ACXReviews of acx.com

Don't do an audible book for the money. You'll get nothing in return. I'm not sure how the system works but you can sell a decent number of books and not get a cent. I think it's because all of these giveaways they have and no money changes hands. So they're just giving away my book. It's not sell x amount, get x amount back. They have all these categories, which I don't quite understand so I've just written it off. I wish there were a decent (meaning upstanding) competitor out there. But for now, it's all we got.

I trusted ACX because of their immediate connection to Amazon and Audible, thinking it would be a safe platform for authors like me. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I never imagined it would be so easy for scammers to operate on their platform. I recently encountered a scammer who openly admitted to using AI for voice narration, which is a clear violation of ACX's policies. When I reported this to ACX, I expected them to take swift action to remove this person from their platform. Instead, they did nothing. The scammer is still active on ACX, which is incredibly concerning. To make matters worse, I paid this scammer over $1,000 as a deposit, money that I am now seeking to recover through legal action. While I understand that ACX is not directly responsible for this loss, they should be doing a much better job of vetting the people they allow on their platform. Dissolving the contract with this scammer was also a ridiculously time-consuming process. ACX promised it would take up to three days, but it ended up taking five days and a phone call before any action was taken. This added unnecessary stress and delay to the process of hiring a new producer. As a result of these delays, all my paid advertising for my book's release is now inaccurate. My new producer couldn’t complete the audiobook in time, reflecting poorly on me as an author. The integrity of my book was compromised because my former producer violated ACX policies by using AI and had access to my manuscript—my intellectual property—before the book was even released. This experience has been incredibly frustrating and upsetting. ACX needs to take more responsibility and enforce stricter policies to protect authors and narrators from scams and ensure the integrity of their work. I trusted ACX, and they let me down. I gave two stars because I started with zero stars, but the encounters with their employees and support have been prompt, helpful and kind. At least their customer service is on par.

Everything was going well working ACX until I made an offer to the narrator and he accepted the offer. Then, a day later he decided to back down from it and just sent me a message through ACX saying he can no longer do the narration. I found a different narrator but I cannot move forward because my first narrator needs to send an email to acx approving the contract dissolution. It’s been a few days and he doesn’t respond to my messages. So now I am stuck. I reached out to ACX and they basically said I am stucked until he decides to send that email. They did not trouble going through our communication via ACX and confirm what I am saying. They did not bother trying to reach out to him on my behalf. They just told me, the customer who is paying, I am screwed. I think they can do way better. I am super disappointed with this whole process now.

Easy to upload and straightforward; I've done 4 audiobooks with them so far. However, approval of a project takes a long time--usually the same audiobook has been on sale for weeks at other outlets! Their policy that a title must be on sale through Amazon is cumbersome; I carved out audio rights for my last novella but the publisher took a while to post the ebook, so that hindered my start date. ACX will not assign any giveaway codes unless one is exclusive, making marketing more difficult. However, the worst thing is the predatory, abusive policy that allows listeners to "listen and return" with impunity. I've seen some work their way through my entire catalogue. This really cuts down on the royalties. Ideally, it will get better if ACX realizes there are other options for authors/narrators.

Like a lot of others I have had a lot of issues with ACX so far. Firstly their website is not laid out well and is missing a lot of key features, like instant customer service chat. Why is that not there? I wrote to customer service and asked some questions, when someone got back to me I suggested adding this feature. Then a manager responded saying thank you for the feedback and he would pass it to the 'higher ups' who knows maybe there will be improvements in the future. But here's the real problems. My narrator spent hours recording and downloading, I went back with some notes and she fixed those errors, finally we put everything in for review and here we go. "This review may take up to 30 days" Right around the 30th day we get an email saying they are denying the project because of some issues that needed fixing with the recordings and the cover art. Now when I say "we" I don't mean "We" my narrator got the email, I got nothing. She contacted me and was like, did you see this? I'll make the changes but they also say something about changing the cover art. I hadn't received anything. Regardless we both went in and fixed everything right away. She submitted it, I approved it. We get the generic email saying it'll take 30 more days. Then about a week later, I get an email very reminiscent of the first saying there are issues with certain chapters and the cover art. My narrator did not get the same. We looked into it and she said, no, the files they reference on the email are the wrong ones, they are not the new ones. She knows because she changed the file names. So we start emailing them. We are getting no where. Customer service says they can't help us because they are not the QA people. We say, get us in contact with the QA team then, they say they can't do that. So now what? We wait for another who knows how long with no explanations or help. Its clear that the different departments in this company don't talk to each other and there's no tracking system, so they're sending multiple emails to different people from different people and missing details. No wonder things take so long!! Ridiculous. I'm just crossing my fingers that somehow the rest goes okay but I highly doubt it.

Just notified after a month that my completed audiobook was cancelled. No explanation. After finally getting someone on the phone they said the rights holder was a fraud and had stolen the rights. Wouldn't you think they'd vet these titles before posting them? Or at least tell you it's on you to do that? It should not get as far as a completed, week-of-work book to tell me I am a slave. There's no insurance to pay SAG rates for the hours completed, either. You just wasted your time, too bad.

The idea of ACX is a good one. The platform is structured pretty well. BUT all that is for naught when they treat artists like indentured employees who are obliged to accept working more and more for less and less. There are other platforms. Bye bye, ACX.

I've published a large number of books with ACX, so I have some basis to measure their performance. My latest book sat for 75 days "pending audio review". I wrote six times asking them to please approve it. Each time, I received a canned email response saying it might take 30 business days to approve audiobooks. I tried calling, but ACX now just plays a prerecorded message before hanging up on you. Finally, a few days ago, I received an email written in broken English that read "perhaps they contact in days with regard to issue." After reading the email, I sat scratching my head, not only confused about the poorly worded message but also about any kind of issue the audiobook might have. As I said, I have completed many audiobooks, and all have passed without a hitch. Finally, yesterday, it was revealed that they wanted an additional word added to the introduction. No other book had ever required such an addition, so it made no sense. Even so, I quickly re-recorded the introduction and resubmitted the book. My blind compliance appears to have loosened up the jammed wheel, because now I see the book is "heading to retail." Of course, I'm very relieved that the book is finally out of the "pending audio review" quicksand, but honestly, I feel that ACX failed me this time around. I've bumped the rating up to 2 stars for the quick turnaround after the word addition, but the whole experience was dreadfully slow and unnecessarily painful. I can only hope that ACX's customer service will improve by the time my next audiobook is ready to go to market.