Hnngh. The Audible “hack” is making the rounds again, with people claiming you can use your Audible credit to listen to a book and then return it “for free.” While I am the first among many to say “fuck Amazon and we should gullotine Jeff Bezos,” I need you all to know it’s not Amazon refunding you.
It’s the authors.
They take that out of our royalties. And that’s after they take 80% of our royalties on sales we do make.
(Note: Also, do not assume that your credit is worth the price listing that Amazon shows. Amazon does not pay us the cost of the listing. ((WHICH THEY PICK, we cannot set our own prices on audiobooks and then that forces us to use the Amazon price for the rest of the market!!)) What we get is 20% of the credit’s value, so my book might appear on Audible for $20-30. However, if you received an Amazon credit for one of those $4.99 deals, I’d get 20% of $4.99. Yes, it’s fucked, it’s all fucked. Yes, other audio retailers do the exact same thing. This is one of the reasons authors don’t make half as much money as people think they do.)
This became such a big issue that they had to make it impossible to return books after a certain point without talking to a customer service representative, because people were using Kindle/Audible and Amazon’s return policy “like a library,” and some authors (myself included) were getting royalty checks that showed negative income.
At this point, I don’t even know if the Audible “hack” still works (Amazon has made changes to protect authors from this kind of thing at a glacial pace), but I need you to know it’s not Amazon that’s refunding you. This isn’t a fun little “fuck Amazon” thing. The way Amazon has it set up, it’s directly fucking the authors over.
So, yeah. Obviously, if you download something and can’t get into it, or if something pops up on the author’s side that makes you not want to support them anymore, yeah, process that return. Yeet the bitch. But please don’t use it “like a library.”
It’s really harrowing to see your predicted income based on sales and then find out you’re getting one-tenth of that because of refunds. And it’s not even because people didn’t like your book. They’re just using the wrong place like a library and fucking over your algorithm as well, because once you get too many returns, you stop getting promoted.
Try using a library. You can access places like @queerliblib for FREE provided you have a US library account that you’ve hooked up to Libby. It’s a little bit of work, but once you’ve got a card number, you’re golden.
Just, y'know, throwing it out there because I don’t think people realize this is how it works. You’re not taking something back to Walmart, and Walmart is eating the refund before dumping the item in the garbage. Amazon takes the refund, turns to the author, and takes it off our plates.
Note: this does not affect Kindle Unlimited. Flip through the end pages to give the author maximum pages read, and then return that bad boy so the author can get paid. But also, please, maybe think about switching to a Kobo+ account instead. It offers the same subscription-based membership without demanding exclusivity, so authors aren’t locked into just Amazon the way they are with KU. (Royalty rates are roughly the same, but it’s a better deal in terms of allowing broader market access.)
This has been a rambling and exhausted PSA from your local peddler of weres.
^^^^^^^
(one note on our memberships: you don’t need to have another existing library card in libby! It works even if we’re your only one!)
Oh nice! I remember needing to use my original card to sign up, but maybe I’m remembering wrong! This is excellent news!
If I remeber correctly, you’ve said Kobo paid okay royalties. Is that still true?
(Also i’ve been thinking about starting Kobo+ but if they are similar to KU, maybe i’ll stick w ordinary kobo)
The pay is comparable to Kindle. Most online retailers offer about the same.
Where Kindle Unlimited becomes a real pain in the ass is their demand for exclusivity, which means books currently in Kindle Unlimited cannot be sold anywhere else or distributed to libraries while the KU contract is still in effect.
Kobo+ pays similar rates, but it has the advantage of not forcing an exclusivity contract, which means you can still push your work to a broader market and retain library access.
It’s a better deal for authors if you use Kobo+ purely from that regard.
Does anyone know about libro.fm? I’ve been using them since you can use them to support a local bookstore but am not sure about their royalty situation.
The royalty situation is about the same. It’s expensive to host/stream audio files, so unless you’re buying the audiobook files directly from the authors, we’re earning roughly the same across the board.
Libro.fm has the advantage of having a good affiliate program for authors (same as Bookshop.org, which they are a part of) and, as you pointed out, supporting indie book stores.
So while the royalties might be about the same (and again, most places that offer audiobooks are paying roughly the same rates, at least where indie and self-published authors are concerned), it does have the advantage of not having the moral bankruptcy of Amazon.
Returns are also processed the same way across the board.
If someone returns my book, whether through Kobo, Libro, or another platform, it still comes out of my check.
It’s just more common for people to abuse the return policy with Audible because Audible/Amazon used to promote the “reuse your credit!” as part of their marketing (because it never hurt them, just the authors/voice actors), and because it’s widely promoted by online influencers because that Audible sponsorship money is lucrative and it’s a “fun neat hack” to tell your viewers they can essentially listen to books “for free,” thus ensuring they click on your link and get you that sponsorship money.
Every time you have GenAI make you an anime waifu with three titties and a dumptruck ass a family doesn’t get to have a drink or bathe.
Every time you ask Copilot to write you a PowerShell script to stroke your boss’ ego, a city experiences a brownout.
Every time you chat with your AI “girlfriend” a farmer doesn’t get to water their animals.
Using these tools actively hurts you and your community, while at the same time enriching some shitheel who would happily step on your neck to make an additional dollar. Don’t use them. Actively remove them from devices you own. Disable them whenever possible. Go out of your way to avoid them. It’s honestly not hard. You’ve been using the internet just fine without GenAI hallucinating at you.
So the government just defunded PBS and NPR which is fucked. That being said, the public can cover the damage if we orginize and donate.
Only about $1.60 of tax dollars per US citizen per year are spent on the public broadcasting budget. NPR and PBS offer beong able to make small monthly donations, some being 7$ per month or lower if you want.
If you want to donate 1.60$ per month to your local station, you can multiply how much funding they get from you by 12. If you do their monthly donation of $7 per month, your donation can equal the tax dollars of 54 people spent on public broadcasting per year.
If you want to donate to your local station, look them up by your town here to make sure your local stations get helped specifically:
FYI subscribing for $5 a month to any local station gets you access to the PBS Passport app, meaning you can stream a bunch of PBS content, hopefully including the upcoming Ken Burns documentary about the Revolutionary War that’s coming out this fall.
