Today, we’re excited to introduce a long-requested feature: Royalty Share Plus!
With Royalty Share Plus, authors and publishers can invest in their audiobooks by contributing to the production costs and accessing an even greater community of Producers. This new payment option is an evolution of the Royalty Share concept, allowing ACX 
Rights Holders to negotiate a per-finished-hour payment for their projects in addition to splitting royalties with their Producer. Once the audiobook production is complete, Rights Holders send the Royalty Share Plus fee to their Producer, and ACX will split your royalties once the audiobook becomes available for sale.
For Producers, this means building a portfolio of steady residual income and paying everyday expenses. Producers tell us this option helps them pay for supporting services like audio engineering, take care of everyday expenses, upgrade their recording equipment, and expedite production to create even better audiobooks. Authors and Publishers can discover talented performers that may not have been previously accessible to take your audiobook production to new heights.
We hope you’ll consider Royalty Share Plus for your next audiobook production. We can’t wait to hear what you do next!
Learn more about Royalty Share Plus and all of your production options on ACX.
Sounds like a simple fee in addition to 50-50 royalties. Not very clearly telling us why this is a benefit to the author or narrator. Maybe it is, but it doesn’t sound like it. May make it clearer?
With Royalty Share, the producer has to front any production costs (performance, editing, mastering) and eventually earn it back. With PFH/buyout there’s no residual income. With Hybrid, the RH can pay for or share costs in the production, and the producer can earn residual income. Benefit to the RH: access to a higher quality of talent for lower upfront cost. Benefit to the Producer: some immediate revenue, without giving up the seven years of residuals.
Many have been negotiating this type of deal on the side. Bringing it into the ACX contract is a win for everyone. And, it’s just an option. No one who likes the old way is forced to use it.
This benefits the author because now they can get the attention of narrators who otherwise would be pfh only. This benefits narrators because they no longer have to either swallow the cost of production or try to negotiate outside of acx. After that, its the royalty share agreement.
Thanks Scott. Soon to be active. John Clouston
John Clouston http://www.johnclouston.com 613-872-1110 Clients First
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Finally!
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For Samyann: Many experienced narrator/producers are unwilling to shoulder the entire risk by investing in the “hard costs” of producing an audiobook – proofing, mastering, etc without the assurance of any income at all, which is the result of a Royalty Share production that does not sell. Some of us like sharing Royalties for seven years, but also have those costs. So this makes the project attractive to a wider range of producers, which seems a nice option for you if you are looking for your book to be released in the best possible audio version. Sounds like a win-win to me! One more thing: I’ve heard that some authors put very little effort into promoting their audio version, and experience shows that potential reader/listeners are much more influenced in their selections by the identity of the author than of the narrator, so we need them to actively promote our collaborations. Even a small Per-Finished-Hour payment constitutes having some “skin in the game” for both parties. I’m sure some of my even more experienced colleagues will second this – I see you only posted this shortly ago. “Harry the Librarian”
samyann, that ‘simple fee’ opens up a lot of possibilities for both producers and rights holders.
Producers who are outsourcing any part of their post-production will have the possibility of getting that work covered so they don’t have to risk losing money on a Royalty Share book. They can also have the comfort of being compensated for at least some of their time if the book does’t sell.
Rights holders who can’t afford a true professional Pay for Production rate can get access to a higher tier of producer who wouldn’t consider their book under a classic Royalty Share contract.
And in a more general sense, it now allows for ‘shared risk’ contracts. In Royalty Share, the risk is almost entirely on the producer. In Pay for Production, the risk is almost entirely on the rights holder. Now in RS+, there can be shared risk.
This simple improvement will lead to more books being recorded at a higher level of quality.
This is a fantastic development. Thanks to ACX for implementing it!
how to get started?
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If I were to go this route, how long does the audio producer receive a share? Is it for the life of the book?
jacob76dem a Royalty Share contract splits for 7 years. Leave the blog site and go to acx.com check the links on the bottom of the page. Everything is fully explained. Good luck to you.