How to Publish an Audiobook: Every Route, Royalty and Rule

The routes, side by side

What each route pays you

Royalty rates are not quite comparable: ACX pays a share of Audible’s net receipts at a price Audible sets, while Spotify for Authors, Kobo and Google pay a share of the list price you set. Still, they show where the money is.

ACX: Audible, Amazon and Apple Books

ACX is the self-serve route to Audible. To sell there your book must already be a Kindle ebook; you claim it, narrate it yourself or find a narrator, approve the audio and submit it for review, and titles that pass go on sale on Audible, Amazon and Apple Books.²

• Royalties: 50% exclusive, 30% non-exclusive under Audible’s new royalty model; titles still on the legacy model get 40% or 25% until it ends at the end of 2026.¹
• Exclusive means only Audible, Amazon and Apple Books sell it. Royalty share deals with a narrator must be exclusive.¹
• The files must meet ACX’s audio rules; see ACX requirements.³
• No AI narration unless Audible has authorised it.³

Going wide: Voices by INaudio and Author’s Republic

Voices by INaudio, formerly Findaway Voices by Spotify, distributes to retail, subscription, library and K–12 channels with no exclusivity, and you keep all your rights.⁴ You keep 80% of the royalties it receives; stores pay it 40–50% of list on single sales and 30–40% on subscriptions.⁵ Most stores go live in 2 to 4 weeks; Audible takes about 45 to 60 days, and needs your ebook on Amazon (not claimed on ACX).^6,7,8

Author’s Republic distributes to “Audible, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, Hoopla, Libby, and more”, and authors keep 80% of earned royalties.¹⁹

ACX vs Voices by INaudio, head to head

The two routes most authors weigh against each other. Voices by INaudio is the distributor Spotify called Findaway Voices until INaudio took it over on 1 August 2025; Spotify’s own page now says it “was previously called Findaway Voices by Spotify”.³⁵ Both can put your book on Audible; only one lets you sell it everywhere else too.

The room tone rule is the one difference in the files: mastered for ACX’s 1 to 5 seconds at the start, a file can fail INaudio’s 0.5 to 1 second. The spec checker tests a set of files against both. To sell on Audible and everywhere else, one way is ACX non-exclusive for Audible, Amazon and Apple, plus INaudio for the other stores with its Audible delivery left off, since INaudio can’t deliver a book already claimed on ACX.⁸

Direct to Spotify, Kobo and Google

• Spotify for Authors: free, unlimited and non-exclusive; MP3, WAV or FLAC files and a square cover (3000 × 3000 px recommended); live “within 3 business days”.⁹ It pays 50% of your suggested retail price on single sales, and a share of a pool for Premium listening.¹⁰ You can opt in to have Voices by INaudio deliver your book to other stores, except AI-narrated ones.¹¹
• Kobo Writing Life: 45% of list at $2.99 or more, 35% below, 32% for paid subscription tokens; never exclusive; MP3 only, each file up to 200 MB and 2 GB in total; live in 24 to 72 hours. The audio tab is rolling out, so you may need to email Kobo to switch it on, and Kobo doesn’t distribute audiobooks to libraries.^15,16
• Google Play Books: free to sell, though Google says only select partners can sell audiobooks at the moment. Files can be MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, ZIP or LPF, 5 minutes to 100 hours long.^12,13 Its own AI auto-narration pays 52%.¹⁴
• Apple Books: not direct. Apple takes audiobooks through preferred partners (Bookwire, De Marque, Draft2Digital, Ingram CoreSource, Lantern, OTOBANK, PublishDrive and Zebralution), with no exclusivity; ACX also delivers to Apple.¹⁷

Step by step

1. 1

   Check you own the audio rights

   Your publishing contract may already include them. Self-published authors usually hold them.

2. 2

   Get it narrated

   Narrate it yourself, hire a narrator for a fee per finished hour, offer ACX royalty share, or use AI narration where the store allows it.

3. 3

   Produce files to spec

   One chapter per file, mastered to the levels each store asks for (ACX: RMS −23 to −18 dB, peaks under −3 dB, noise under −60 dB, 192 kbps CBR MP3), plus a square cover.

4. 4

   Choose your routes

   ACX for Audible, Amazon and Apple (exclusive or not), then a wide distributor, Spotify for Authors, Kobo and Google for everywhere else, unless you go exclusive.

5. 5

   Upload, price and submit

   Each route reviews the files. Most titles go live within days to weeks; Audible through a distributor can take one to two months.

Exclusive or wide?

Exclusive with ACX pays the highest Audible rate and is the only way to use royalty share, but locks the audiobook to three stores for the term; a Pay-for-Production title can move to non-exclusive after 90 days on sale.^1,20 Going wide gives up 20 points of Audible royalty in exchange for every other store and library.

AI narration and publishing

Rules differ by store: ACX allows it only where Audible has authorised it; Google, Apple (through its own digital narration), Spotify and Kobo accept it with labelling.^{3,14,18,22,15} See AI audiobooks for each store’s rules and how to make one.