7 Tips For Audiobook Profitability

Today I’m going to talk about a very advanced level indie author topic, namely audiobook production and the economics of it.

Recently there’s been some controversy because ACX (Amazon’s audiobook production platform) has been changing its royalty model (a good summary here) and rolling out what they call Synthetic Voice, which is basically an AI-generated voice. Some writers have been using it because it’s a lot cheaper than a good human narrator, but the flipside is that not many people like it and won’t pay money for it.

Admittedly, this is not a new technology. Text-to-speech has been around forever. Macs have had it since 1984, back when 128 kilobytes of RAM was a lot. (Brief aside: I wish the term “AI” hasn’t been bandied about so liberally. But before the public backlash began against generative AI and data centers, the term “AI” was trendy, so it got slapped on things that actually are wildly different from generative AI. I saw a post where someone was complaining about the locations in STARFIELD being AI-generated, when in fact they’re procedurally generated, which is something totally different.) Synthetic voice is just a more advanced version of the text-to-speech technology that’s been around since the 1980s.

The fear is that AI-generated audiobooks will swamp the market and dominate most of ACX’s payment model. I strongly suspect that this is unlikely, given the hostility I have observed to synthetic voices, especially in fiction. In the early 2020s I experimented with making synthetic voice versions of my SILENT ORDER science fiction series and putting them on YouTube, and the overwhelming response was that people liked the story but hated the computer-generated voice. (It might be different for nonfiction – a romance novel with a synthetic voice would be quite flat, but that wouldn’t matter as much for a primer on tax law or agronomy something similar.)

So there is a lot of uncertainty on whether or not audiobooks can still be profitable for indie authors.

However, I suggest this is nothing new. Audiobooks have always been indie publishing on Hard Mode, partly because they’re expensive to produce, and partly because they’re harder to sell than ebooks and sometimes even paperbacks. That said, I’m on my eighth year of self-publishing audiobooks, and some of them have made back their production costs and turned a profit, so I thought I would share seven tips on how to have profitable self-published audiobooks.

1.) Think Long Term

If you want your audiobooks to be profitable, you need to think long-term.

ACX has this thing called “royalty share”, where rather than pay a narrator, you and the narrator split the royalties on the audiobook for the next seven years, and after those seven years are past you get all the subsequent royalties. I’ve never taken this option, but I cite it here because I think seven years is not an unreasonable amount of time for an audiobook to earn back its production cost.

People always blanch a bit when I say that, but I’ve been doing self-published audiobooks for eight years now, so let’s see how some of them have done:

-Frostborn: 100% has earned back its production cost.

-The Ghosts: Of the 24 GHOSTS books in audio, about the first ten have earned back their production cost.

-Cloak Mage: Of the 12 CLOAK MAGE books, about the first three and a half have earned back their production cost.

-Dragonskull: Of the nine DRAGONSKULL books, the first three and a half have earned back their production cost.

-Malison: Of the four MALISON books, they have 100% earned back their production costs. (It helps that they’re short.)

-The Shield War. Of the six SHIELD WAR books, the first one has earned back production costs, but I only started that series in 2023.

-The Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide. My one nonfiction audiobook has totally earned back its production cost.

So I don’t think seven years is an unreasonable length of time to earn back the production cost.

This means you have to think long-term, almost like a small business owner buying a new piece of equipment. Depending on the business, the owner might budget for the equipment making back what he paid for it in four or five years. Or if he has to take out a loan to buy the equipment, he’ll calculate how long it will take to pay back that loan. Like I just had to pay a lot of money to have the struts in my car fixed, and I expect the garage owner carefully considered how much he would spend on his vehicle hoists (I believe a new vehicle hoist and installation typically costs between $7,000 and $12,000) and how long it would take him to make that money back. But all successful small business owners think like this.

This mindset is a bit tricky for indie authors because we often have a strong tendency to think in the short term, especially new indie authors who want their books to make a ton of money RIGHT NOW. But as I said above, audiobooks are self-publishing on Hard Mode, so you need to decide whether it is worth the investment, and if you’re comfortable waiting a few years to earn back the production cost over time.

The reality is that if you’re paying a professional narrator to create the audiobook, you’re paying $200 per finished hour or above, which is a small business expense, so for that kind of money you need to think about the audiobook as a small business owner.

2.) Deduct This

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, and I am not an accountant and this is not investment/financial advice. If you want financial/investment advice, you should talk to an accountant or financial planner properly certified with the tax laws of your state/province and nation, and if you want legal advice, you should talk to a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.

The way my writing business is set up I can take the production cost of audiobooks as a deduction against my taxes. This initially was one of the reasons I got into self-published audiobooks way back in 2018. I realized that if I was going to have to pay the money in taxes anyway, I might as well spend some of it on audiobook production instead, since that way I’ll at least get a revenue-generating asset out of it. Other small businesses will sometimes do this when they approach the end of the fiscal year and realized they have more tax liability than expected, so it’s probably time to invest in some new equipment or upgrades they would need anyway. Like, maybe the garage owner we mentioned earlier has a really good year, so he decides it’s time to spend that $12k on a new vehicle hoist so he doesn’t have quite so a high a tax bill at the end of the year.

I once had someone tell me rather self-righteously that this was a tax dodge and therefore immoral, but that’s ridiculous. No less of an authority than Jesus Christ Himself said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar, and if Caesar says that audiobook production is a deductible business expense, it is a deductible business expense. Business deductions are the government’s way of saying “spend this income on something that benefits the national economy or we’ll take it as taxes.”

To a more immediate point, the IRS itself says you have the legal obligation to pay exactly the amount of taxes you owe, but there are also legal ways (such as business deductions) to reduce the amount of taxes you owe.

Besides, the government gets its cut anyway. At the end of the year, I have to file 1099s for the narrators because their payments are taxable income, and every time one of the audiobooks sells the government gets sales tax, the stores owe taxes on that income, and I owe taxes on the payment from the store! Uncle Sam has a lot of practice at getting his cut, and he’s very good at it.

So depending on your business structure and the local tax laws where you live, audiobook production might be a deductible expense, which is very helpful on the financial side of it.

3) Promote The Ebook

The easiest way I’ve found to sell an audiobook is to have it be the audiobook of a ebook that sells well.

Admittedly, this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? However, that can help you choose which titles to make into audiobooks.

Like, I mentioned above that FROSTBORN has paid back 100% of its production costs, and that’s because it’s my most popular series. It was easy for the audiobooks to sell well because the ebooks were selling well. By contrast, an ebook that sells more slowly will have a harder time selling audiobooks. One of the reasons I experimented with using synthetic voice on YouTube with SILENT ORDER earlier in the 2020s was because I knew I never would make SILENT ORDER into actual audiobooks because the series didn’t sell well enough to merit it.

So if you want your audiobook to sell, the easiest way to do it is to promote the ebook. If the ebook sells well enough, it will likely generate some audiobook sales as well.

This can also help you determine whether or not you should even produce an audiobook of a particular ebook. If the ebook does not have strong sales, it will probably not be a good idea to make an audiobook out of it.

4.) Diversify

We started by talking about ACX, but ACX is not the only game in town.

The other big audiobook distribution platform is Inaudio, which is owned by Spotify. Previously it used to be known as Findaway Voices, but then Spotify bought it and changed the name to Inaudio for whatever reason. ACX will get your audiobook into Audible, Amazon, and Apple. Inaudio will get you audiobook into every other platform – Google Play, Kobo, Storytel, Chirp, the library distributors, and a bunch of others. So if your audiobook is not exclusive to ACX, it’s a good idea to use Inaudio as well.

That said, Google Play and Kobo now have direct upload for audiobooks, and if your audiobook is not exclusive to ACX, it is a good idea to use the direct upload for Google Play and Kobo instead of relying on Inaudio. There are a few significant advantages to this. First, you make a little bit more money since Inaudio is not taking its distribution fee, and the cumulative effect of that over time can be significant. Second, your audiobook will be eligible for Kobo Plus, which can generate extra revenue. I’ve had some of my best months from Kobo in 2026 thanks to Kobo Plus.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, you won’t be completely dependent on Inaudio because Inaudio is frequently quite glitchy and has gone noticeably downhill in quality since Spotify took over. Every single problem I’ve ever had with Inaudio has come after Spotify bought Findaway and turned it into Inaudio. Spotify, like many other publicly traded corporations in the US, has the chronic problem of an upper management class who are buzzword-prone MBA drones with an unhealthy enthusiasm for generative AI and indulging in self-destructive cost cutting/layoffs right before quarterly report time. Very frequently the QA process on Inaudio will go berserk and declare that a book is AI-generated and ineligible for distribution even when it’s not. So direct upload to Google Play and Kobo avoids that problem.

(Because of these problems, another distributor called Authors Republic has been growing, but I haven’t used them yet.)

Despite these problems, Inaudio also gets you access to Chirp, which is our next bullet point.

5.) Chirp Deals

I said earlier that the best way to promote your audiobook is ebook promotion, but the one exception to that is Chirp.

Chirp is run by Bookbub, which is an email newsletter service that offers discounted ebooks to its subscribers. Bookbub wanted to expand to audiobooks, but Audible very famously does not let indie authors control their prices and definitely doesn’t let them do discounts. So, to get around that slight problem, Bookbub started its own audiobook store in the form of Chirp, which does let indie authors control their prices and therefore offer discounts.

I’ve had some excellent results with Chirp deals over the years, usually with CHILD OF THE GHOSTS and CLOAK OF DRAGONS. In May I had a Chirp deal with DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE, but since the dashboard on Inaudio only updates every 30 days for Chirp, I’m not sure how it did yet.

If you get a Chirp deal and you want to take a big swing with it, you can also set temporary discounts on the subsequent books in the series. For the earlier Chirp deals for CLOAK OF DRAGONS, the price for CLOAK OF DRAGONS was at $0.99 and I set the price of the subsequent two audiobooks CLOAK OF WOLVES and CLOAK OF ASHES at $2.99 each. I got good results from that and some of my best months on Inaudio.

For the recent DRAGONSKULL deal, SWORD OF THE SQUIRE was at $0.99, and I temporarily set every other audiobook in the series at $2.99 on Chirp. It was the biggest swing I’ve taken yet with a Chirp deal, so I’m curious to see how it did!

6.) Direct Sales

It’s a good idea to have a direct sales platform of some kind, whether Shopify or Payhip or Gumroad or a similar platform, and offer direct sales of your audiobooks.

There are numerous advantages to this. You can set your own price, which as we mentioned above, ACX does not let you do. You can very easily run sales and discounts. If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know I do a different Coupon Of The Week for my Payhip store every week, and it’s often for audiobooks. As I mentioned with the problems with Inaudio, it provides a platform to get your audiobook to listeners even if the other stores are having problems. (Sometimes ACX processing can take weeks, and during the site’s past troubles, it has sometimes stretched into months.)

The difficulty is getting people to actually use the store. The term “vendor lock-in” means that the more a consumer uses a platform, the less likely they are to switch. Like, if someone has been building up their Kindle library since 2009, they’re unlikely to switch to a competitor. Most of my direct sales come from a combination of Coupon Of The Week and new releases to people who don’t like DRM.

So having a direct sales platform is a long haul, but still worth doing. Besides, everything in audiobooks is a long haul.

7.) Direct Reader Relationship Via Patreon Or A Similar Site

I’ve never done this myself, so I don’t have any specific tips, though I have seen some writers do it quite successfully.

That said, you should only have a Patreon or a similar site if you’re willing to put in the work. Readers are very unforgiving of a writer who does not live up to his or her Patreon obligations. However, if you include audiobooks as one of your patron tiers, that can go a long way towards audiobook profitability. A regular Patreon-type income can help fund regular audiobook production.

CONCLUSION

Audiobooks are indeed indie publishing on Hard Mode, but hopefully these tips will help increase the changes that your audiobooks will be profitable.

Lastly, thanks to everyone who has listened to one of my audiobooks!

-JM