I've been an Audible paid subscriber for 10 years. I have 138 audiobooks in my library. At $10/month, that means I've paid Audible $1200 for ~2000 hours of "reading". Using the 25% royalties mentioned in a child comment (no idea if that's accurate) I've paid authors only $300 for all of that. That seems super low! And I imagine I'm in the top quintile in terms of paying for "books".