The ACX Statement Changed. Check it Before You Pay Anyone.

As most of you will be aware, ACX has rolled out their new AYCL (All You Can Listen) program now. It went live in June voluntarily and will become mandatory for everyone in December.

I spent a couple of months prior to the go live date chasing ACX for sample statements so that I could guarantee that Imprint would work on day 1. Despite a few back and forths, I didn't get very far with them.

The eagle eyed among you would have noticed that prior to the new system going live, there were some additional line items on the ACX statement that seemed to cover the proposed changes and you might have assumed, like I did, that those would be enough to handle the new format.

I was wrong. And if you were working on that assumption, so were you.

The two-minute check

Do this before your next royalty run, whether you pay narrators, co-authors or nobody at all.

1. Open your latest ACX monthly statement.

2. Go to the Summary tab. Find the Total row and the Net Royalties Earned column. That is the true figure for the period.

3. Compare it against whatever you've recorded for that month.

4. If there's a gap, open the tab called Sales Detail (Member Value). That's where the missing money is.

If the two match, you're fine and you can stop reading. If they don't, and you've already paid someone based on the lower number, you've underpaid them.

What Changed?

ACX statements used to have one detail tab that mattered: Sales Detail (Net Sales). Cash sales, à la carte purchases, straightforward stuff. If you were reconciling audiobook income — in a spreadsheet, in your own system, in any tool — that's almost certainly the tab you pointed at.

From the statements issued at the end of July 2026, covering June, there's a second one: Sales Detail (Member Value).

That tab carries two things:

• Member Credit Sales — someone spent an Audible credit on your book. That's a unit sale in everything but name.

• Qualified Listens — consumption-based earnings under the new model.

Neither appears in the Net Sales tab any more. They didn't move somewhere obvious. They moved to a tab that didn't exist the month before, so anything reading the old one carried on working perfectly and reporting a fraction of the truth.

There's also a Member Value Information tab explaining the calculation, and a Glossary. Worth reading once.

What it looked like on a real statement

These are the actual figures from Horrific Tales Publishing's June 2026 statement. Small numbers, but the proportions are the point.

	Units	Royalties	Per unit
Sales Detail (Net Sales)	38	$184.94	$4.87
Sales Detail (Member Value)	61	$264.40	$4.33
Total	99	$449.34	$4.54

58.8% of the royalties and 61.6% of the units were in the new tab.

Had I paid out on the old tab alone, every author and narrator on those titles would have received under half what they were owed, and the statements would have looked entirely plausible.

The part nobody's talking about yet

Look at the Member Value tab more closely and it splits by membership type. On that same statement:

Membership type	Units	Per unit
Premium	46	$4.70
Prepaid	7	$4.23
Standard	8	$2.34

A Standard member listening to your book earns you roughly half what a Premium member does. Same book, same marketplace, same month.

Which means your average per-unit audiobook royalty is now partly a function of who happens to be listening, and that mix will move month to month without anything changing on your end. If you've been working to a fixed per-unit figure for planning or ad spend, it's worth recalculating from each statement rather than treating it as settled.

And the consumption half hasn't arrived yet. On that statement, Total Qualified Listens was zero. Every unit in the Member Value tab was a credit sale, which behaves like a purchase and pays like one. When genuine listen-based earnings start appearing, they'll be fractional payments against listening time, and the blended per-unit figure will fall. That's the change that's still coming.

If you pay other people, this needs a decision

The new tab separates Member Credit Sales from Qualified Listens, and there's a reasonable argument they shouldn't be treated identically.

A credit sale is a discrete transaction — someone chose your book and spent a credit on it. A qualified listen is consumption, closer to KENP pages read than to a sale.

If your contracts use tiered or escalating rates based on cumulative units, that distinction matters. Do 500 qualified listens advance a narrator toward their next rate tier the same way 500 credit sales do? Your contract almost certainly doesn't say, because it was written before any of this existed.

Worth settling now, in writing, rather than during a disagreement in eighteen months.

How I found it

I run a small press and I build royalty software, so I import my own ACX statements every month like everyone else.

June's import came out at a third of what I was expecting. Nothing had failed. The import read the tab it had always read, the tab was still there, and the numbers in it were correct — they were just no longer all of the numbers.

I fixed and shipped it inside the hour. But that only helps people using the software. Anyone running a spreadsheet formula pointed at Sales Detail (Net Sales), or an in-house system built any time before July, has the same problem and no error message to tell them.

That's the whole reason for this post.

This is going to reach everyone

AYCL becomes mandatory in December 2026. Titles are flipping over in waves before then, so the fact that your last statement looked normal doesn't mean the next one will.

Two things worth doing:

Check the Summary tab total every month, not the detail tabs. That figure is the honest one to reconcile against, and it survives whatever ACX does to the tabs underneath it.

Don't build automation against a tab name. That's precisely the assumption that broke here, and it'll break again the next time a retailer reorganises something.

If this was useful

I wrote a book about the parts of running a small press that nobody warns you about — contracts, record keeping, royalty runs, and what the money actually looks like. Twelve chapters, free, no catch, with the templates and checklists I use for my own press.

[Get The Small Press Operating Manual free]

And if you'd rather not reconcile any of this by hand: Imprint Royalties is the desktop app I build. It imports from eighteen connectors including ACX, applies each contributor's terms, and generates the statements. It picked up the Member Value tab within an hour of me finding it, and every user got the fix without doing anything. Thirty-day trial, everything switched on, runs on your own machine.

[Imprint Royalties]