In case you haven't seen it yet, Audible has found a new creative way to not pay it's authors >:I
When Brandon Sanderson announced his secret projects, he refused to put them on Audible and negotiated for better royalties for authors. At the time, they acted like heros, but now they've rolled out a new plan that - in the fine print - actually hurts authors more than it helps.
Basically there are two different subscription models: Premium which is the "Pay to Own" model and lets you get credits for a given book, and then the Plus model which lets you pay a flat fee for access to an Exclusive pool of titles which you can check out like a library. But since you can read as many Plus titles as you want for "free", Audible doesn't actually pay those authors royalties. Instead! They skim the royalties of the authors in the Premium catalogue and force them to split the money from the credit with the authors in the Plus catalogue.
So if you bought an indie book from the Premium catalogue with your $16 credit, and then you went to the Plus catalogue and listened to LOTR, Frankenstein, and ACOTAR, the Indie book would actually only get $4 and each of the other titles would also get $4! (using round numbers for simplicity).
Daniel Green's video goes into more detail, and Robin Sullivan is taking the fight to Audible so I encourage you to check out her Change.org petition where she goes into way more detail about all the ways this is incredibly shady.
Convince Audible to revise it's New Royalty Model
Also check out libro.fm and your local library's Libby subscription for alternatives!
