How to Make the Most of Audible Credits when Purchasing Audio Books

Purchasing audio books from Audible offers a choice of plans. You can have one membership credit per month for the upload of one audio book, or two credits for two. You may opt to purchase audio books one-off without being a member of Audible at all, but this means purchasing the book for its listed price, which can be very costly. But there are ways of getting more out of Audible credits than first impressions. Here’s how.

Make the Most of Audible Credits

Make the Most of Voucher Codes on Audible

Audible will use various means of enticing the audio book lover to sign up for a membership plan, one such way is to offer free membership for the first 30 days.

If you decide to sign up for a membership plan, you can go for £7.99 per month for 1 credit (or one audio book), or 2 credits, £14.99 (or two books) per month. One membership credit allows you to upload any audio book, regardless of its price or length. This is interesting to note, as the writers of tomes such as Stephen King and Dan Brown can provide many hours of listening for one credit. Retail price for these lengthy audio books often exceed £20 (around $30).

Some books are in excess of 40 hours long. That doesn’t means to say they are interesting or to the listener’s taste, but some comprise complete story collections, such as the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes or other classic travel stories.

You can exchange any audio book you don’t like, no questions asked within one year of purchase. According to Audible, it doesn’t matter if you have finished it or not, whether you actually liked it or not, or whether you have even listened to a single sentence. You can exchange it. This does not bode well for audio book producers like me, but great for the Audible member. Once you have exchanged that book, you can no longer leave a book review.

Free Audio Books on Audible

You don’t have to look far to find authors begging for reviews of their audiobooks for a free listen. On completion of an audio book, ACX, (a marketplace where authors, narrators and producers can get together to produce audiobooks) will dish out vouchercodes. These are complementary codes that on redemption gives the Audible member a free credit.

Go to Goodreads, Twitter, author blogs or Linkdin to discover authors touting their vouchercodes for a free listen in exchange for a review.

It is also worth making a regular check of Voucher Code Sites such as Voucher Box, My Voucher Codes or Wow.com where you can spot Audible promotions and deals for a vastly discounted price, for instance, a 3 month membership for 99p per month.

But why not have an equivalent of NetFlix, where members can listen to as many audiobooks as they want for the membership subscription? Well, Audible has no competition as it is the largest audio book provider in the world, but things can change. Maybe Audible will do so in the future. Who knows? And the system can do away with ‘credits’ and simply pay a subscription to listen to a whole bank of audio books.