking it through. Or, has ever narrated as a primary income earning job.
That's like saying "Those 20 lines of code you wrote are only like 90 words. You type at 40WPM, so it took you what 2, maybe three minutes to write?" You and I both know that's utterly uncorrect.
Your housemate might be thinking only of the "talking into the microphone part", and assumes that the narrator only makes mistakes on a line a few times in an hour. There are some excellent cold readers out there, but in my experience that's just not the case for the majority.
And for the vast majority of the time in the ACX world, the narrator is also doing your housemate's job.
As someone who's been narrating for about 10 years with hundreds of hours of finished audio under my belt, here's how it breaks down:
- Rehearsal / Prereading. A narrator needs to know what's going to happen so they can properly act a line. So you have to read the text in advance. No one should expect a narrator to read a work of fiction cold and get it perfect on the first try. YOu need to rehearse, or at least get familiar with the text. Let's say that's 30 minutes because you read faster than you narrate. If it's a work of fiction and you've got a number of different characters you need to create and voice consistently it can mean additional prep work. Characters don't just come out, first try, fully realized.
- Actual recording. By definition this cannot be less than one hour, but that assumes an absolutely perfect read for one hour. In my experience it's probably a minimum 1.5x multiplier for retakes, mistakes, line fixes if you do punch and roll. So 1.5 hours. Complex fiction with lots of characters could take a significantly longer. Of course there are amazing narrators out there who can do this, but that is the vast minority.
So, We're up to 2 hours already, minimum.
Now that it's recorded you need to do a QA pass -- you should listen to what's been recorded and make any adjustments to timing, breaths, volume riding, effects, compression, EQ, and to identify and correct errors. You shouldn't ship untested code, you shouldn't ship untested audio.
In many ACX cases, the narrator also performs this job.
If it's absolutely perfect on the first try it's another hour (unless you're QA'ing at a faster than 1.0x reading speed, then you're ignoring all the technical checks, and only validating narration checks). Again, in many ACX cases, the narrator does this job too.
There are almost always pickups (redoing mistakes you find) in an hour of text, for missed words, dropped lines, bad line interpretation, reversed words, etc... The audio should be letter perfect to the text, so even the slightest mistake should be fixed.
Any pickup will take time to get right. If you interpret a line wring it can influence the outcome for the character. You need to get the line reads right. Skilled narrators can punch in a correction perfectly with just a take or two, but some lines can require multiple tries and full minutes to get right. Especially if it's the next day and you need to warm up again so you can sound like you did before, (your voice changes as you narrate) so there is a multiplier. call it 1.5x
Now we're to 3.5 hours. Your friend may disagree, this is my experience after doing this a long time.
Finally you have to master it and get it delivered to ACX. This can be largely streamlined, but it takes time to ensure you meet ACX's technical standards. Let's say you get it perfect on the first try. Call it 15 minutes to render, label, upload and pass the ACX checks.
We're to 3 hours 45 minutes.
A narrator needs to warm up before a session so that they sound consistent from session to session. When you're warming up for a gig, you're not working on another gig, so the time goes to the current project. Maybe you can multitask and QA yesterday's work while your warming up, but it's hard to do critical listening while you're humming and stretching and reciting toungue twisters. Call the warm up 15 minutes. Maybe less maybe more. But Most narrators cannot narrate for 8 hours a day. There is a limit to preserve the voice, and breaks must be taken to preserve your voice not only for the session, but for your work. So warming up is part of the gig, you're working and you need to factor that time in to creating the finished audio.
So, We're at 4 hours. And that's if you're really skilled and great at it and working at high efficiency. You know your DAW inside and out, and you have the voices down perfectly every time.
For many narrators there is an efficiency factor to build in. Narrating is physically demanding as it requires a great deal of sustained concentration -- not to dissimilar to coding. After a long narrating session you might not have the mental energy required for the sustained attention to detail to perform QA. (Similar to how it's difficult to debug code right away, and you find errors the next day when you're fresh)
In my experience that adds 30 minutes work to get the finished audio right and out the door.
So, yeah, a finished hour of audio can easily take 4 to 5 hours for an experienced narrator to create. Less skilled narrators who make more mistakes, take longer to edit, take longer to punch in corrections, take longer to meet the technical standards can easily get to 8 to 10 hours PFH. Just like a junior dev makes more mistakes and takes longer than a senior dev.
I coach newer voice actors all the time. I know from real experience how long this takes.
Yeah this is the difference between professionals and less experienced narrators.
I'm not buying the 5h/h thing neither. How long is an average audiobook? Booking studio time, etc for that plus the heavy editing that a 5h take would take is just not worth it.
You just don't have to read it out loud. You to read it at an even pace, have to enunciate properly, have to decide what words to emphasize in every sentence or how you change your tone etc.
Getting this right for every paragraph will usually take multiple takes. Then there is additional audio editing and what not.
Just for reference, as a prof, just creating a 30 min video that students can watch on their own time, easily takes 2 hours of work. This is where you just remove the worst errors, to get a just-good-enough product.
I think he's ignoring the chance of recording a really popular audiobook though. I'd guess that's why people take royalty deals that they probably know will likely not pay well. Basically gambling.
“If you’ve ever looked at the Audible ACX contract, you’ve seen the complicated sales earnings math (another future post). For now, let’s focus only on the result: the amount of money which ends up in our bank”
I personally feel like I need to see the math in order to understand what is actually going on
Sounds like the marketing is misrepresenting the contract - which consumers have some protections against, but I'm not sure how many similar protections exist for what are supposed to be sophisticated counter-parties.
ACX producer here. You get as much say in the contract as you do the average EULA. If you want to use Audible without a publisher to negotiate on your behalf, you get a 40% royalty rate, but not always (hence the complicated math comments).
Some purchases are worth nothing (literally invoiced at a 0% royalty rate) to the authors/producers.
I know I'm against the grain here, but I don't have much sympathy.
Firstly, no-one is forcing them to sell through Amazon/Audible. They don't have to. They could build their own storefront, with all the effort and cost that goes with that.
Secondly, publishers are complaining about shady accounting and crooked royalty payments? Publishers of all people? Oh, the irony.
Thirdly, presumably they've done the calculations, and even with the shady royalty payments it's still worth their while going through A/A rather than selling elsewhere (presumably because A/A's reach is far bigger than anything they can do on their own). This is about "we want more of the pie", though granted it's "we want the share of the pie that we were promised".
Lastly, publishers will happily stiff everyone else when they have the power. Appealing to the masses to help them when the shoe is on the other foot is pathetic. I'm much more inclined to schadenfreude than sympathy.
I'm honestly curious about this statement, maybe someone can explain - the author seems to be upset about this part:
"where the consumer could return their AB whenever they pleased, and the PRODUCER shouldered the cost."
....as opposed to who? When you return an item to amazon within their returns policy, who do you think pays you back for that? Is the author assuming that when their book gets "returned" for any reason.....it's amazon who should pay the consumer back, not the author? Why?
Um. Amazon is a marketplace, it gets a cut. Since the sale is void, the seller gets 0, Amazon gets some percent of that, which is ... 0.
what the hell. how else could it be? if Amazon is billing sellers for "transaction" costs (or presence on platform cost), that's one thing, but that should be a fixed dollar amount.
even using the term "cost" makes no sense, because it's not a cost, it's "would have been revenue", and yes, there's a cost of doing business, handling returns, etc. but all of those are automated on this shiny marketplace, right, right? right!?
Yeah I genuienly think that the author expects Amazon to just eat the cost of returned books. Looking at their other arguments, I guess it's simply because "they can afford it". And while that's true, I don't see any reason why it should work this way - even actual real life bookstores return unsold books to publisher and the publisher has to eat that cost.
Well, taking it to absurd levels it would be something like if Spotify were to claim they are 'selling' songs to people who are currently listening to them and they are 'returned' when people stop, with Spotify just paying royalties over the difference.
The situation with audiobooks is far less extreme, but there is a cost attached to lenient return policies. Though you'd expect Amazon to be losing more money on it than the authors, so it's more like the authors disagree with Amazon's business model.
I'd love to know the stats for how many people listen to the entire book(or 90% of it) and then return it. I have refunded books on audible before, but it was always because I didn't like the narrator, I listen to books while driving and sometimes the narration works in the car, sometimes it really doesn't - that's when I refund and get something else, but it's always within the first hour of listening.
i believe the issue is that audible is marketed as allowing returns at _any_ time in the future, which is a pretty extraordinary return policy that leads to more subscribers. but then the producer has to shoulder the costs of this incredibly lenient return policy.
How is that different to deciding to sell your goods through Costco or Walmart and then complaining that their returns policy allows customers to return anything for any reason basically with no time limit if you complain enough?
Like, the author knows the policy if they decide to sell through Audible. It comes with a massive userbase, userbase which potentially exists because of a decent returns policy. If they think they can make more money on a platform which doesn't allow returns, then they are welcome to try - it's not like amazon has monopoly here, plenty of other places to buy and listen to audiobooks from.
As a publisher that uses ACX/Audible, it's REALLY hard to figure out how much they should be paying you. When I look at my Sales Dashboard, there's no monetary figure. It's also set to Lifetime Earnings, instead of the current month, which is just weird.
Sales are broken down into AL Units, ALOP units, ALC units, Net returns, and Net Sales units. Again, these show the # of units, but not the rate you're being paid for them.
You do receive a Royalty report for each month, but it comes 2 months after the close of that month (my December one is the latest available). It does have dollar values, but it's hard to figure out how they arrived at their numbers. It's generally related to how long the book is (longer = more money), and whether the books were bought on some kind of sale (no visibility).
I am confused. I spent a decent amount of time reading the thread and the linked article, and I see no proof, only an accusation that Amazon/Audible are manipulating their calculation of “Net Sales” in “shady ways”. Is the accusation that people are getting paid a percentage of an audible credit instead of a percentage of the retail price when a credit is used? Or that they don’t get paid when someone returns a purchase? Because those both seem very obviously how it should work and not at all a -gate situation. If someone has a better understanding of the root problem, I’d be very happy for a short explanation.
I feel the same. It‘s really strange that the „forensic accountant“ suggests to calculate the royalty from the retail price, is that common practice anywhere? At least in my country, everything business related is calculated from the net prices.
However, what may not be clear for creators is that they will mostly sell their books cheaper than retail because of the subscriptions.
Readit News
Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were being calculated correctly. They weren't. We eventually figured out something was wrong and went through a very annoying process of learning about royalties and how they interplay with prices, discounts, and other factors and then set things right.
Still, if I were paid by Amazon royalties in any capacity I would carefully double check their math and read the fine print.
Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running. There's also high turnover, so it's very easy to be the person on your team with the longest tenure and also be mostly in the dark about how your services should and do work. As I say, maybe it's greed, but I would never rule out the people responsible just not understanding (or doing) what they should be doing.
I worked on a discount calculating service with no prior knowledge.It was supposed to replicate an existing system, so we went through the oroginal specs and general litterature to get a sense of what we were supposed to make.
First day of test with a employee in the field, and it appears that they have specific calculation rules that are so obvious to them that it didn't warrant to be written. Welp. And a few iterations after we were still hitting blocks of "what ? didn't you know that in case of X you do Y?" due to us being outside of their field.
Real world systems are hard. I'd still blame Amazon for not having caught these issues very early in the process, that's on them. But bugs and gross calculation errors are par for the course.
It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).
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I worked for Amazon as well, and I'd say it is greed, not in that the behavior was purposely designed to be malicious, but in the way they don't properly fund developers to work through their tech depts, and spend proper time and effort to make sure all the systems work, have been thoroughly tested, have lots of test coverage, that the teams manages to keep subject matter expert around, etc.
Amazon doesn't because it's too expansive to have dev resources doing all that, so most projects get released using the bare minimum, and get maintained using the bare minimum.
If Amazon cared about creators, they would have built an automated system that monitors royalties and ensures that no matter what changes occur, creators are being paid fairly, correctly. They'd have a small product manager team who are experts in royalties because it's their job to be.
But that doesn't benefit a customer, so none of that exists. Because only people paying Amazon money are worthy of such attention.
You can't make mistakes like this any more than you accidentally burn one of Bezos' house to the ground "accidentally" trying to get proper restitution ringing his doorbell and it all going wrong somehow. It's just not an accident in any meaningful interpretation of that word. It's a level of incompetence that we don't accept as any kind of defense.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*lFhFi-5JsP-zhW7Al...
For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness. No one should have shipped the service without knowing if the calculations were correct!
Meanwhile both sides of the interaction (Amazon and the publishers) are using words they recognize, but with different meanings behind them! And both sides are so used to seeing the words that _of course_ it's the right thing (until it's not!).
Of course the reality is probably more subtle than this, but spec documents don't save you from domain knowledge (or lack thereof) 100% of the time. Definitely helpful as a reference document, of course! And it eliminates a large class of discussions.
A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing here is that the people who were using the tool were using it incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers available to specific customers in certain conditions) did not understand the nuances of the different price values on offers and how they connected with royalties.
I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into our tool and they just populate two of the three different "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool still would've failed because the people using it didn't really understand the system either.
Most companies now-a-days don't write spec up front. That's called Big Design up Front (BDUF) and it was seen in this industry that this was prone to failure which could cause the whole project to fail. That's because it's impossible to know everything up front and often during the project the requirements will change as the stakeholders learn of the consequences of their decisions.
In fact most companies don't do a "spec document" at all they design their system in small iterations called "sprints" typically 2-weeks and the "spec" is a ticket in a system like Jira (others are available). This process is part of Agile Project Management methods
> Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness
There are some industries where they still do that kind of thing (BDUF) for example government work, defence, oil and gas. These are older industries that just haven't changed the way they approach projects. Amazon here is a bit a front runner when it comes to updating it's practices to be more leading edge so they likely adopted an Agile approach here learning about what was required as they go through the project.
2. I am no less uncomfortable with monopolistic publishers who exploit creators out of incompetence after becoming the only game in town and making any ability to walk away from negotiations with them a Hobson's choice at best than I am with ones where all of that is true except the harm is due to greed/malice instead
3. Corporations aren't people and even if you believe (as I don't) that they can meaningfully have intentions in the same sense that people do, those intentions do not matter in a context where the behavior is on the scale of an organization, and so separating incompetence from malice is a distraction in the first place
This is one of the reasons for the uptick of new and experienced authors ditching (or making plans to ditch) Amazon KU exclusivity and going wide.
> Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated
I really don't see how this is a valid excuse. "How the royalties should be calculated" is a lawyer's domain, an engineer should never have had anything to do with the decision, and any engineer who was tasked with coding the calculation without proper guidance should have pushed back.
Sounds like easy profit from a captive audience.
I would not be surprised to learn that there are harsh or exploitative terms for audiobook publishers. In that sense I think Amazon would consider that serving the customer means securing better prices. I would not be surprised to learn that some element of the people responsible for getting this working correctly were not doing so in some way (either because they didn't understand, bugs in the system, or they were too busy doing other stuff). I would be really surprised if they were intentionally cheating Audible publishers out of relatively small sums of money though.
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I don't like this saying because it generalises too much.
For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.
I had wondered for a while how the credit system worked, and if the increase in sales made up for the 'deal' off audiobooks. I get $50-$60 audiobooks for $15, there's something mismatched there. Either the audiobook was priced at an extreme premium, or, it seems, Amazon just isn't paying the price I would expect.
Edit: I found one response from an author that I think makes a simple point, if not perhaps what the thread describes (still can't tell). It's impossible for authors to calculate their expected royalties as there are so many varieties of discounts and price points that customers can pay for a single book: https://twitter.com/AdamEcclesBooks/status/14933236569105489...
Which makes sense to me, as there's purchases and credits and various subscription tiers and audible unlimited and these are just the things I can think up off the top of my head. But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased at full price.
The narrators don't get paid by the retail price (and the contract doesn't suggest they would). Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on in proportion to the number of credits spent on that book, but weighted by the retail price. I.e. a credit spent on a long expensive book pays the narrator more than the same credit spent on a medium length book, even though the credit cost the same to customer.
There's an undocumented revenue floor for price tranche of books. If the revenues per copy would end up lower than the floor in a billing period due to e.g. some promotion that flooded the economy with cheap credits, Audible makes up the difference and pays the narrator at least that minimum amount per copy. Apparently that floor is being hit every time, i.e. Audible is paying them more than they are actually required by the contract. The author thinks this is a smoking gun that proves how they're being cheated, which is an odd take.
Since the credits are far cheaper than the retail prices, it should hardly be surprising that the effective sales price is cheaper than the retail price.
Yeah, this was my issue with all I could find so far. It seems like 'working as designed'. Perhaps those who publish on audible would like to be able to opt in or out of various sales/credits etc but as a customer I prefer that I can get anything with a credit.
> Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on, except weighted by the retail price
Is that all credits in the system (similar to how Spotify was weighting streaming subscriptions (to my understanding)), or per user. I would prefer the money from my credits to go to the books I purchase, not be weighted with purchases by all other users.
The terms on which Amazon want to offer Audiobooks are their business, but as I consumer I certainly wouldn't expect them to affect any downline incomes.
You think it is fair that Amazon sets an arbitrary low price, and then makes the authors take the cost. That's an odder take. If Amazon wants to sell their tokens at price X, have a campaign or whatever, that's a cost they should take. Not just dictate what the price should be and pay royalties based on that.
A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their price
B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the price, but in reality this credit system destroys that %% completely
C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each book, irrespective of the price sold.
D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they can, underprice all competitors with cheap credits, and overall corner the market to make sure producers can't get around them.
Total monopolistic practices with abuse of market power. In a competitive environment no producer would accept this.
EDIT: looking closer, 17 of the sales occurred in a market/purchase combination that resulted in no royalties at all. The invoice is less than clear on why those markets have 0% royalty rates. The US market is split in two, one with the expected rate, one with 0. No guesses on how the counts lined up.
So, around 2% real royalty rates, or 10x less than the contract stipulated.
It’s not something worth fighting against for me right now, I’m using it to build a resume. But between this and the rampant fraud they do nothing to curb, it’s not a stretch to call it a scam, both for the producer and the author.
But it’s Audible. What choice is there?
EDIT2: Going to bed. Its not that I don’t like you.
I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily discounted price and still come out ahead.
If enough producers come together this way you could even create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop and account system.
> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?
Yeah, they sadly seem to be lacking in meaningful competition. People on twitter are talking about libro.fm which has a slew of anti-audible articles, although I can't find any details on their reimbursements either.
The terms are monopolistic, but I mean, they have a monopoly.
I know from other, let's call the traditional, authors that classical book royalties were more in the 10 - 20 percent range for printed books. The upper range if you were a long published best seller with bargaining power.
So I was already irritated when he stated that 40% exclusive royalty (as a not so well known author I assume) was very little earnings per book. Without providing context that already was him trying to weapponize my opinion (at least that was how it felt to me).
Publishing that one feels there is an error on Audibles side in calculating royalties is not only legitimate but appreciated by me. I want to know that errors occur and ideally how they are fixed. Trying to manipulate me into enragement "porn" and wesponizing public outrage might be good for business or might feel like a valid approach when feeling wronged by Goliath but is - at least on my side - just off-putting.
So I do wish for all authors to be compensated based on the contracts they have with Audible. But I couldn't care less about this person's vendetta.
What is the potential gain of going after audible as an author?
I’ve got ~300 audible books in my library, and I can safely say I’d have bought exactly none of them at full price.
The author seems disingenuous to propose that the retail price in audible is anything that anyone expects. I assume he’s not stupid and is aware of this so not bringing up this point is misleading.
It’s like if someone wrote a blog post enraged that BMG Record Club wasn’t paying them out a percent of retail prices without pointing out that BMG’s whole model was 10 CDs for a penny and then 2 for the price of one (or whatever the ridiculous price scheme was).
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In most cases a narrator will never earn even close to minimum wage for the effort to create an audiobook. And it's more effort than you might guess. A skilled narrator might produce a finished hour of audio in 5 hours, and a less skilled narrator may take 10 to 12 hours to create that same finished hour. So for a 10 hour audiobook a narrator will have between 50 and 100 hours of work, depending on the material and the production skills of the narrator.
It can take literally years to earn $500 to $1000 in royalties -- thats $10/hr -- on a book. And most books never sell enough audiobook copies. And that's why any narrator who understands this should never accept and ACX / Audible exclusive Royalty share audiobook deal.
Now with this Audiblegate revelation it's all to clear that we narrators are destined to never make our money back.
That's like saying "Those 20 lines of code you wrote are only like 90 words. You type at 40WPM, so it took you what 2, maybe three minutes to write?" You and I both know that's utterly uncorrect.
Your housemate might be thinking only of the "talking into the microphone part", and assumes that the narrator only makes mistakes on a line a few times in an hour. There are some excellent cold readers out there, but in my experience that's just not the case for the majority.
And for the vast majority of the time in the ACX world, the narrator is also doing your housemate's job.
As someone who's been narrating for about 10 years with hundreds of hours of finished audio under my belt, here's how it breaks down:
- Rehearsal / Prereading. A narrator needs to know what's going to happen so they can properly act a line. So you have to read the text in advance. No one should expect a narrator to read a work of fiction cold and get it perfect on the first try. YOu need to rehearse, or at least get familiar with the text. Let's say that's 30 minutes because you read faster than you narrate. If it's a work of fiction and you've got a number of different characters you need to create and voice consistently it can mean additional prep work. Characters don't just come out, first try, fully realized.
- Actual recording. By definition this cannot be less than one hour, but that assumes an absolutely perfect read for one hour. In my experience it's probably a minimum 1.5x multiplier for retakes, mistakes, line fixes if you do punch and roll. So 1.5 hours. Complex fiction with lots of characters could take a significantly longer. Of course there are amazing narrators out there who can do this, but that is the vast minority.
So, We're up to 2 hours already, minimum.
Now that it's recorded you need to do a QA pass -- you should listen to what's been recorded and make any adjustments to timing, breaths, volume riding, effects, compression, EQ, and to identify and correct errors. You shouldn't ship untested code, you shouldn't ship untested audio. In many ACX cases, the narrator also performs this job.
If it's absolutely perfect on the first try it's another hour (unless you're QA'ing at a faster than 1.0x reading speed, then you're ignoring all the technical checks, and only validating narration checks). Again, in many ACX cases, the narrator does this job too.
There are almost always pickups (redoing mistakes you find) in an hour of text, for missed words, dropped lines, bad line interpretation, reversed words, etc... The audio should be letter perfect to the text, so even the slightest mistake should be fixed. Any pickup will take time to get right. If you interpret a line wring it can influence the outcome for the character. You need to get the line reads right. Skilled narrators can punch in a correction perfectly with just a take or two, but some lines can require multiple tries and full minutes to get right. Especially if it's the next day and you need to warm up again so you can sound like you did before, (your voice changes as you narrate) so there is a multiplier. call it 1.5x
Now we're to 3.5 hours. Your friend may disagree, this is my experience after doing this a long time.
Finally you have to master it and get it delivered to ACX. This can be largely streamlined, but it takes time to ensure you meet ACX's technical standards. Let's say you get it perfect on the first try. Call it 15 minutes to render, label, upload and pass the ACX checks.
We're to 3 hours 45 minutes.
A narrator needs to warm up before a session so that they sound consistent from session to session. When you're warming up for a gig, you're not working on another gig, so the time goes to the current project. Maybe you can multitask and QA yesterday's work while your warming up, but it's hard to do critical listening while you're humming and stretching and reciting toungue twisters. Call the warm up 15 minutes. Maybe less maybe more. But Most narrators cannot narrate for 8 hours a day. There is a limit to preserve the voice, and breaks must be taken to preserve your voice not only for the session, but for your work. So warming up is part of the gig, you're working and you need to factor that time in to creating the finished audio.
So, We're at 4 hours. And that's if you're really skilled and great at it and working at high efficiency. You know your DAW inside and out, and you have the voices down perfectly every time.
For many narrators there is an efficiency factor to build in. Narrating is physically demanding as it requires a great deal of sustained concentration -- not to dissimilar to coding. After a long narrating session you might not have the mental energy required for the sustained attention to detail to perform QA. (Similar to how it's difficult to debug code right away, and you find errors the next day when you're fresh)
In my experience that adds 30 minutes work to get the finished audio right and out the door.
So, yeah, a finished hour of audio can easily take 4 to 5 hours for an experienced narrator to create. Less skilled narrators who make more mistakes, take longer to edit, take longer to punch in corrections, take longer to meet the technical standards can easily get to 8 to 10 hours PFH. Just like a junior dev makes more mistakes and takes longer than a senior dev.
I coach newer voice actors all the time. I know from real experience how long this takes.
I'm not buying the 5h/h thing neither. How long is an average audiobook? Booking studio time, etc for that plus the heavy editing that a 5h take would take is just not worth it.
Getting this right for every paragraph will usually take multiple takes. Then there is additional audio editing and what not.
Just for reference, as a prof, just creating a 30 min video that students can watch on their own time, easily takes 2 hours of work. This is where you just remove the worst errors, to get a just-good-enough product.
I think he's ignoring the chance of recording a really popular audiobook though. I'd guess that's why people take royalty deals that they probably know will likely not pay well. Basically gambling.
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but then it goes on forever, right? (as long as copyright lasts)
(sure, the NPV probably still sucks due to time value of money)
“If you’ve ever looked at the Audible ACX contract, you’ve seen the complicated sales earnings math (another future post). For now, let’s focus only on the result: the amount of money which ends up in our bank”
I personally feel like I need to see the math in order to understand what is actually going on
Some purchases are worth nothing (literally invoiced at a 0% royalty rate) to the authors/producers.
Firstly, no-one is forcing them to sell through Amazon/Audible. They don't have to. They could build their own storefront, with all the effort and cost that goes with that.
Secondly, publishers are complaining about shady accounting and crooked royalty payments? Publishers of all people? Oh, the irony.
Thirdly, presumably they've done the calculations, and even with the shady royalty payments it's still worth their while going through A/A rather than selling elsewhere (presumably because A/A's reach is far bigger than anything they can do on their own). This is about "we want more of the pie", though granted it's "we want the share of the pie that we were promised".
Lastly, publishers will happily stiff everyone else when they have the power. Appealing to the masses to help them when the shoe is on the other foot is pathetic. I'm much more inclined to schadenfreude than sympathy.
"where the consumer could return their AB whenever they pleased, and the PRODUCER shouldered the cost."
....as opposed to who? When you return an item to amazon within their returns policy, who do you think pays you back for that? Is the author assuming that when their book gets "returned" for any reason.....it's amazon who should pay the consumer back, not the author? Why?
what the hell. how else could it be? if Amazon is billing sellers for "transaction" costs (or presence on platform cost), that's one thing, but that should be a fixed dollar amount.
even using the term "cost" makes no sense, because it's not a cost, it's "would have been revenue", and yes, there's a cost of doing business, handling returns, etc. but all of those are automated on this shiny marketplace, right, right? right!?
The situation with audiobooks is far less extreme, but there is a cost attached to lenient return policies. Though you'd expect Amazon to be losing more money on it than the authors, so it's more like the authors disagree with Amazon's business model.
Like, the author knows the policy if they decide to sell through Audible. It comes with a massive userbase, userbase which potentially exists because of a decent returns policy. If they think they can make more money on a platform which doesn't allow returns, then they are welcome to try - it's not like amazon has monopoly here, plenty of other places to buy and listen to audiobooks from.
Sales are broken down into AL Units, ALOP units, ALC units, Net returns, and Net Sales units. Again, these show the # of units, but not the rate you're being paid for them.
You do receive a Royalty report for each month, but it comes 2 months after the close of that month (my December one is the latest available). It does have dollar values, but it's hard to figure out how they arrived at their numbers. It's generally related to how long the book is (longer = more money), and whether the books were bought on some kind of sale (no visibility).
You kind of just have to trust ACX.
However, what may not be clear for creators is that they will mostly sell their books cheaper than retail because of the subscriptions.
I don‘t understand the hype/gate.