So the world of audio has had some rather large disturbances of late, like in the last month, and if you go back a bit further, you find even more.  A lot of the newest drama has been tied to companies attempting to legally procure AI rights to the content they host, because everyone wants to have clean content that they can use for their AI services in the future, but most creatives aren’t ready to part with these rights for nothing.

In the field of audiobooks, the authors who are attempting to get their work hosted, they don’t even *have* the rights to hand over to their distributors.  Those rights belong to the voice performer unless they specifically included AI rights in their contract, and most audio was produced in an era when AI wasn’t even on the radar.  A recent contract update with one of the major distributors of audio work may or may not have claimed a whole boatload of rights (there were mixed opinions of what the words in the contract actually meant, but the plain English read of it was pretty shocking), but it means that a lot of creatives are looking for paths to market that don’t involve corporations that are in the market for as many rights as they can lay hold of.

Enter direct sales.

The math of direct sales is rather inescapable, and authors have been drifting this way in small numbers for a long time.  Ebooks are one thing, but the power of the math behind audio is staggering.

When I distribute an audiobook through Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Chirp, or any other service (none of which are the distributor referenced above), I make between 25% and 40% of the list price of the book.  When you (lovely, lovely reader and consumer of science fiction and fantasy worlds that you are) buy from me on my own website, or a similar author-owned property, I make something approaching 95% of the list price.  So while a lot of the discoverability of books comes from these great retailers who stock *huge* numbers of titles (and yay for that!), when I pay to produce an audiobook using a voice talent who is putting in very significant hours to generate that work, the rate at which I make that money back is much, much higher on sales that I host myself.  Which means more audiobooks.

On my ads, on my website, on my Facebook, even in my daily life, I get requests all the time to provide books in audio.  I know that these are more convenient for a lot of people, and I completely understand the situation.  I don’t do well with audio because how my brain works – words just don’t go in as well when I’m listening compared to what I’m looking at – but I can completely understand how the inverse would be true for some people.  I also understand the premium of the *hours* spent on fiction, and if you have the opportunity to use other time – like driving or working out or housework – that improves or at least doesn’t diminish the effectiveness of that time to consume fiction, it gets a lot easer to make those commitments.

Heck, I’ve listened to Carbon Chronicles just because Wesley is a great performer and I find myself laughing at my own work.  Which normally I’m much too stodgy to do.

There are lots of great reasons to enjoy and appreciate audio, but it is *expensive*, and buying direct means that more money (a lot more money) goes to the creatives behind the enterprise and justifies a lot more of that content.

So.  I’ve already written here about the reasons behind my (current) decision not to be on Audible, but I’m going to have some work in front of me getting my audio content back onto some of the smaller distribution channels (including libraries… I’m sorry; these are just hard to get into) as I’m exiting my current central distributor.  We ought to be back up on the major outlets (Apple, Kobo, Google Play) pretty quickly, but the others might take some work.

In the meantime, for your consideration, I offer you my very own shop, shop.chloegarner.com, where you can download a free 1-hour sample of the beginning of Flight of the Kingfisher, and where Flight of the Kingfisher and Journey to Verona are both available for sale.

They are hosted by Bookfunnel, which means that you are not relying on my technical capability to get you your books and manage any issues you have with it.  Bookfunnel has their own app, their own support staff, and a great reputation in the author community for customer service to readers.  It means a new app, and I know that that’s not nothing, but I do think that this is one of the directions that indie publishing is going to go, in the future, as we look for paths to control both our own IP and our own profits.

I am hoping that it will be worth the investment to you, both because this series is great fun and Wesley’s performance is *fantastic*, but also because it makes all of the future audiobooks you’re interested in that much more seamless to procure.

Happy reading, happy listening, and as always THANK YOU for being here.  Readers like you absolutely mean the world to me.