Why I'm Selling My Audiobooks Direct to You

Hey, Realmers,

Quick story, then a small confession about rebellion.

You can now buy The Realms audiobooks straight from me, in my own store. From the guy who actually writes them. I want to tell you why, because the why is the whole point.

Here's the honest math. A professional audiobook, narrated by someone as good as Armen Taylor, costs me somewhere between $5,000 to $9,000 to produce. Every book. When that book sells on Audible, I keep about 25 percent. That's the ceiling, not the floor. And after their discounting and the way credits are counted, my actual take usually lands under two dollars a sale. On a lot of my books, closer to a buck fifty.

Sit with that for a second. A $5,000 audiobook, earning under two dollars a sale, needs roughly 2,500 sales before it earns me a single dollar of profit. Two thousand five hundred sales. Per book. And the more expensive ones need far more.

And it may be heading in the wrong direction. The whole industry is drifting toward Spotify-style "listen to everything for one flat fee" subscriptions, and Audible keeps expanding that way. A lot of us authors expect that eventually most titles get pulled into an all-you-can-stream pool that pays pennies per hour instead of per sale. If that day comes, that already-thin number gets thinner.

This is the part where some authors throw up their hands and switch to AI narration to make the numbers work. I understand why. But I won't do it. Not to these characters, and not to you. I'm committed to keeping a real human narrator employed for my series.

Selling direct is how I keep affording real human narrators.

So, I built a better home for my stuff. Here are some of the benefits for you:

• When you purchase audiobooks from me, you own the files. Real MP3s, yours to keep. Put them on your phone, listen on your computer, save them on a backup drive, wherever you like. Not rented, not locked to one app that can change the rules whenever it wants.
• It's cheaper. Every single audiobook in my store costs less than one $14.99 Audible credit. Usually, a good bit less.
• You'll be the first to get any new audiobook. New releases land in my store first, and always a month or more in advance of other retailers. True Realmers cut to the front of the line, always.
• In my opinion, the BookFunnel app is just better. Their player is clean and simple. No "you might also like," no countdown timers, nobody shoving three more things at you while you're trying to press play. No more spending five minutes looking for the last book you were listening to amidst an onslaught of gibberish.

And yes, fine, I'll say the quiet part out loud. This is a tiny act of defiance. A few enormous platforms take the majority cut of almost everything creators make, and every direct sale is one small vote for the people who actually make the things you love.

It's not a coincidence that more authors are selling direct. I'll bet that within a couple of years nearly all of us will, because it's the only model where the math actually works for the person making the art. I write entire books about underdogs taking on impossibly powerful forces and winning through sheer stubbornness. Consider this me practicing what I preach. We are not exactly storming the Doom Vault here, but it's something.

There's one more reason I chose to build my own store, and it's the one I'm most excited about. When you buy from me, I can keep in touch and communicate directly with you.

None of this is a knock on you if you listen on Audible. Truly. I use it myself. Plenty of you own my books there already, and I love you for it. I'm just handing you a second option that happens to be better for both of us.

You can visit the store here.

Thank you for being here, for listening, and for caring about the small, principled, slightly stubborn stuff that keeps indie authors alive.

All the best,

C.M. Carney

P.S. The store will expand later this year with merch and signed books and other swag.