Karen Commins’s Audiobook Distributor Comparison Chart

I don’t offer personal guidance on distribution choices. As I tell everyone who asks, the decision of which distributor(s) to use rests with you and depends on your goals, risk tolerance, etc. Something that might be important to me might not matter to you.

What does your gut tell you? Whatever you choose to do, know that it will be the right thing for you.

What I’ve Done: 

1. Whenever possible, I publish to ACX as a DIY project and choose exclusive distribution for at least 90 days to get the promo codes and have my audiobook listed quickly on Audible. ACX promises to post your audiobook on Audible within 10 business days. Other distributors don’t specify a timeframe and, in my experience, often required more days to publish on Audible. See the Important Note below regarding royalty percentages.

• This step should not be a problem for contemporary rights holders (RHs) producing their audiobooks as long as they pay a PFH rate to the narrator on ACX or contract with the narrator outside of ACX.
• However, it may be more difficult to do when a narrator is self-publishing a public domain book as you first need to claim an Amazon edition. This can happen in 3 ways:
  • You create your own edition.
  • You obtain permission from an Amazon RH to pair your audiobook with their existing edition.
  • You send a request to me to ask my Kindle partner if he will create a Kindle edition for your book. If Kindle editions already exist, he will not create a new one as there wouldn’t be any money in it for him.
• I’ve had some Public Domain books where I couldn’t get permission for an existing edition and didn’t want to create one, so I used one of the other distributors, primarily Big Happy Family Audio.

For the last 2 options above, look in the Create Your Own Path video course Publishing Resources for my template email to Amazon RHs and the instructions to request a Kindle edition be made for your book.

Beginning at 1:03:38, the Public Domain Audiobooks and Self-Publishing webinar shows you step-by-step how to claim an Amazon edition and set up your audiobook project on ACX.

2. When I want to go wide — which may be later than 90 days, depending on how the audiobook is selling — I’d contact Audible to change the distribution to non-exclusive.

• RHs who have created a RS/RS+ contract with an ACX narrator do not have this option because RS audiobooks must have exclusive distribution. They would need narrator consent to terminate distribution. In addition, they will lose all Audible ratings and reviews when they make this change because Audible will pull the audiobook from its virtual shelves. RHs would be better served to pay a narrator the PFH rate or contract with a narrator outside of ACX to avoid 3 costly mistakes.

3. Once that step has completed, I’d upload the book to InAudio (formerly Findaway Voices) and choose all sites for distribution except Audible and Amazon (and maybe Spotify). InAudio receives a much higher royalty from Apple (45%) than Audible (25% for non-exclusive), so I’m happy to let InAudio distribute to Apple even though ACX also distributed to Apple. In other words, my net royalty from Apple would be 36% (45 * .80) rather than the 25% I’d get from Audible. I’d still be earning 25% from Audible/Amazon and 80% of royalties paid to InAudio for the other sites. 

InAudio earns a hefty 50% from Google Play and Spotify! My single copy sales from Google Play and Apple have netted $7-8 in royalties, so you may want to create affiliate links and direct your Buy links to those listings to earn even more. InAudio provides a list of links for each retailer.

My Spotify earnings have also been very pleasing! My books were sent there automatically when Findaway became InAudio. I think today I’d upload them separately to Spotify.

Thoughts About Wide Distribution

You must carefully consider whether to go wide. Would your royalties from other sites offset the 15% difference on Audible in going from exclusive to non-exclusive distribution? Audible is still the largest distributor, but those with hotly-selling books — especially in the big 3 genres of Mystery, Romance, and Sci-FI — may make more money with non-exclusive distribution on Audible. 

Authors who sell directly from their sites, at conferences, on Shopify, etc. use different apps such as Bookfunnel.com and Payhip.com to perform fulfillment. This chart doesn’t include any information about that type of distribution. Look in the Resources section below for Rebecca Hefner’s links to learn more about direct options.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Audible pays its highest royalty rate of 40% of proceeds to those books uploaded through ACX with an exclusive contract. Its second highest royalty rate is 25% paid on books uploaded through ACX with non-exclusive distribution.

Be aware that a distributor who promises 70-80% of the royalties they receive is not getting more than 25% of the total royalties that Audible pays on non-exclusive distribution through its own platform ACX. Sites like InAudio and Author’s Republic are middlemen that get 25% and then take their cut from that. InAudio keeps 20% of that 25%, effectively giving the RH a 20% royalty from Audible. Author’s Republic takes 30%, effectively leaving the RH with 17.5%. Therefore, if you want the largest royalty that Audible pays anyone, you must upload directly to ACX rather than using a different distributor to upload for you.

The Chart and Resources

My comprehensive chart below compares 9 popular distributors across 31 points of consideration. If you don’t want to scroll from side to side, you can click on a Distributor’s name in the first column and see all the info for them.

Also, if you see a Cookie Policy box, it is generated by Airtable, not me. I am not collecting any cookies! Just click the X to make it go away.

Thanks to Emily Solomon at https://www.stagandforge.com for designing the Airtable and converting my previous HTML data.

Additional resources are listed below the Airtable.

Other resources on this topic:

• Narrator and Spoken Realms owner Steven Cohen created this Q&A document that goes through a number of considerations of using ACX, Findaway Voices (now InAudio), or Spoken Realms.
• Narrator Amy Soakes compares royalties from several sites on this Narratorlist.com page.
• ALLI’s The Ultimate Guide to Self-Publishing Audiobooks includes some excellent info about popular genres, distributors, and royalty rates. Be aware that the vendor Soundwise contributed to the article and may have introduced bias in the discussion about distributors. Also, they didn’t add the comments from the linked deep dive of Audible titles concerning the high degree of reviews for romance books.
• Scribe Media created this guide that compares 6 points across ACX, Author’s Republic, Findaway Voices (now InAudio), Kobo Writing Life, Lantern Audiobooks, PublishDrive, and Soundwise.
• I recommend that rights holders interested in wide distribution join Rebecca Hefner’s Marketing Audiobooks Wide Facebook group and her excellent Marketing for Wide & Direct Authors Substack to stay current on sites you may want to target and strategies to implement.
• You’ll find a wide range of marketing tactics and ideas in my Audiobook Marketing Cheat Sheet. Even on multiple platforms, an audiobook won’t necessarily sell itself! Marketing and promotion are the keys to long-range sales.