3 Audiobooks, 70 Hours, Read by Michael Kramer

To celebrate our "wide release" of our audiobooks (which means we're no longer exclusive to Audible/Amazon) we're offering the first three audiobooks of our fantasy series to the first 1,000 customers at a special discount. 

For nearly 60% off the regular retail list price you can get The Prisoner of Tardalim, A Prince's Errand, and A Thief's Way, all read by Michael Kramer.

Click the image below to snag this special offer.  3 Audiobooks, 70 Hours, Read by Michael Kramer for only $14.95 plus tax.

If you're wondering why we're providing this offer, continue reading.


With the current waves created by Brandon Sanderson we saw a considerable drop in our audiobook sales on Audible.com and Amazon.com.  Many readers/listeners were appalled by his words concerning the current percentages of royalties for audiobooks published by independent publishers and small presses. 

Here is what Brandon had to say in his annual newsletter:

"If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.)

Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of reference, most brick-and-mortar stores take around 50% on a retail product. Audible pays indie authors less than a bookstore does, when a bookstore has storefronts, sales staff, and warehousing to deal with. 

I knew things were bad, which is why I wanted to explore other options with the Kickstarter.  But I didn’t know HOW bad.  Indeed, if indie authors don’t agree to be exclusive to Audible, they get dropped from 40% to a measly 25%. Buying an audiobook through Audible instead of from another site literally costs the author money." (taken from State of the Sanderson 2022).

These statements led many to boycott Audible, effectively cutting our sales for the last month by 2/3.  We can actually see the sales dropping the day of the State of the Sanderson.

Audible has held the lion's share of audiobook sales since its inception and controls about 41% of the current market.  Many of us producing independently published audiobooks have taken the exclusive deal with Audible because of this large pool of customers.

Honestly, a 40% royalty isn't ideal, but the actual profit dollar amount is actually greater than every other format (print and eBook).  At the 40% royalty rate the amount on a full length audiobook (12 plus hours) is $6.23 vs $3.49 for a $5 eBook.  The 25% Audible rate is more like $4.10 for a full length audiobook.  These numbers reflect purchases with an Audible credit.

For exclusive titles like ours, we received 40% of the retail purchase price (not list price) of our audiobooks.  Most of our sales consisted of Audible credits, which are purchased anywhere between $11.99 and $14.99.  There were occasional "Whispersync" purchases (a $7.49 deal when you purchase the eBook first), but not that many.

We've been planning to offer our audiobooks via our web-store but hadn't quite implemented the processes needed to make them deliverable.  So, after the New Year we went to work getting things in order to provide our audiobooks independent of Audible/Amazon.  Luckily, we work directly with Michael and his production team and LOK Publishing, LLC (our publishign company) owns the mastered files of our audiobooks.

Unfortunately, the audiobook retail landscape isn't much better anywhere other than Audible while being exclusive to that platform.  We ran many numbers with all the audiobook retailers and audiobook aggregators (think of them like a distributor) and in order to make the same dollar amount that we made with the 40% Audible rate we'd need to increase the retail prices by at least $3 above what many consumes expect; $15.

That didn't seem fairy to anyone involved.  So, we decided to implement the sales and delivery through our website sooner than we planned.  Normally our website prices would be $12.99 for our large novels and $4.99 for our novella length stories.

But for the first 1,000 people who purchase the bundle of The Prisoner of Tardalim, A Prince's Errand, and A Thief's Way you'll get an additional 50% off that web store price, bringing your total for these three audiobooks down to $14.95 plus tax.

Your audiobooks will be delivered by BookFunnel.  Shortly after you check out you will receive an email from BookFunnel with instructions to download your audiobook.  If you have a current BookFunnel account, the audiobooks should be added to your library upon purchase.

BookFunnel accounts are free and you can install the app on your mobile devices.

We've decided to go this route because we don't know when the current market's landscape will change.  We expect our audio retail sales to continue suffering for the next few years, or until other retailers decide to increase their royalty rates to the 70% standard Brandon mentioned. 

So in the mean time, in order to best support authors, especially indie-authors, purchase direct.


Click any of the images in this blogpost to snag this limited-quantity deal, and double check that the discount code WIDERELEASE is applied.