Audible.com, Amazon’s audiobook e-commerce store, wants the obtain the audiobook rights for titles directly from authors. To encourage authors to work with them, Audible is launching a new program, “Audible Author Services,” in which authors can earn $1 for each audiobook sold out of a $20 million fund. (This includes sales from Audible.com, Audible.co.uk, and iTunes).

Audible explains the idea on its site: “We want to foster direct relationships with more authors. We have had great success working directly with authors, and these partnerships have led to audience expansion and greater consumption of audiobooks. We know authors work very hard to promote their books; we want to encourage authors to promote their audio versions at the same time. We want all authors in the Audible store to benefit from working with us.” Since the idea is to help support authors, the fund is only available to living authors.

PaidContent.org has more: “To sign up, authors must make their titles available as audiobooks through Audible.com. (Audible encourages them to do this via ACX, the audiobook rights marketplace it launched last year.).” Audible also has lots of tools to help authors market these audiobooks online.