Why Do xigxag Prices Reset Every Year?

The Economics Behind Fair Audiobook Pricing

The short answer: without an annual reset, our pricing model would eventually make the business unsustainable. The longer answer involves VAT, app store fees, publisher economics, and a fundamental disagreement with how the biggest player in audiobooks treats the people who make them.

Audiobooks carry costs that other books do not

Printed books and ebooks are zero-rated for VAT in the UK. Audiobooks are not. Every audiobook sold in Britain carries 20% VAT, whether it is digital or physical. That is a tax that does not apply to any other format of book. HMRC classifies audiobooks as audio content rather than publications, so they fall outside the zero-rate rules that have applied to ebooks since May 2020.

We contract with some of the biggest publishers on earth, publishers whose job is to get the best possible deal for their authors. We support that. But as an independent platform, we do not have the leverage to negotiate at the same scale as our big tech rivals. That means we are often paying higher prices for content across the board.

Then there are payment processing fees. If you buy through the xigxag app on your phone, Apple or Google take a percentage of the sale. On our website, processing costs are much lower. This is one reason we always encourage browsing and buying at xigxag.co.uk, though we will never force you to do so.

How the xigxag pricing model works

xigxag has no subscription. You buy when you want to listen, starting at £8.99, with the Listen for Less section always offering titles from £3.99.

The volume discount works like this: after every five full-price audiobooks, you unlock a £1 discount. Buy another five and it drops again. This continues up to 20 books per year. The pricing model encourages and rewards frequent listening without locking you into a monthly commitment.

But those discounts have to reset annually. Here is why.

The maths has to work for everyone

As your discount grows through the year, the gap between what you pay and what we pay for the content gets tighter. For listeners who buy a few books a year, the model balances comfortably. For heavy listeners working through 15 or 20 books at the deepest discounts, the margins become very thin.

We are happy to reward that kind of listening. The whole pricing model is designed to encourage it. But if discounts never reset, the economics would eventually tip to a point where the business could not continue to offer them.

The reset is what keeps the model viable for everyone: listeners, authors, narrators, and us.

Why we refuse to do what Audible does

Audible solves this problem differently. Their subscription model charges £5.99 or £8.99 per month whether you listen or not. The cheaper plan gives you access to a streaming catalogue, but you lose access if you cancel. The £8.99 plan includes one credit per month for a book you keep. The people who forget to use their credits subsidise the people who do. Audible keeps the revenue from unused credits, and the authors whose books went unbought see nothing from that money.

The economics go deeper than that. Audible's stated royalty rate for authors is 25% to 40%, depending on exclusivity. But those percentages are calculated on "net sales" after Audible's own deductions, not on what the customer paid. Independent analysis suggests that the effective royalty, as a percentage of the retail price, can be closer to 21%. Authors have no control over pricing, no say in when their book gets discounted, and Audible's return policy means royalties can be clawed back weeks after a sale.

This is not a fringe concern. Brandon Sanderson, one of the bestselling authors in the world, publicly withheld titles from Audible to protest royalty rates he called unfair. A growing number of authors and narrators have raised similar concerns, and the conversation keeps getting louder.

At xigxag, we pay publishers and authors based on the actual sale price. No hidden deductions, no pool system, no revenue from forgotten subscriptions. Our catalogue is built around professional human narration, and we believe the people who create audiobooks should be paid fairly for their work. The annual price reset is part of how we make that possible.

What the reset means in practice

Your discount level goes back to the starting point once a year. You keep every audiobook you have bought. Nothing disappears from your library. Your listening stats, your streaks, your reading challenge progress: all of that stays.

And the discounts start building again straight away. Buy five more books and you are back to your first discount level.

Compare that to Audible, where you pay £8.99 every month regardless. If you listened to 20 audiobooks on xigxag this year at progressive discounts, you almost certainly paid less in total than an Audible subscriber, and the authors earned more from your purchases.

We would rather explain than hide

Most audiobook platforms do not talk about their economics. We think that is a mistake. If you are going to ask people to pay for audiobooks, they deserve to understand where the money goes.

Here is where it goes at xigxag: to the publishers and rights holders who invested in the book. To the narrators who spent hours in a studio bringing it to life. To HMRC, because audiobooks still carry 20% VAT. To the app stores, when purchases happen there. And to us, so we can keep building the features that make listening better, including the x-book® format that lets you listen and read at the same time.

An increasing proportion of audiobooks on xigxag are also available as x-books, which synchronise professional narration with the full published text on screen. Look for the x-book® ribbon on the cover image, or use the search filter to show x-books only.

Getting started

You can browse and buy audiobooks at xigxag.co.uk. The full listening experience, including x-books, offline downloads, and all the app features that make listening personal, is available through the xigxag app.

The price reset is not a penalty. It is the mechanism that lets us offer volume discounts in the first place, pay authors fairly, and keep the lights on without trapping anyone in a subscription. We think that is a trade worth making, and we hope you do too.