Audiobook Distribution Options for Self-Publishing Authors #audiobooks #authorsrepublic

In February, Findaway Voices by Spotify shook the publishing and author community with some new terms of service that were an outrageous rights grab. After taking them back and saying oops, sorry, many authors have been seeking alternatives. Today I'm going to share two alternatives with PublishDrive and Authors Republic. If you are looking to sell your audiobook beyond Audible, but you want to avoid Findaway Voices, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad Founder of Book Launchers, a professional self publishing services company. And besides helping authors with a book with ghostwriters and coaches a course, we also have an amazing team of editors and designers to bring your book to life. And then we also surround you with book marketing and promotion strategy and support and for launch and post launch book sales and brand building goodness. Now part of what we do is guide our authors to figure out what distribution makes sense for them. Our authors who produce an audiobook are almost always uploading them to ACX for Audible distribution. Like them or not, they are where the majority of book sales come from for authors in the North American market, but beyond them. You likely don't want to sit there and upload your book to half a dozen other places to get a sale here or there from other platforms, but aggregators do that for you. That was where Findaway Voices came in and they had a beautiful bonus of of a lot of library distribution and access to Spotify. But you can reach wide audiences with other options like PublishDrive and Authors Republic. So let's talk about those now. PublishDrive provides distribution to all major audiobook stores just like Findaway Voices, with the added bonus of not having the additional royalty fee of 20%. You will earn 25% more if you choose to distribute through them. Why I'm not giving you a specific amount is because it depends on the store and what business model they have. You can learn more at the link down below so you can see specifically which stores will pay you what. Now they do have a set subscription fee, so if you aren't selling very many books outside of Audible, it might not make sense to go through them. And I went through their pricing options on their website and I couldn't figure out if an audiobook and an ebook for the same book count as one book or two in their service. Do you know if if you know, comment below please. Regardless, even if you only have one audiobook to sell, it's going to be 24 and 99 cents per month because that is their lowest level offered to distribute an audiobook. Now not unique to publishdrive all the aggregators offer distribution to Audible, Google, Apple, Audiobook, storytel and overdrive for everyone. I recommend you still set up your book on ACX to go through Audible just because you'll make more money on Audible that way. Now additional stores available only on PublishDrive, CNPiEC, Gardeners, Voxa, MPIC and Lazy Joy Audio.

But here's the catch with Publish Drive they are using Findaway Voices to do a lot of their distribution. It says extend your reach to Find a Way and beyond publish in over 400 stores and 200,000 plus libraries, which is the huge advantage of Findaway Voices. But if you're avoiding Findaway Voices and you're using Publish Drive to do it and you want to get all this reach, I think you're still hitting, you're still getting stuck with Find a Way Voices.

So the questions I would have at.

This point is are they giving you a separate terms of service or are you agreeing to the Find a Way Voices terms of service? And then obviously you're still financially supporting Findaway Voices because some sort of a cut from publishers Publish Drive's service is going to go to Findaway Voices. So I'm not thinking PublishDrive is a great solution to go with if you are looking to avoid Findaway Voices, but ask questions, read the agreements carefully and make the choice that's right for you.

But please comment below if I'm nuts or if you have intel on this. Now let's talk about Authors Republic. Authors Republic is one that I have used in the past, whereas I have not used Publish Drive for my audiobooks in the past, but my book the New Brand you I did an audiobook version for it in 2016 before I started Book Launchers and before I moved to the United States. Which by the way, I started the company in part, and I'm not really joking about this, but I started the company in part so I would never have to mess around with all the distribution and upload details again because it's agony for me. Which is why you never see a how to video on how to upload your book to any platform. Because I don't do it. My team does it. And that's part of why I have Book Launchers. I don't want to do it again, but one of our clients hired a company that wasn't us what to do a journal and asked us to upload it and we uploaded and everything was wrong and we had to send it back for a ton of corrections and this went on and on and then there were ISBN issues on one platform. It's a pain in the butt to handle all the fine details. And so if you don't want to do that, work with book launchers, because my team will do that for you. Now back to Authors Republic. I used them in 2016 because I couldn't sell my book on Audible as a Canadian. They have added Canada since, but at the time Authors Republic was the only company I could use and I can say they were great to work with. They also now have narrators featured on their site, which is great for anyone that used to go to Findaway Voices for their narrator network because that's gone away. So the Authors Republic narrator list might be of interest. Oh, and what a delight to see when I logged in to shoot this video that I've actually sold an audiobook of the new brand new through them this year. At the end, I'll share a video on why that book didn't sell. And actually, content wise, I think it's maybe the best book I've written. But it's also sold the least by a lot. So seeing one copy of the audiobook has sold in the last 2.5 months was kind of a delight. I know I got distracted, but see they have the narrators here. These seem really cheap because this is a per finished hour, which is probably at least twice the number of hours they will work to narrate this. So someone making $25 an hour is making like $12 an hour. They're actually working. Wow. Most of our clients who hire narrators are typically paying people at least $100 per finished hour, plus the cost of editing, production and mastering, which usually ends up costing closer to 300 to $500 per finished hour because the editor has to work many, many hours to produce one hour of an edited product for your audiobook. Anyway, I always narrate my own books and I recommend if you can. As a nonfiction author, you should also consider narrating your own too, but I thought this was a really interesting addition. So on this platform, users can choose to audition and hire a professional narrator from their roster in the Authors Republic studio. They can also have Authors Republic handle the audiobook production via a managed service plan. Authors Republic has wide global distribution. Users can sell to 50 plus distribution partners through the Authors Republic platform, and they have all the usual ones you'll care about. And they have hoopla for libraries. Findaway Voices has other library access points like Bibliotheca and Overdrive, but again, we're doing this to potentially avoid Findaway Voices what they do have that's kind of cool is distribution to Story Fair. I've looked at them because they have coupons you can use for promotions. If you only want to use Authors Republic for some but not all of the outlets listed here, you then email their customer support team which you can reach@infothorsrepublic.com to let them know which ones you want to opt out of. Additionally, and this is pretty exciting, Authors Republic has established a direct relationship with Chirp, which is the promotional platform for audiobooks. So once upon a time that was another reason why I highly recommended Findaway Voices and now you can get to them through Authors Republic as well. One other point for all of us that loathe working with the bots over at Amazon, they have humans that handle their customer support, which is also one of my favorite things about Draft 2 Digital. They have dedicated customer support. When users need help at any stage of their audiobook journey, they can reach out to customer service and they get back to them quickly. They call it rapid response from a human and it's pretty helpful to self published authors and indie publishers all around. You also get promo codes if you want. You have to email them to request them, but you can get up to 100 promo codes that can be used on audiobooks.com, which you can use for promotion or giving away books to people who might write a review for you. Uploading on both platforms is very similar. You also have to upload your metadata, your cover art and your files and then they take it from there. With Authors Republic you'll receive 70% of royalties from the sale of your book on this platform and there are no upfront fees. So if you're not selling your book, you're not paying. So tell me, are you leaving or have you left Findaway Voices behind? And what are you using to distribute your audiobook now as promised, this is the video on the 5 reasons why my Book Didn't Sell and this is the one on selling your books Direct, which includes some ideas for selling an audiobook direct as well. Click on over. I'll see you there.