📑 Attack Surface: audiobook for the third Little Brother book (Kickstarter)

Cory Doctorow is trying to disrupt the market by running his own Kickstarter, rather than depending upon platform capitalists. Steven Melendez unpacks this,while Doctorow elaborates on this further.

So let’s say this does really well in audio, selling, say, 10,000 copies. That works out really well for me, as I’m the publisher for this one, because I keep 95% of that (Kickstarter gets 5%).
By contrast, if my publisher sold this with Audible, they’d get 70% (Amazon takes 30%), and then I’d get 25% of that (17.5% of the gross). That means I earn 542% of what my take would be with a publisher/Audible on these sales.

Writing for the Publishers Weekly, Doctorow talks about his hope of being the ‘pebble that starts the avalanche’:

I want to be the pebble that starts the avalanche that changes the face of the mountain. Think of it: if more bestselling authors declined to offer their audiobooks under Audible’s current DRM-enforced terms, and Audible became the place on the web where you couldn’t get a bestselling audiobook, how much pressure that would create for fairer terms?