ALLi signed up to support the work of these dedicated authors in a variety of ways–as did a number of other author organizations around the world, and thousands of authors and other rights holders. (See Watchdog John Doppler’s explanatory blog post here). On investigation, ACX’s grading was further downgraded to “Caution” and and narrators in their campaign to win a fair deal from Audible. Disturbed by the evidence, we changed ACX’s rating from “Recommended” to “Pending” while our watchdog desk carried out further research.
A smaller group of dedicated volunteers, bringing various skills that fit just right for the campaign needs, began to dig deeper, and to reach out to the wider author community, narrators and producers, and outside interested parties.Īround this time, the group came to ALLi’s attention. In sharing the replies they were receiving from Audible, a disturbing pattern quickly emerged, both in accounting practices and communications with rights holders. On realising the potential extent of rights holder losses, an Australian indie author, Susan May, founded a Facebook group Fair Deal for Rights Holders and Narrators. The group connected audiobook authors and narrators together, and began to gather information and evidence about the various anomalies they were witnessing. The glitch also revealed how lack of transparency and opaque accounting practices made it all but impossible for an individual author to get a picture of how Audible / ACX calculated their income.
If a book was “returned”, Audible deducted the money they had originally paid to the author, publisher or narrator–even though the listener had fully consumed and enjoyed the book. The glitch seemed to show that Audible had been secretly deducting the costs of this “returns” scheme from rights holders’ share of the revenue, not their own. Under this program, audiobook listeners are encouraged to swap out a book once they’ve listened to it, at no cost. In October 2020, a reporting error on the Amazon's audiobook self-publishing platform ACX revealed some worrying indications about how Amazon Audible’s “easy exchange and return” program was funded. If you’re a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) or a regular reader of our Self-Publishing Advice blog, you’ll be aware that ALLi has been supporting the work of the author pressure group, TERM, The Equitable Rights Movement in the campaign known as “Audiblegate”.
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