Every newpub author should read this post. The one item you nailed that too many indies can't get through their heads is that royalty sharing means giving someone else equity in your work. In every other business, the word for someone with an equity stake is called a partner. No business owner in his right mind would make a specialist who performs a one-off job a partner. That's a contractor who, as you said, should operate on a work-for-hire basis.
I think re: equity if both parties had full knowledge and there was no asymmetry there would never be an agreement to split royalties in this case. The only problem would be that most narrators wouldn't want to work for the honestly discounted rate, and I wouldn't blame them. They want to get paid like everybody else for their effort.
"Of course, maybe new AI voice features will change all of that and render the whole thing moot. That’s for another day."
I think that day is soon approaching.
My current source of income is online freelance work, a significant amount of which involves the menial side of training AI, and especially voice recognition and text-to-speech AIs. This includes tasks like providing voice recordings, transcribing other peoples' voice recordings, analyzing the accuracy of other peoples' transcriptions, analyzing the pronunciation and naturalness of AI voices, etc. I was doing it before I even knew it was being used to train AI (in the beginning, I thought clients just wanted accurate transcriptions of audio recordings for some reason).
In some of these freelance jobs, I was tasked with listening to samples of AI voices reading books and determining the accuracy of their pronunciations and/or voice naturalness. Some of them weren't good, but some of them were VERY good. At first, I thought some of the recordings were AIs and others were real voice actors, only later realizing that they were all AI voices. And this was all in the testing phase a couple of years ago. They have no doubt gotten better due to further training with the feedback data provided by me and thousands of other freelancers.
There are already some high-quality AI text-to-speech products on the market, some of which are made specifically for creating things like audiobooks. Some come with a library of voices, and some provide the ability to train the model with your own voice. They will likely get increasingly better very quickly.
Hey David, very interesting post and full of a lot of information regarding audiobooks I wasn’t aware of. Thanks for being so willing to discuss these topics and for being transparent.
If you had a moment, I was curious what you think regarding royalties being split or shared between authors and the publisher if the publisher assumes the cost of publishing the book instead of the author paying up front? I’ve been trying to come up with a decent contract but have gone back and forth on what is symmetrical like you described in your post. I trust your analytic opinion. Thanks for sharing your industry knowledge!
Royalty split with a publisher is standard practice. That's the way they usually make money, but they are also fronting the investment and ongoing costs (printing, etc.) and after a certain amount of time (usually out of print) the rights revert to the author and he can publish the book elsewhere. That way the publisher has equity as long as they are indeed publishing the book. "Advances" are usually an advance on the author's portion of royalties; he doesn't receive additional money until his portion of royalties earned through sales exceeds the amount of the advance (same with record contracts). Some authors never "recoup" and thus never get paid again.
The rates vary and I'm not an expert, so I can't tell you what is standard or fair in the market right now (which is shifting all the time). Usually it is fairly low for the author, say about 10 or 15%.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining. I'm learning a lot of this as I go, so it's been a crash course in publishing over the past 2 years. Your essays are super informative and I look forward to reading more from you in the future. Thanks! Keep up the great work.
Honestly I like some audiobooks, principalement for old books and I like making some for older books but not my own. As to getting an audiobook make I'm not in any hurry and prefer to keep polishing those works I've completed not yet published, and working on my serials hereon Substack then go chasing after any audiobooks.
But this was a great article, nice work Mr. Stewart, hopefully at some point the SW fans you have will finally read your Samurai books.
Every newpub author should read this post. The one item you nailed that too many indies can't get through their heads is that royalty sharing means giving someone else equity in your work. In every other business, the word for someone with an equity stake is called a partner. No business owner in his right mind would make a specialist who performs a one-off job a partner. That's a contractor who, as you said, should operate on a work-for-hire basis.
Thanks!
I think re: equity if both parties had full knowledge and there was no asymmetry there would never be an agreement to split royalties in this case. The only problem would be that most narrators wouldn't want to work for the honestly discounted rate, and I wouldn't blame them. They want to get paid like everybody else for their effort.
"Of course, maybe new AI voice features will change all of that and render the whole thing moot. That’s for another day."
I think that day is soon approaching.
My current source of income is online freelance work, a significant amount of which involves the menial side of training AI, and especially voice recognition and text-to-speech AIs. This includes tasks like providing voice recordings, transcribing other peoples' voice recordings, analyzing the accuracy of other peoples' transcriptions, analyzing the pronunciation and naturalness of AI voices, etc. I was doing it before I even knew it was being used to train AI (in the beginning, I thought clients just wanted accurate transcriptions of audio recordings for some reason).
In some of these freelance jobs, I was tasked with listening to samples of AI voices reading books and determining the accuracy of their pronunciations and/or voice naturalness. Some of them weren't good, but some of them were VERY good. At first, I thought some of the recordings were AIs and others were real voice actors, only later realizing that they were all AI voices. And this was all in the testing phase a couple of years ago. They have no doubt gotten better due to further training with the feedback data provided by me and thousands of other freelancers.
There are already some high-quality AI text-to-speech products on the market, some of which are made specifically for creating things like audiobooks. Some come with a library of voices, and some provide the ability to train the model with your own voice. They will likely get increasingly better very quickly.
Some authors on twitter have been saying that there is already an Amazon beta for AI audiobooks you can opt into if invited.
I haven't been invited though.
Hey David, very interesting post and full of a lot of information regarding audiobooks I wasn’t aware of. Thanks for being so willing to discuss these topics and for being transparent.
If you had a moment, I was curious what you think regarding royalties being split or shared between authors and the publisher if the publisher assumes the cost of publishing the book instead of the author paying up front? I’ve been trying to come up with a decent contract but have gone back and forth on what is symmetrical like you described in your post. I trust your analytic opinion. Thanks for sharing your industry knowledge!
Royalty split with a publisher is standard practice. That's the way they usually make money, but they are also fronting the investment and ongoing costs (printing, etc.) and after a certain amount of time (usually out of print) the rights revert to the author and he can publish the book elsewhere. That way the publisher has equity as long as they are indeed publishing the book. "Advances" are usually an advance on the author's portion of royalties; he doesn't receive additional money until his portion of royalties earned through sales exceeds the amount of the advance (same with record contracts). Some authors never "recoup" and thus never get paid again.
The rates vary and I'm not an expert, so I can't tell you what is standard or fair in the market right now (which is shifting all the time). Usually it is fairly low for the author, say about 10 or 15%.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining. I'm learning a lot of this as I go, so it's been a crash course in publishing over the past 2 years. Your essays are super informative and I look forward to reading more from you in the future. Thanks! Keep up the great work.
Honestly I like some audiobooks, principalement for old books and I like making some for older books but not my own. As to getting an audiobook make I'm not in any hurry and prefer to keep polishing those works I've completed not yet published, and working on my serials hereon Substack then go chasing after any audiobooks.
But this was a great article, nice work Mr. Stewart, hopefully at some point the SW fans you have will finally read your Samurai books.