Everything a creator asks before publishing an audiobook on Digitalbook — what it costs, what you keep, and how you get paid.
Digitalbook Publish is the creator portal behind Digitalbook.io. It is where authors, narrators, voice artists and small publishers upload their own audiobooks, set their own price, and sell them to the listeners already browsing the store.
Digitalbook.io itself is a free audiobook and ebook discovery site built on public-domain works. This portal is the other side of it: the books you publish here are your own recordings, sold rather than given away.
Nothing. There is no upfront fee, no subscription and no charge per title. Upload as many audiobooks as you like and share revenue only when a book actually sells.
Yes. Publishing needs an account, because a book has to belong to someone and royalties have to be paid to someone. Sign in with an email address, Google or Apple — there is no separate application to fill in and no payment details to give us to get started.
Audiobooks you hold the rights to. That means your own recording of your own work, a recording you have a licence to distribute, or a narration of something in the public domain.
You are asked to declare that when you submit a book, and the declaration is part of the distribution agreement. Uploading someone else’s recording is the one thing that will get a book removed rather than corrected.
Not yet. The portal publishes audiobooks today; the Ebooks tab in the dashboard is marked "Coming soon" rather than hidden so you can see it is planned. The reader-facing site lists both formats, but only audio can be uploaded here for now.
MP3 files, one per chapter, in the order you want them played. You add chapters in the audiobook form, name them, and reorder them there.
There is no minimum or maximum number of chapters. A single-file audiobook is simply a book with one chapter.
Your browser converts each chapter into an encrypted stream before it is uploaded — it is split into short segments and encrypted with an AES-128 key, and only that output is stored. The conversion runs on your machine, so:
One image, up to 5MB, which you crop in the portal. The crop tool enforces what a book cover has to be:
The finished cover is saved as a JPEG and scaled down if it is taller than 1080 pixels. You can replace or delete it at any time while the book is editable.
Yes, and it is worth spending time on: the clip is what a listener hears before deciding to buy. You trim it from one of your chapters in the portal, so there is no separate file to prepare and no audio editor to learn.
A title, a description, at least one genre and one language, and a price in the currency you want to sell in. The portal tells you what is still missing rather than failing at submission — the description has a formatting editor, and genres, languages and currency are pick-lists.
It moves from Draft to Pending Review and a moderator checks it. You are told the outcome in the portal — the notification bell and the activity log both record it — and the book lands on one of two states:
Tell us. If we decline a book or remove one we say why, and the agreement gives you 14 days to challenge that decision and gives us 14 days to answer it. Write to support@digitalbook.io.
Yes. Nothing here is permanent. Unpublishing a live book makes it Unlisted: it stays available to the people who already bought it and disappears from the store for everyone else. You can then correct it — a typo in the description, a chapter that needs re-recording — and submit it again.
Yes. You can withdraw a book whenever you choose, and you can end the agreement with 30 days’ notice. Two things survive that:
You do, in the currency you choose, and you can change it. A book carries one price in one currency — that is the price every listener sees, wherever they are, rather than a figure converted per country.
You keep 70% of what the buyer actually pays. The rate is the same on your first title as on your hundredth: there is no tier to climb, and you are not asked to sign away exclusivity to earn it.
Monthly, once a sales month has closed and cleared a 30-day hold, and once your balance in a payable currency passes the minimum for it. A balance below the minimum carries over to the next run rather than disappearing.
The hold matches the cycle Apple Books and Google Play use, and is quicker than ACX or PublishDrive.
Through Stripe, straight to your own bank account. You complete Stripe’s own onboarding once from Settings, and from then on payouts are transfers to the account you gave them. Your bank details are held by Stripe, not by us — we never see them.
There is a small minimum balance per currency, and the agreement promises it can never be higher than £10 and cannot rise without 30 days’ notice. Transfers can be made in US dollars, pounds sterling, euros, Canadian dollars and Japanese yen.
A sale in any other currency still accrues and is still reported in full — it simply cannot be transferred, and the earnings panel says so rather than inventing an exchange rate and reporting a number that looks authoritative but is wrong.
If you are VAT-registered you invoice us for your royalties; the agreement sets that out separately rather than burying it in the payout clause, because it is something you have to act on. Where a sale is refunded or charged back, the royalty on that sale comes back out of your balance — you are paid on what a buyer actually keeps.
No. The licence you grant is worldwide and non-exclusive, so you are free to sell the same recording on other platforms, on your own site, or anywhere else, at the same time.
Yes. Publishing here is not a transfer of rights. You keep the copyright in your book and in your recording; what we get is permission to sell it in the Digitalbook store and to stream it to the people who buy it.
Your recording is never a plain audio file on a public URL. Each chapter is stored as an encrypted stream, and the key that unlocks it is served by a separate service that releases it only to a signed-in listener who owns that book. Buyers stream; there is no download.
Encrypted streaming is a deterrent, not a guarantee. No client-side protection is unbreakable, and we do not claim a determined listener cannot capture audio their own device is playing.
The Audiobook Distribution Agreement between you and Digitalbook Ltd. You are shown it in full, and asked to accept it, when you submit your first book — it is not buried behind a link. It is written in English, governed by the law of England and Wales, and the exact version you accepted is recorded against that book, so a later revision cannot be applied to you retrospectively.
Where anything on this page and the agreement disagree, the agreement is the one that binds.
A current desktop browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari — and a reasonable connection. The dashboard works on a phone for checking sales and answering a review, but preparing a book is a desktop job: the audio conversion runs in your browser, and that is where it will be fastest.
No. Chapters are handled one at a time and each keeps its own state, so a failure is a retry on that chapter rather than a restart of the book. You can cancel a queue, come back later, and pick up where it stopped — a reloaded page recovers what has already been uploaded.
You can delete your account and its data from Settings, and the agreement sets out what happens to the rest:
Write to support@digitalbook.io. That is the address notices under the agreement go to in both directions, so it reaches a person rather than a queue.