What each road actually gives you

On a royalty-share arrangement you pay no cash up front and split earnings with the narrator for years. It is the cheapest way in and the most expensive way to succeed, because a book that sells well pays that split forever.

Paying per finished hour buys you a narrator, not a production. Direction, casting, sound design, score and mastering are separate trades, and on a marketplace they are usually nobody's job.

A production house carries direction and quality control, delivers masters you own outright, and can put a full cast, effects and a mixed score behind the words.

Rights, exclusivity and the long term

Read the exclusivity terms before anything else. An exclusive distribution arrangement raises the royalty rate and closes every other storefront to you for the length of the term.

Whoever holds the masters holds the book. If you commission production and own the files, you can move to any storefront, in any territory, in any future format. Keep that in writing.

Here, 7.000000000000001% of your word count buys production and the masters, with no royalty split and no exclusivity of any kind. A 50% deposit begins the build.

How to decide

If the book is a single-narrator work, your list is small, and cash is the binding constraint, a royalty-share marketplace is a defensible start.

If the book has a cast, a world, effects, or a backlist behind it — or if you intend to sell it in more than one storefront — commission the production and keep the masters. The Ledger of Rights in this Workshop will lay out exactly which rights you are trading away in each arrangement.

Asked and answered

Is ACX royalty share worth it?

It is worth it when you have no cash and modest expectations. If the book sells, the split you signed will cost far more than production would have.

Who owns the audiobook masters?

Whoever the agreement says. On royalty share, rights are entangled with the narrator and the distributor. On commissioned production here, you own the masters outright.

Can I use my own producer and still sell on Audible?

Yes. Independently produced audiobooks can be distributed to Audible and every other storefront, provided you have not signed an exclusive arrangement elsewhere.