The most frequent question I see from narrators and rights holders, especially indie authors, is some variation of:
Which audiobook distributor is the best?
The answer is: It depends.
Authors and other rights holders need to research distributor options and make decisions based on their goals. Narrators are included in that group because they want to be knowledgeable to guide authors, as well as publish their own audiobook productions.
Royalty rates are only one consideration. Before distributing an audiobook, you need to factor in many other criteria, such as:
- whether you’ve published or plan to publish an edition on Amazon (Some people avoid Amazon at all costs! Those who fall in that category can’t use ACX at all or InAudio to publish to Audible/Amazon since it goes through ACX.)
- payment frequency (monthly or quarterly)
- payment thresholds
- reporting capability and frequency
- promotional support (download codes, etc.)
- ease of use in starting the project and uploading files
- whether they want to be listed as the publisher, and if yes, whether they need to purchase an ISBN
In the linked page below, I compared 9 distributors across 31 individual points to aid in the research and decision process. I also discuss my choices and reasoning.
Note that if you already have a narrator account on a marketplace site like ACX, you’ll need to create a rights holder account using a different email address. Both your narrator and rights holder accounts can share the same tax ID.
If you’re a rights holder and ask someone else to upload the files to distributor sites for you, be aware that they would login as you and would have access to your tax and payment information. Therefore, you need to be absolutely sure you can trust the person with this sensitive information.
Audiobook Distributors Comparison Chart (Members Only)
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.
- Narrator Rebecca H. Lee wrote the article Narrators Who Work With Indie Authors Should Learn About Audiobook Distribution as a guest contributor to Tanya Eby’s Substack. Note: You may need a subscription to read Tanya’s Substack. You’ll find a discount offer in the Welcome Center.
- Narrator Paige Reisenfeld has created the guide Audiobook How-To For Indie Authors which contains a lot of information about different distributors.
- 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 subscribe to 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.