Last updated 10 September 2026 · All amounts in US dollars (USD)
Indiewright is a publishing platform for independent creators — audiobooks, eBooks, comics and graphic novels, podcasts and serialised work. Each edition of a work is sold on its own, for a price its creator sets. Creators keep 90% of that price.
A single book can exist in more than one form. The same story might be a narrated audiobook, a readable eBook, and an illustrated edition with artwork on every page. Each of those took different work to make, so each is sold as its own product at its own price.
Creators decide which editions exist, what each one costs, and whether any of them is free. Nothing is bundled in silently and nothing is priced by us.
Where a work has two or more editions, it can also be sold as a bundle. A bundle is cheaper than buying the same editions separately — by default 12% less than the sum of its parts. A creator can discount further; a bundle can never cost more than the editions it contains.
If you already own part of a bundle, you are not charged for it again. What you already paid for that edition comes off the bundle price, and you pay only the difference.
You pay per edition, or per bundle, with your card. There is no balance to load first, no credit to spend down, and nothing that expires.
The price you see is the creator's price, and it reaches them whole. Card processing is added on top and shown as its own line before you pay:
| Edition price | Card processing | Your card is charged | The creator's price |
|---|---|---|---|
| $4.99 | $0.46 | $5.45 | $4.99 |
| $7.99 | $0.55 | $8.54 | $7.99 |
| $14.99 | $0.76 | $15.75 | $14.99 |
| $24.99 | $1.06 | $26.05 | $24.99 |
Card networks charge 2.9% + $0.30 per payment, and we do not mark that up. Because the 30¢ is flat, it weighs much more heavily on a small purchase than a large one — which is the honest reason a whole edition is sold for a few dollars rather than a chapter being sold for a few cents.
The total is always shown, and always confirmed, before anything is charged. You tick a box that names the edition and the exact amount. A purchase that was never confirmed at the figure charged is refused by our own server, not merely discouraged.
There are exactly two things a creator pays, and both are named here. A one-off fee to publish a work, and 10% of what that work sells for. Nothing is taken out of a sale beyond that 10%, and nothing recurs.
Putting a work in front of people costs a one-off fee, charged to your card at the moment you publish it. It rises with the number of works you have published, and stops rising at the fourth:
| Work | Cost to publish |
|---|---|
| Any work, your first or your fortieth | $20.00 |
| … and if you give it away free | $50.00 |
Card processing is added on top of the fee, exactly as it is for a buyer, and the total is shown to you and confirmed by you before anything is charged. Nothing is charged while you are building a work: you can upload audio, write a description, set prices, change your mind and delete the whole thing without paying anything. The fee is charged when you publish, and only then.
This fee is not taken out of your sales. It is not a subscription — nothing recurs, and a creator who publishes once pays once. You still keep 90% of every purchase.
Why it exists: hosting, storage, bandwidth, moderation and fraud checks all cost money from the moment a work goes live, whether or not it ever sells a copy. Charging a small amount at publication is what lets the commission stay at 10% instead of rising to cover works that never sell, and it is what stops the catalogue filling with uploads nobody intended anyone to read.
Indiewright keeps 10% of each sale. Creators keep 90%.
| Cost | Who pays it |
|---|---|
| Publishing a work | The creator, once per work: $20 — or $50 to give it away free |
| Uploading audio, manuscripts, artwork or covers | Free, and unlimited in number |
| Storage and streaming bandwidth for audio | Indiewright |
| Card processing | The buyer, at cost, added on top of the price |
| Payout transfer fees | Indiewright, out of its 10% |
| Monthly payout account fees | Indiewright, out of its 10% |
| Annual tax form filing (1099) | Indiewright, out of its 10% |
| Chargeback fees when a buyer disputes | Indiewright, out of its 10% |
| Platform commission | 10% of the edition price |
A creator selling a $14.99 audiobook receives $13.49 on every copy. No processing fee is deducted from it, no payout fee, no monthly account fee. When rounding is required, it rounds in the creator's favour. The publishing fee was paid once, when the work went live, and never touches a sale.
A disputed charge is the one case where money is taken back after a sale: the creator's share of that sale is reversed, because the money was returned to the buyer's bank. The dispute fee itself is never charged to the creator — Indiewright absorbs it out of its 10%.
Earnings accrue as sales are made. They clear seven days after the sale, and once your cleared earnings reach $50.00 a payout is sent automatically to your connected bank account.
Both numbers exist for reasons worth stating plainly. The seven days are because a card payment can be reversed by the buyer's bank after it looks settled; paying earnings out within minutes of a sale is exactly how a platform gets drained by stolen cards. The $50 threshold is because our payment provider charges a flat monthly fee for every account that receives a payout — paying a creator earning $20 a month every month would cost more in fees than that creator generates in commission. Neither is a way of holding your money, and you can withdraw earlier if you want to, paying only what the transfer actually costs.
Once a work is published, audio, text and image uploads carry no further charge — no per-episode fee, no bandwidth bill, and no cap on how many times your work is opened. This is possible because our storage provider does not charge for bandwidth on those files.
There is one limit worth naming honestly rather than discovering: each creator has 20 GB of storage. That is a great deal of audio — roughly 400 hours at the quality we encode at — and no creator has come close to it. If you do, write to us; we would rather raise it for you than have you find out from an error message.
Video is different, because delivering it does cost us per minute watched. Video is capped at 10 minutes per file, and each creator has a free monthly viewer-minute allowance that grows as they earn — every $1 earned adds 100 viewer-minutes, on top of a free baseline of about 16 hours a month. If an allowance runs out, the episode keeps playing as audio. We do not take anyone's work offline over a bandwidth bill.
Optional creator plans exist only to pre-purchase video capacity before you have earnings to fund it. They do not unlock features. Analytics, branding, episode count, storage, audio bandwidth, community tools, and payouts are never behind a plan. A creator earning steadily never needs one.