14 Audible MoneySaving tricks, including free audiobooks and three months' membership for £12

New to Audible? Get one book totally free

If you're new to Audible's subscription service, you can take advantage of its 30-day free trial* to get a free audiobook (which you can keep). If you took out a trial a while ago, it's worth checking to see if it offers you another one, but there are no guarantees.

You'll need to give payment details to sign up. Audible obviously hopes that you'll end up paying, and will charge you £7.99/mth after the 30 days are up. So if you don't want to continue with your subscription, make sure you remember to cancel (and if you just want to grab the free audiobook, cancel as soon as you've got it).

You can send your mates one FREE Audible book – and vice versa

You probably know precisely what your bestie looks for in a book – and with this trick, you can send them one of your audiobooks for free. So why not team up with a pal and send each other a freebie? You don't need to be an Audible subscriber to give or receive books.

To send a free book, open the Audible app, then go to 'My Library'. Click the three dots next to your chosen title, and hit 'Send this book'. You need to own a book already to send it, but the title will remain in your library after you've gifted it.

While you can send as many freebies as you like, users can only download one they've been sent for free. That's one EVER, so pick wisely. See full terms.

Audiobook-worm? Up your subscription package to get books from £4.50 each

Audible usually plugs its £7.99 for one-book-a-month subscription. But if you're a keen listener, it can pay to opt for a more expensive subscription which'll give you more credits each month instead.

The best value subscription is 24 books a year for £109.99/year, which works out at £4.58 a book. Alternatively, you can choose 12 books a year at £69.99/yr (£5.83 a book).

Both those options require you to pay upfront for a year, so are best only if you're certain you'll really use your subscription. If you just want to try a higher-frequency subscription instead, you can opt for two books a month at £14.99/mth (£7.50 a book).

Of course, if you can get the £3.99/mth deal above, that's still the cheapest option per book. But you'll only get that cheap rate for three months, and only one book a month in that time. So if you're an avid listener, the other packages may be worth a look.

Buying a book without a subscription? Bizarrely, buying the Kindle book first can slash the cost

This sounds odd, but it's often much cheaper to buy a Kindle book first and then opt for the audiobook as an addition, rather than just buy the audiobook outright. (Kindle is an Amazon brand, like Audible.)

For example, when we checked this week we found Violet by SJI Holliday for 99p on Kindle, and it then cost a further £3.49 to add the audiobook. That's £4.48 in total – a massive £12.40 saving on the audiobook's £16.88 list price. Though of course it doesn't beat paying £3.99/mth above – so that subscription trick may still be worth trying first if you can.

To see if you can cut the upfront cost of an Audible book via this Kindle trick, go to Amazon and search for the title's Kindle e-book. Below the 'Buy now' button, there's usually a button to 'Add an Audible narration' at an extra charge. Compare the total cost with the audiobook's normal price to see if it wins.

It's worth noting you don't actually need a Kindle for this trick to work – you can buy a Kindle e-book without actually owning the device, and listen to the audiobook via your phone, for example.

Got lots of Kindle books? Quickly check which you can get as a cheap audiobook

If you're a Kindle fan, log on to Amazon's Matchmaker Tool* to see which of your Kindle titles you can add an audiobook to, for a usually reasonable charge. A quick check on my list revealed upgrades including Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield for £2.99 (Audible list price £19.24) and The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne for £2.99 (£25.99).

Listen to 100s of best-selling digital audiobooks for FREE via your library

This one's a game-changer. Many libraries allow borrowers to listen to a vast catalogue of digital audiobooks for free – and often you can borrow the same book with the same narrator as you'd get on Audible.

As an example, my local library in Essex uses a brilliant app called Borrow Box. All you need is a login, then you can borrow up to seven audiobooks at a time from a selection of 500. You may need to wait a month or so to 'borrow' popular books if there's a queue, but often there's not.

Current options include Becoming by Michelle Obama, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (read by Elisabeth Moss) and Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay.

Different libraries offer different services, but all the libraries we checked offered some kind of digital audiobook service, so it's widespread. The best thing is to check out your local library's site to see what's on offer.

Get PAID £3.20 to get a free Kobo audiobook

Rival audiobook-seller Kobo works in a similar way to Audible, but charges a pound less – its subscription costs £6.99/mth for one credit a month (though of course this still doesn't beat the £3.99 deal above).

But even better, right now there's a trick to get a free book and actually get paid £3.20 for doing so.

As with Audible, if you're new to Kobo you can take a 30-day free trial to get any audiobook for free, which you can keep. (Make sure you mark in your diary to cancel if you don't want to continue with your subscription, otherwise you'll be charged £6.99/mth.)

But if you go via cashback website Topcashback right now it'll pay you £3.20 for doing the trial. Remember though that cashback is never guaranteed – see our full guide to Cashback Sites.