The Promised Explanation About Audiobooks

(In Which the Jaguar is Brutally Honest)  

A handful of you have asked about my decision to stop releasing audiobooks, and I can condense that down to a single reason: they make no money.

Now, I don’t always allow that to stop me if the product is something I enjoy. And I really do enjoy the audiobook editions of my work. Arranging for and listening to them has brought me one of the few unadulterated pleasures of my career; they’ve inspired me in fascinating ways, and demonstrated things I would have otherwise missed, and I have loved stumbling into the audio world and am glad (mostly) that I did.

But audiobooks are just too expensive to produce for pleasure, or because I value the end product. When I say ‘too expensive,’ I want you to think of price tags in the thousands of dollars. On average between $3000 and $5000, in fact, per unabridged book. Or if you want to look at per-hour rates, think between $150 and $400 an hour. These are not price tags that I can shrug off; I am a midlist author, not a bestseller. I am gratified to sell maybe 1-3 copies of any given audiobook in a month, making a royalty per book of between fifty cents and three dollars. You can see how that math doesn’t work: an average of $180 (let’s be generous and round up to $200) per book per year isn’t going to make back $3000+ anytime soon.

Those of you who’ve been with me long enough to recognize how my brain works will instantly pivot and point to the handful of Kickstarters I recently ran. “Ah! But you figured out there’s no making back that money, so you turned to crowdfunding to try to secure that money in advance!” Which… is exactly what I did try, yes. And yes, those projects did fund. But I set their goals low to ensure they funded, suspecting that if I asked for the actual amount I spent, I wouldn’t hit the target. And… I was correct. Those Kickstarters, on average, only paid half the bill for the audiobooks they were funding. Furthermore, I paid attention to the number of backers who were participating because of the audio (not for the other prizes, which included e- and print editions), and there were less than 50 people per Kickstarter who requested the audiobook codes.

The numbers just aren’t there. I’ve been releasing audio for over 8 years, and the numbers have never been there.

There are also contract and union issues which would require me to hire lawyers to address, and even the cheapest lawyers are not cheap, which led me to run the numbers again and find that equation just as badly skewed. One of the lawyers I was talking to, in fact, looked at my sales and said, ‘Hey, I hate to put myself out of a job, but you need to ask yourself if you’re ever going to make back what you’re going to spend on me.’ (Blessed lawyer. I put him in my rolodex in case I need an honest man.) These legal issues are manifold and irritating, and even if I ironed them out it would hardly matter because I’d still have the “but audiobooks don’t earn enough to justify producing them” issue which… can't be fixed.

I’d hoped that if I made some audiobooks, the sales would build, and I’d be able to find an audio-only audience that would help defray the costs of production. It’s been almost a decade and that didn’t happen, so it’s time to cut my losses. So many losses, y'all. Looking at the amount honestly makes me queasy, and I have no one by myself to blame. I heard that audio was the future, and I jumped for it, and I didn’t quit when it became clear it wasn’t working. I'll try to be wiser next time.

And no, because I know some well-meaning people will ask, I’m not planning to get around these problems by recording my books myself. As I’ve explained in other Business Posts, my time is worth money; any hours I spend recording an audiobook (so I can sell 1-3 copies of it a month!) is time taken away from writing or doing something I know will make money. I can’t imagine spending 24-40 hours recording and editing an audiobook just to make $1-12 on it a month. The idea is physically painful. :, 

So: with the exception of a couple of audiobooks already in production when I made this decision, I’m done… there won’t be any new ones, unless something weird happens. My recommendation is that you download personal copies of whatever you’ve bought and archive those somewhere, because I can’t control what Audible is going to do with them and I’d hate for you to wake up one day and find them vanished from your library. The ones on Bandcamp should be safe for the foreseeable future, but I would encourage you to keep copies of those too.

I should also note that Bandcamp has been updated with the last two Jokka novels, so if you want those, there they are. When I finish putting together the Kherishdar's Exception book, it'll go up there too, and then that'll wrap up my workload.

So there it is. I wish I had better news! And who knows… maybe some bizarre thing will happen and my audiobooks will take off and I’ll be able to finish the Princes’ Game series, or start Dreamhealers, or get future books done. But I’m not counting on it, and I don’t want you all to either. For those of you who joined the Patreon $10 tier hoping specifically for audio content, there won't be any more books; I will continue to drop anything I personally record (like podcast rambles) in that tier, though. (Those of you who hoped on board that tier just to get the extra day's content will, of course, continue to get an extra day's content.)

That's everything... if you have questions or comments, those are welcome. Suggestions... I dunno. It would have to be a pretty out-there suggestion for me not to have beat my head on it already, but who knows. :)