On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports from London Book Fair week and covers a dispute at the Paris Book Festival that led Amazon to withdraw its sponsorship after protests from French booksellers. He also examines Audible’s new lower-priced subscription plan and what it could mean for listeners and author royalties, and looks at the expansion of the Authors Guild’s Human Authored certification program.
Listen to the Podcast: Paris Book Festival Drops Amazon Sponsorship
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, welcome to Self-Publishing News. As I record, we are of course in the midst of London Book Fair. I say ‘we' — I mean the literary world, because I am laid low, having been really incredibly stupid and given myself food poisoning. Not recommended. Not at all sensible.
But it is the day, as I record this, of the Indie Author Lab, which is ALLi's special London Book Fair adjacent event. So there will be lots of people learning huge amounts. And in the next podcast I will obviously be bringing the highlights from Author HQ as well as anything else of interest from London Book Fair.
Amazon and the Paris Book Festival
We also have some news this week from one of the big book fairs in France — the Paris Book Festival. And I think that is best described by saying: it is all kicking off. And it's kicking off around Amazon.
Amazon, of course, at the London Book Fair for many, many years has sponsored the ALLi post-party drinks at the Ivy Flower, which has become one of those things one always looks forward to at London Book Fair. And Amazon has also been involved as a sponsor in the Paris Book Festival. But this year, that has not gone down well.
The French Booksellers Association threatened to boycott the Paris Book Festival as a result of Amazon's sponsorship. The concern was that Amazon is enabling the flooding of the market with AI-generated content, and that this is to the detriment of publishers, authors, and rights holders in general. So big was the backlash that Amazon has agreed to pull out of their sponsorship of the French Book Festival.
This is part of an ongoing battle between French booksellers and the literary industry in general, and Amazon. You may remember that a few years ago, booksellers in France boycotted one of the major French literary awards because some of the titles on the shortlist were Amazon publications. They felt so strongly about this that they refused to stock any of the books from the shortlist. So yes, the Amazon and French literary industry battle continues.
Audible Launches Standard Pricing Plan
Talking of Amazon, there is more news this week from Audible. Audible has rolled out a standard pricing plan, and this is really big news — big news for everyone, not least for listeners. This is rolling out across lots of different markets: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and France.
Taking the US pricing as indicative, the standard plan comes in at $8.99 — that is $6 less than the Premium Plus pricing, and $4 less than Spotify's subscription plan. So this is clearly aimed at being an entry-level pricing plan. Audible trialed this in the UK and Australia, and the results, as quoted from their press release, showed that the plan was responsible for driving a strong double-digit performance increase in new member sign-ups compared to previous offerings. So they clearly believe this is bringing many more listeners to the platform.
So what do you get — and what do you not get — for that $6 fewer? Essentially, it is more like a library model. With Premium Plus, you spend your one credit a month and the book you buy with it you keep, even when you stop subscribing. But with the standard plan, as soon as you stop subscribing, you lose access to the books you had acquired with your credit. There is also much less access to the listen-as-much-as-you-like catalog — you get a specially curated selection rather than the full Premium Plus catalog.
As an author, the royalty structure also looks slightly different. It is much more like the paid-reads model from Kindle Unlimited, which fits with the library model. So instead of getting a royalty based on price as you would with Premium Plus, you get a royalty based on the number of minutes listened to when someone takes your book with their credit. If they take the credit for it and then never actually listen to anything, you would not get any money. But if it's a long book and they listen to it all, you might get more than you would otherwise. So it's a slightly different royalty system for this standard pricing plan.
Human Authored Certification Expands
Finally, we have some AI-related news, and that is the expansion of the Human Authored certification program. This is the program from the Authors Guild whereby you can submit your title and get a certificate to show that it was written by you, a human being. Until recently, this was limited to Authors Guild members. It is now being rolled out more widely.
It allows any rights holder to submit up to ten titles a year — including backlist titles — for verification. The submission then goes through whatever the secret sauce is to determine that it has indeed been written by a human being. You then get your certificate, which you can put on your cover, and a unique certification number as ongoing proof. The cost is $10 per title. And as I say, it is now open to those outside the Authors Guild as well as those inside.
I will leave you there. Thank you very much for listening. I very much look forward to catching up now with what is going on at London Book Fair and bringing you the news from there next week. Thank you very much, and speak to you again soon.
