ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
“More opportunities for authors and publishers.” That’s how Audible describes its new royalty model in the headline of its press release. I have seen authors variously offer a cautious welcome for a model that claims to have arisen from discussions with ours and be part of a “creator-centric ethos” and scratch their heads to try and figure out what it actually means in practice. Before I get to that detail, I will say that the emphasis placed in the release on transparency is welcome.
What that transparency means seems to be a monthly statement that is actually clear and decipherable and by reading which an author can get an idea of how their royalty payment was arrived at. Whether that transparency extends to returns and how it reflects adjustments to previous months based on them remains to be seen.
This is the key paragraph on the calculation of royalties. It does, I have to say, seem relatively clear. Rather, it tells you how the calculation is performed. But the wording of the last sentence has some clever semantic notes that suggest more generosity than a closer reading justifies:
“Audible takes a member’s plan value (Plus or Premium Plus) and adds the value of any additional credits used, then divides that value among the titles the member listened to over the course of the month. That figure, multiplied by the contractual royalty rate, comprises a creator’s royalty payment.”
Something to note here. “Multiplied by the contractual royalty rate” sounds great. But of course that royalty rate will be a percentage. Which means the multiplication is actually by a number less than one. In other words, what we are actually being told is the size of the payout pool. It is a proportion of the total of subscriptions and additional a la carte payments. The size of that proportion depends on the royalty rates for each of the titles read. And they may differ from author to author, publisher to publisher. That will make it difficult to predict the overall size of the payout pool based on subscription and sales figures. It should make it easier for individual rights holders to make their own calculation, though.
There is also a certain lack of clarity in this statement about the “titles the member listened to” in terms of when a title counts as being listened to.
Further information is promised and I will update as it emerges.
