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Audible opens $20m fund that will reward authors using social media to help sales

As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold.

With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend. Authors who sign up will be encouraged to use social media to promote their work, and will receive $1 for every audiobook sold from Audible.com, Audible.co.uk or iTunes, on top of their royalties.

"Nothing gets attention like saying 'we will top up your per sale income'," said Atwood. "That's not to be sneezed at."

According to Audible's chief executive Donald Katz the motivation for the scheme is not "purely altruistic".

"We are willing to do this because I think it will grow our sales and the authors' sales," he said. "The fact is people buy a Neil Gaiman, not a HarperCollins or a Simon & Schuster, so it is for us to connect with the writers and hopefully wake them up to what they can do. If it works it can become a channel of membership and sales."

Acquired by Amazon in 2008 for $300m, the company's last published results were released in 2007, but according to Katz the company is making "many hundreds of millions of dollars in turnover, and membership base growth is up 40% a year".

Authors signing up to the scheme will be given tools such as audio samples and links to use on social media to connect with readers and drive audiobook sales on Audible – but the $1 per sale will be paid whether they promote themselves or not.

"There is really a new class of authors, and Margaret Atwood is one of them, that has figured out that in the digital age, authors can help themselves," said Katz. Atwood, a regular Twitter user with more than 300,000 followers, said she would "certainly" be letting her fans know about the new Audible scheme, calling the $20m fund "a vote of confidence" in writers. "It's an author-friendly move, and I'm in favour of those," she said.

"There has been a centrifugal force in the publishing industry, where even upper midlist authors are getting lower advances and it's very difficult and very stressful to do things the old way – ceding all responsibility to agents and publishers. That's done," said Katz, an author himself. "People like me don't even get sent on tours any more … This is an era of self-reliance which is there for the taking [and] this is the last generation of authors who can think of themselves as Victorian gentlemen living above the marketplace, because publishers and agents don't have the wherewithal to support them".
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