Last year, I published Wide book distribution in 2023: My 6 tips. Most of what I covered there is still valid. However, that was a general article about three types of books: print books, ebooks and audiobooks. Today, I am going to expand upon what I suggested there about audiobooks. I’ll explain why many author-clients of my TecnoTur Publishing division have elected to distribute their audiobooks everywhere except Audible/Amazon, how to get 80% royalties with Spotify, and how to get 97% royalties on your audiobooks sold via your dedicated e-commerce website created for you by TecnoTur, get your money within 3 business days, and even get the purchaser’s email address. I’ll also go into details about why the .M4B file format is ideal for your direct audiobook distribution strategy, including the square image and chapter navigation for your direct audiobook purchasers.
A brief history of audiobooks since 1878
Many short, spoken word recordings were sold on cylinders in the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, the round cylinders were limited to about 4 minutes each, making audiobooks impractical. Flat platters increased that to 12 minutes, but this too was impractical for longer works. By the 1930s, close-grooved records increased to 20 minutes (which reminds me of the mini U-Matic tapes for ENG). Although spoken recordings were popular in 33⅓ rpm vinyl record format for schools and libraries into the early 1970s, the beginning of the modern retail market for audiobooks can be traced to the wide adoption of cassette tapes during the 1970s. In the early 1970s, instructional recordings were among the first commercial products sold on cassette. By the middle of the 1990s, the audio publishing business grew to US$1.5 billion a year in retail value (short-scale billion, U.S. version). In 1996, the Audio Publishers Association established the Audie Awards for audiobooks, which is equivalent to the Oscar for the audiobook industry.
With the spread of the Internet to consumers in the 1990s, faster download speeds with broadband technologies, new compressed audio formats and portable media players, the popularity of audiobooks increased significantly during the late 1990s and 2000s. In 1997, Audible pioneered the world’s first mass-market digital media player, named The Audible Player, which retailed for about US$200, held 2 hours of audio and was touted as being «smaller and lighter than a Walkman», the popular cassette player used at the time. Digital audiobooks were a significant new milestone as they allowed listeners freedom from physical media such as cassettes and CMP3, which required transportation through the postal mail, allowing instead instant download access from online libraries of unlimited size, and portability using comparatively small and lightweight devices. Audible.com was the first to establish a website, in 1998, from which digital audiobooks could be purchased. (Audible was later purchased by Amazon.)
The transition from vinyl, to cassette, to CD, to MP3CD, to digital download has been documented by Audio Publishers Association in annual surveys. The final year that cassettes represented greater than 50% of total market sales was the palindromic year of 2002. Cassettes were replaced by CDs as the dominant medium during 2003–2004. CDs reached a peak of 78% of sales in 2008, then began to decline in favor of digital downloads. The 2012 survey found CDs accounted for «nearly half» of all sales, meaning it was no longer the dominant medium. The APA estimates that audiobook sales in 2015 in digital format increased by 34% over 2014.
The resurgence of audio storytelling is widely attributed to advances in mobile technologies such as smartphones, tablets, and multimedia entertainment systems in cars. In 2018, approximately 50,000 audiobooks were recorded in the United States, with a sales growth of 20 percent per year. U.S. audiobook sales in 2019 totaled US$1.2 billion (short-scale billion, U.S. version), up 16% from the previous year. In addition to the sales increase, Edison Research’s national survey of American audiobook listeners ages 18 and up found that the average number of audiobooks listened per year increased from 6.8 in 2019 to 8.1 in 2020.
Source for the above: Wikipedia article.
Audiobooks as a business nowadays
In 2023, Forbes stated that audiobooks are the fastest growing segment within the book publishing industry.
Source: Forbes article.
Audiobook royalty breakdown in 2024
This is only a tiny overview of the three extremes of the 37-38 platforms (including libraries) where I have been helping authors to distribute their audiobooks, to both retailers and libraries.
| Amazon/Audible | Spotify | Your book’s dedicated ecommerce website | |
| Without exclusivity | 25%7-year contract | 80% | 97% (100% minus ≈3% credit card fee) |
| With exclusivity contract | 40% | n/a Spotify fortunately doesn’t request exclusivity. |
If you decide to sell the audiobook exclusively on your book’s dedicated website, it will still be 97%, but you’ll likely get less overall sales. (100% minus ≈3% credit card fee) |
| When you get paid | The following month, «…if the earnings for that month are greater than US$10. If you’ve earned less than that amount, the balance carries over until the following month and will continue to do so until you’ve earned US$50. Then, payment will be sent for the cumulative balance.» |
The following month, after surpassing the US$100 royalty threshold. |
within 3 business days, without any minimum. |
| You get the purchasers’ email address to offer new books, webinars, etc. | No | No | Yes |
Note that the extremely low Amazon royalty shown above is for audiobooks, not for ebooks. Also note that Spotify currently distributes audiobooks in the United States and a tiny number of other countries, which is a disclaimer I put next to the Spotify link on the direct sales websites I create for authors. The direct sales covered by your direct website mentioned in the third column (above) currently function for sales to all countries on planet Earth, with the notable exceptions of Crimea, Cuba, Donetsk, Iran, Luhansk, North Korea and Syria, due to embargoes.
Why the M4B format is ideal for your direct audiobook sales
Even though you could distribute the audiobook as a simple audio file (with or without an image and navegable chapters) like an .M4A with the AAC códec, as many audio podcasts do (AAC superseded the MP3 códec back in 1997, due to its higher quality at much lower bitrates, and even more so with the later incarnation called HE-AAC for spoken word, but many haven’t read the memo yet and continue with the long obsolete .MP3), the .M4A file format is not ideal to distribute audiobooks directly to consumers. The reason is because today’s content consumers are accustomed to having a dedicated app for music, a different one for podcasts, and yet another for books (whether they are audiobooks or just ebooks). The ideal file format is .M4B, since it can be opened by default by a book or audiobook app, which is what consumers are accustomed to having. That way, they have their music organized in one particular app, their podcasts in another and their audiobooks in a third. If properly authored, those DRM-free .M4B audiobooks will have a square graphic and chapter markers to facilitate the listener to navigate among sections.
In the next section, I’ll share my recommended apps for newbie audiobook consumers who may be purchasing their first non-DRMed .M4B file directly from the author.
.M4B app recommendations, per platform
The article you’re currently reading is focused on audiobook distribution, not ebook distribution. See my related article:
Apple Books app: terribly inconsistent among formats & platforms
for more details about why I reached the below app recommendations for direct audiobook distribution, and why I only recommend the Apple Books app for use on macOS for audiobooks sold via these dedicated ecommerce websites. At least for now, I can’t recommend the Apple Books app on those websites for iPhone or iPad for the reasons clarified in the article Apple Books app: terribly inconsistent among formats & platforms.
For the detailed reasons covered in that article, and since we (the direct audiobook sellers) can’t assume that every iPhone or iPad user also owns a Mac, I am making the following general suggestions for audiobook purchasers on each book website where .M4B audiobook files are sold:
- Android users: Use the free Sirin app (which imports any non-DRMed .M4B file).
- Apple Mac users: use the Books (Libros) app.
- Apple iPhone/iPad users: use the free BookPlayer app (which imports any non-DRMed .M4B file).
- Windows 10 and Windows 11 users: use the free Audibly app (which imports any non-DRMed .M4B file).
Of course, all experienced users of any other audiobook apps are welcome to use their favorite one, and they probably won’t even read those instructions I include on those websites.
A very short history of my involvement with book and audiobook publication/distribution
- In 2010, I interviewed Victoria Mesas García of an audiobook production company from Spain. (Victoria Mesas Garcia later performed the female voice in the opening of my award-winning CapicúaFM podcast, which just turned 10-years old.)
- In 2011, I published the first book of my own authory. (To date, I have published 13 titles of my own authory. This excludes the 19 authors from 11 countries I have helped to write, edit, publish and do wide distribution.)
- In 2017, I published the first audiobook for a Honduran client. She chose to hire a Chilean narrator who performed most of the content. However, since I had written the foreword and epilog for that book, I narrated those sections with my voice.
- So far as of today, I have recently produced and distributed five additional audiobooks in three languages so far in 2024, as indicated below:
El mundo según Teresa Di Sclafani, narrated mostly by Venezuelan professional voiceover talent CC Limardo, with a few sections narrated by the author. (This one is in Castilian, aka «Spanish» and has the widest distribution so far, since it was the first book we published in 2024 in all three formats: paperback, ebook and audiobook.)
Il mondo secondo Teresa Di Sclafani, narrated completely by Italian professional voiceover talent Federica Ferro. (This one is in Tuscan, i.e. standard Italian.)
The world according to Teresa Di Sclafani, narrated by Anya. (This one is in English.)
Santiago Valiente, narrated by Spaniard professional voiceover talent Luis Carlos de La Lombana Barros. (This one is in Castilian.)
Aquí estoy, Madre Tierra, self-narrated by the author, María Milagros Kowalski Alvarado. (This one is in Castilian.)
Please note that from the tradition of vinyl record jackets, single record jackets, and CD jackets, all audiobooks must have a square logo. The same thing occurred with audio podcasts for the same reasons. All of the above square audiobook logos were designed and created by Andreína Ascanio Toro, as were the rectangular flat ones for the respective ebooks and the CSB (cover-spine-back cover) of the respective print versions.
App to create proper .M4B audiobook files
Although an .M4A audio file (which can optionally include an image and chapter marks as used with some audio podcasts) is very similar to an .M4B, there are indeed some key differences. One of those differences affects which apps will play them, at all and/or by default. Although some online comments state that you can create an .M4B file with any type of .M4A file by simply renaming the extension of the file, some people have discovered that doing that creates an improper .H4B file which does not have guaranteed cross-platform compatibility. That’s why (for the purposes of commercial distribution of audiobooks from a dedicated ecommerce website like the ones I create for our client-authors), I would only use a completely proper .M4B file.
See my review of Audiobook Builder, an under US$10 app for macOS-only which creates proper .M4B files very well, including the square image and chapter marks which properly work with the navigation systems of the above-mentioned audiobook consumption apps. I clarify that Audiobook Builder is not an audio editor, but an audio authoring tool for audiobooks, using pre-edited audio and graphic files. Audiobook Builder can export .M4B or .M4A files, but I only use it to create .M4B files for the reasons explained earlier.
SIDEBAR: FLAC for other wide distribution
When I publish the other audio files for audiobooks distributed via 37 or 38 other platforms, most of those want us to upload each chapter or section as a separate file. Considering that they are very likely going to re-encode the audio, I upload each chapter to the majority as a compressed-yet-lossless .FLAC audio file, which is one of the two types they accept.
I am only concerned about creating .M4B files myself for direct distribution via the ecommerce websites I create for myself and clients. When I use Audiobook Builder for that purpose, Audiobook Builder fortunately accepts the same lossless .FLAC files I use for the other distribution, including its metadata, which saves me a great amount of time. I point that out since the Audiobook Builder website and documentation don’t currently mention its capability of accepting uncompressed lossless .FLAC files, but fortunately Audiobook Builder indeed accepts them without any problem.
That way, in all cases, the final deliverable is only one generation of a lossy format, instead of more than one generation, for maximum quality and fidelity.
TecnoTur’s policies with authors
TecnoTur has never acted as a middleman with authors’ royalties. With our muli-year experience writing, editing, designing, publishing and performing wide distribution of four types of books (audiobooks, ebooks, multimedia books and print books), TecnoTur guides the author with all of the nuances which make the difference, including helping the author to create her/his own accounts, with all royalty payments sent directly to the author’s bank account.
Image credit
The main image of this article is courtesy of Daily Graphic (New York), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Related articles
- Wide book distribution in 2023: My 6 tips (February 2023)
- Apple Books app: terribly inconsistent among formats & platforms (July 2024)
- Review: Audiobook Builder, an ideal authoring tool for audiobooks created for direct distribution (July 2024)
- To DRM or not to DRM? That is the question for today’s digital content producers (January 2011)
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