Authors Republic vs Findaway Voices for Audiobook Distribution

Aggregators are an author's best friend when it comes to going wide with your books. And if you've gone to the extra effort and expense of creating an audiobook, you'll likely want as many people as possible to hear that book. But who do you use to get that distribution? Do you go exclusive with acx or do you use services like Authors Republic or Findaway Voices? If you're trying to make that decision right now, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad. I'm an Amazon Overall Number 1 Best Selling Author and the founder of a fabulous company called Book Launchers. Our superpower is caring more about you and your book than anybody else as we help you write, publish and sell a nonfiction book that will boost your brand and make you money. You've decided producing an audiobook is right for you, which is awesome. I'm a big fan of audiobooks. We've talked about audiobooks a lot on Book Launchers tv and we have an entire video playlist dedicated to them. So if there is something else you want to know about audiobooks, check that out. I'll link to it here and at the end. Today I just want to cover the difference between Authors Republic and Findaway Voices. Both are audiobook aggregators, which means they offer you the beautiful solution of uploading to one platform and managing a lot of the details around your audiobook in one place. It's different than going direct, but many audiobook distribution options aren't even available to you direct, so in many cases you need an aggregator. But they're not perfect either. So let's compare. Authors Republic and Findaway Voices are largely similar. The biggest notable difference is Authors Republic is a pure aggregator, so check out this image from their website. This is what they do. Audiobook distribution. They give you a place to control your metadata, pricing, and a variety of places where you can distribute your audiobook. This is different than Find a Way Voices because they're not just an aggregator, they also help with narration and production. You can choose a narrator option and get your book produced by them. They also have a cool new option called Voice Share. Voice Share is where you pay 50% of production up front, share 20% of earned royalties with your narrator, you get their wide distribution exclusive exclusively with them. But exclusively with them isn't as limiting as exclusive with acx. And if your book does well, you have a buyout option. You can buy it out at 1.5 times the original 50% rate you paid. So they are an aggregator for distribution, but they do a lot more when you compare where Authors Republic and Find a Way Voices distribute, they line up side by side on most places, notably Hoopla and Overdrive, which is library distribution. So that's very cool. There's Nook and Storytell, Audible, Barnes and Noble, itunes and so on. But there are a couple of important and notable differences in distribution. First is that Findaway Voices has the best royalty agreement with Apple, better than going with ACX or Authors Republic. Second, Findaway Voices also has an exclusive arrangement with Chirp, and chirp is a BookBub company. What this means is that you can get distribution with Chirp and run bookbub ads to Chirp to promote your audiobook. Well, it's not proven yet as it's in beta and it's not widely available. BookBub promotions are legendary and allow authors to sell thousands of books. And BookBub ads perform fairly well for many authors because BookBub has a book hungry audience. If you promote the right book at the right price, many authors see a huge lift. So being able to promote an audiobook direct to an audiobook audience is huge. And it's only available through Findaway Voices. And just this past month Findaway Voices has added nine more partners. So they're constantly looking for ways to help you get great distribution. The next thing I love about Findaway Voices is they have a better royalty rate than Authors Republic. Authors Republic takes 30%. Findaway takes 20%. Now this is on what you're getting paid. You are getting paid retail list price times royalty percentage equals royalties generated. And then the royalties generated gets multiplied by 70% for authors republic and 80% for findaway voices. And that's the money that gets deposited to you. This is also why I recommend going direct to ACX for Audible because you're going to get the most sales from Audible. So why pay an aggregator a percentage of that? For hoopla, there's a cost per checkout model for the libraries, which I love and I talked about that in a live stream I did in October 2019. And here's a shot from Findaway Voices Agreement Schedule C that covers that explanation. You can see you get paid per checkout and then you apply your 80% or your 70% to that. Finally, the other major difference between Authors Republic and Findaway Voices is their sales reporting isn't the same. Compare this screenshot of my book sales in Authors Republic to a client's sales where I removed his data in Findaway. These are apples to apples comparisons in that we're both selling Our audiobooks to all channels via the aggregator. Our client wanted simplicity of one spot distribution and as I already noted, I didn't have a choice when I uploaded my book. But you can see that with Authors Republic I'm getting almost no information except what kind of a purchase it was and how much I'm making. The report from Findaway Voices gets much more granular. You can see the publisher's royalty rate, the retail price, the actual outlet. I like this a lot and so do our clients. It would also help with advertising decisions and to gauge effectiveness of ads or other marketing activities if you're doing something to drive channel specific sales. So is there anything I don't like about Findaway Voices? Not really, but I can tell you one thing that came up that you may see as a positive or a negative. Read a client's audiobook, get kicked back from Audible, which is super normal by the way. Audible is really really picky, so lots of little things will get triggered by their bots. Now as part of Findaway Voice's service they just go ahead and fix the issue rather than notifying the author because a lot of times it's something like not enough seconds of blank space, blank sound before or after the end of a chapter. The problem is the production quality when they fix the issue isn't as high as what we create. It passes Audible standards, but we create the absolute highest quality audiobooks. Our producer and voice coach is a multi award award winning sound editor and she takes her role in creating books that are in the top 10% for quality on Audible very seriously. So when she tested the revised file she was really upset to see the quality of the file had been reduced. This is our client's work product and find a way Voices altered it without us knowing or our client's permission. They see this as a value add service and then fixing it does get it to Audible much faster. Many clients may not care, but this issue was not small for us and it caused a many week delay in the Audible release for this book. So that's the only real drawback. But I gotta tell you, the Findaway Voices team was amazing authors. Republic does not edit the book and would just send it back to the author if Audible kicked it back. So you can see this both ways. What I can tell you is I was connected with every person in the Findaway Voices chain of command right to the very top and they took our feedback very seriously. We were the first ones to complain and maybe even the first that noticed this issue, but they didn't dismiss us at all. The resolution was slow and it was painful as we had some unhappy people on our hands given that we were the ones to recommend Findaway Voices to our client. But ultimately I felt like they heard us and they did give us some royalty concessions to our client. As a result of the delay, my second book, the New Brand you'd, was distributed using Authors Republic. My challenge in 2016 was that I was a Canadian in Canada and ACX, which is Audible's company, didn't accept books from outside the US. I didn't know this when I spent $3,600 producing my audio. I had a great audiobook but nowhere to upload it. I asked so many authors and there was no simple solutions until I finally found Authors Republic. So Authors Republic would handle the upload and distribution for me as a Canadian. So I got my book onto Audible, Apple Books, and many other places through them, and then they paid me via PayPal. But when my new book comes out in 2020, I'm going to upload direct to ACX for Audible to maximize my revenue at the place where I'm likely to sell the most books. And then I'm going to use Findaway Voices for distribution everywhere else. It's not that Authors Republic was bad. They deposited my money on a regular schedule into my PayPal account and they got me distribution where nobody else would. That issue, by the way, with upload to ACX as a Canadian, is not an issue anymore. ACX works for residents of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland. You need a mailing address, a taxpayer ID and bank information in your respective country to make it work. Anyway, I hope this explanation helps you in your decision, but it also makes me curious. Is there a difference between the two that I've missed? Or do you prefer one over the other? Or some other aggregator I haven't talked about before? Let's chat about it below in the comments. And when you comment on the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet book launcher swag like this noboringbooks Special Edition Hoodie okay, we don't give away hoodies very often, but we do always have mugs and journals like this. Tip. Go ahead and smash that thumbs up button. It makes you feel so good, so try it. And make sure you subscribe to the channel so we can hang out every Tuesday and Friday when new videos come out. By the way, this was not a pain promotion for Findaway Voices. I have just come to love and appreciate their services. Like I said, I am an Author's Republic client with my book, but I will be a future client of Findaway Voices. Now check this out. 3, 2, 1. There's a playlist on audiobooks for you right here. If this was all you needed to know about audiobooks, then maybe this video that I just released is more your thing. Either way. What are you doing still watching me here when we could be having so much fun here or here?