The Story

Welcome to Audiblegate, the public site of the Fair Deal for Authors and Narrators group.

We are currently at war with Audible, who have for years clawed back sales from authors secretly through opaque reporting, while they gave away our books via their over-generous "Easy Exchange" policy for readers.

Since October 2020, when a glitch at ACX, (associated Amazon company through which independent authors post their books to Audible) revealed the true depth of the returns, we authors, narrators and rights holders have waged a war of words with Audible to force them to reveal our returns data and pay us compensation. Audible charges 100% of the cost of returned and exchanged books to authors, narrators and rights holders, all at zero cost to Audible. Audible keeps the membership fees and keep us under contract while they give away our content in an unauthorized lending scheme.

We've been working on this in a private Facebook group

Fair Deal for Authors & Narrators

but now this is our public face.

Audible has granted a few minor concessions, however, these appear only delivered to appease us so we won't continue pressing them for our data and compensation for their quasi-library scheme for which none of us signed onto in our contracts.

Readers, we need your help too in spreading the word. If you want authors to continue to create audiobooks, we need companies to pay us fairly. We value you and know you've got our back. This isn't about taking away the ability to return a book but about a fair, honest return when you're not enjoying a book and don't want to continue reading or you've made an error in purchasing.

We will continue to demand fair treatment until we have satisfaction, but we are also in the process of creating a new place for authors to bring readers to purchase their audiobooks. This will shepherd in a new era, we believe, where independent publishers become independent again and less reliant on Amazon companies.

After all, we bring the readers to Amazon and Audible to buy our books, we can also bring them elsewhere, where we control price and pay reasonable selling fees. Paying 60/75% to any company simply to host your book for sale on their platform is outrageous.

Along the way, though, we learned that Audible has been misleading authors, misrepresenting earnings and calculation rates. They have ignored their own contracts with authors and have been paying us incorrectly for years. When we brought this to their attention, they denied this.

So, we call on legislators around the world to examine Audible CEO Bob Carrigan, Don Katz, and their co-conspirators in these manipulative practices against not only authors, narrators and rights holders but also against consumers. 

Audible has employed an #antitrust #anticompetitive system for years to habituate readers, while manipulating sales prices to prevent competition. They have underpaid authors in manipulating payouts through concealment and denial.  

Join our journey. Join our fight. Join our revolution.