Julie BroadYour Non-Fiction Sidekick for Writing, Publishing & Marketing a Book That Builds Your Brand and Grows Your Biz

Selling Your Audiobook on Spotify with Findaway Voices - What will you make? #bookpublishing

25 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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Julie Broad explains how Findaway Voices and Spotify handle audiobook payouts. She states Findaway takes a distribution fee equal to 20% of royalty receipts and cites a table indicating rights holders receive distribution royalties equal to 100% for sales on Spotify. She warns that Spotify’s new model for premium subscribers (allowing up to 15 hours/month of books) pays from a pooled fund based on listening time — which may result in low per-listen payouts similar to musicians’ complaints — and that payouts are calculated from Spotify’s retail-listed (discounted) price, not the author-set list price.

Questions this video answers

20% of royalty receipts.

Up to 15 hours per month.

The payout is based on Spotify's retail-listed (discounted) price, not the author-set price.

Chapters

Findaway shall receive a distribution fee equal to 20% of royalty receipts. According to the above table for royalty receipts from Spotify, the rights holder shall receive distribution royalties equal to 100%. Now, anything sold on Spotify you're getting 100% of, which is cool. However, the new piece of news about books being available for premium subscriber holders up to 15 hours a month is going to be paid out based on the pool of funds and the amount of time your book was listened to. Musicians have notoriously complained about Spotify not paying well for their music being listened to, so I'm not sure, but it's likely that's going to be the same for authors. It's also important to note that the payout is based on the retail listed price, not what you set. So if they discount the price, as Audible does all the time, you're getting paid on that discounted price, not what you've set your price.