![]() “It was out of the ordinary and it was a bit funny, it wasn’t just rude. He remembers one, in particular, that he flagged as a scam. He turned to ACX, and has recorded ten or 11 audiobooks since, which is prolific when you consider one of them was The Bible over 365 Days. “I remember walking on stage to do a dress rehearsal of Strauss’ opera ‘Elektra’ with the Bournemouth symphony orchestra… as we walked on stage, the whole country shut down,” he says. This time last year he had three years of opera and theatre work booked in, but it was wiped out almost overnight when coronavirus hit the UK. Peter Wilson is a classically trained opera singer with bushy Beethoven hair – he calls it lockdown-meets-headphone hair – and 25 years of experience on stage. If we determine that the print/eBook edition of a work submitted through ACX has been removed from sale at Amazon or does not meet the content guidelines, we cease distribution of the audiobook.” All audiobooks distributed through ACX are subject to Amazon's Content Guidelines. “There are 1,824 titles open for audition.”Īn Audible spokesperson said: “To provide the best experience for ACX Producers and Audible listeners, we require that the print/eBook edition for each title submitted through ACX remain available for sale at Amazon during production and through the length of its distribution with Audible. #OPENAUDIBLE FAKE FREE#“If I go to ACX right now, there are 402,930.” This is the number of free profiles set up on the site since 2011, rather than people actively using it to produce audiobooks right now – but it’s still a massive growth. “When I started on ACX, there were roughly 40,000 narrators listed on the site,” Rennie says. The classic gobbledegook scam title has become rarer since the promo codes had their cash value withdrawn, but the sheer number of new narrators who’ve joined since could almost have cancelled out any impact of this by adding to the numbers of newcomers likely to fall for brand new scams. Most likely, nobody would, but the scammers could still get codes – which had a cash value. Rennie’s description of the ruse is that scammers would create a book by scraping content from webpages online into a barely formatted ebook, then list it as a royalty split deal on ACX, so narrators would only get paid when anyone bought it. Roberts, “gurus” were making tens of thousands of dollars a month by gaming the promo codes. According to self-publishing YouTuber Dale L. It seemed like a win-win – and then the scammers showed up. #OPENAUDIBLE FAKE CODE#These codes could be given to members of the public, who could listen to the book for free, and Audible would pay out a royalty whenever a code was redeemed. When it launched in 2011 – and right up until March of 2020 – Audible would give out up to 200 promotional codes to anyone who completed production on an audiobook, no matter what the content. These junk books are a hangover from Amazon’s original marketing strategy for Audible, which accidentally incentivised the proliferation of twaddle. “It was very stilted and awkward for me, and they were like, ‘Oh, I love it, it’s great…’ I hated it.” She was asked to just drag the words out really, really, really slowly. “The problem came when the book probably had about two hours’ worth of narration, and they wanted it to be three hours,” she explains. She’s remembering one of her first and only experiences on ACX, when she secured a gig reading a book of children’s stories. “It seemed like the perfect job for me, because I have children, and I love to read out loud to my children,” says Aleesha Bake, a voiceover artist, appearing on Zoom from within the monochrome, chequered walls of a hermetically sealed StudioBricks recording booth. It’s here that these nonsense books can be used as scams. Occasionally, books not too far from this make it on to Amazon’s flagship audiobook platform, Audible, and more commonly can be found on Audible’s behind-the-scenes platform, where authors can list work and narrators can audition and record it: the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX). ![]()
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