Draft2Digital to Penalise Low Performers
Hello my lovelies,
I'm still recovering from a really nasty cold so I really didn't want to write this fucking thing but since not all of you are fellow writers but all of you are fellow poor people if compared to the Epstein class, I want you to know about this new money grab to squeeze the last few dollars from penniless writers. Trust me, I'd much rather work on escapist horny fiction but the rich just keep on dumping on us.
What the Fuck is Draft2Digital?
If you're not an indie author, you have probably never heard of them. Draft2Digital is a platform that facilitates publishing to a number of retailers like Barnes&Noble, Kobo, and libraries like Libby. You see, an indie author would have to make a separate account with each retailer to sell their book in their online store and then wait until they reach the payout threshold, which might be never. So aggregator platforms like Draft2Digital and Smashwords are useful to indie authors because they allow us to publish to a whole selection of online stores and we only have to reach the payout threshold with our combined sales.
On top of that, Smashwords is the only eBook store that still sells taboo erotica. So many of my fellow erotica writers publish exclusively to Smashwords. I publish a couple of stories exclusively to Smashwords because much of Greek mythology is technically incest and Smashwords allows incest in erotica.
Draft2Digital bought Smashwords in 2022. So right now, there is no major competitor.
The Money Grab
Draft2Digital already takes 10% of every sale. They recently set a payout threshold that used to be $0, so an author only gets paid once they accumulate at least $10 worth of sales. This is not unusual but the zero threshold was really great for anyone starting out.
Now they are adding a $20 "activation fee" for new accounts and a $12 penalty if your books make under $100 / year. Yes, they are going to charge everyone(!) who doesn't make at least $100 in book sales $12. My first year of "going wide", which means stepping outside the Amazon system, I made something like $0.50. My decision to publish via Smashwords and Draft2Digital was not motivated by profit, because I would have made way more than $0.50 if I had kept my books in the Kindle Unlimited catalogue (thereby excluding them from being published anywhere else). If I had had to pay $12 to boot, at a time where I couldn't afford it, I never would have considered it.
Fellow erotica writer Persephone over at Mastodon crunched the numbers.
Her generous estimate is that a book that never sells would cost $0,0024, less than a quarter of a cent, to host for a year ($0.02 for 100 books per month).
Do $12 / year look fair to you?
In traditional publishing, there is also just a small amount of writers who make the publisher money but the publisher doesn't know which ones they are going to be, so it is a gamble. Sometimes a huge gamble, back when there were advances for writers and marketing campaigns for the books. In indie publishing, it remains a gamble but the investment in a book is far lower because it is technically just the server cost. And now Draft2Digital wants us to shoulder the remaining risk for them as well. 🤡
It's the AI Slop, Bro
What really pisses me off is that Draft2Digital's corporate email announcing the new fees pretends this is all to combat AI slop, to help us human writers who are harshly affected by LLM (Large Language Model) text generation massively lowering the already low value assigned to the craft.
Listen.
AI slop is a real problem in publishing. Flooding the market with LLM generated books that took like 5 minutes to make is putting strain on publishers who don't want slop and have to spend time and money on weeding it out and on writers who have to share the revenue with those no effort AI generated books. Because you won't know this if you're not a writer, but Amazon isn't paying us in a straight-forward way for i.e. Kindle Unlimited reads. No, that would be way too transparent. They are setting aside some money that will be distributed among all authors who got Kindle Unlimited reads. And the more authors there are, no matter if their book is slop or not, there is less to go around for every individual one.
So I kinda get the $20 pay-to-play "activation fee". I doubt it is going to discourage content farms but maybe it's not completely unreasonable to assume that some "AI authors" will be discouraged by an entry fee. I haven't researched this, so if that were the only change, I probably would have been wary of their reasoning but accepted it as an attempt to deal with the AI slop problem.
But what is penalising those with the fewest sales going to do? If you generate 1000 books in an hour you are much more likely to hit the $100 threshold than any human author, especially someone like me who can only sell their erotica titles at a fraction of Draft2Digital's distributors.
If they were really after AI slop, they'd monetise high book counts. Low sales are no indicator of a book's quality nor whether or not it was written by a person. A high number of published titles is much more suspect, especially if it's something like 100 novel-length books and the author is not Stephen King.
This has nothing to do with protecting us from AI slop. Draft2Digital was chomping at the bit to partner up with AI companies and only due to the overwhelmingly negative feedback poll, they decided not to go there.
What Now?
I don't know. I guess I'll wait and see if there was enough backlash to make them reconsider on the fees. I probably won't make the golden $100 / year but I could afford the $12 fee if I wanted to. But the thing is, if they won't support me at my poorest $0.50 sales, they don't deserve me at my $100+ sales. The only thing making me hesitate is that they have Smashwords. As I mentioned above, the only eBook store that still sells taboo erotica and the largest erotica eBook platform. Losing that would hurt, not just because I make most of my eBook sales through Smashwords, but because I would be turning away from that one place that truly embraces erotica. Though since Draft2Digital bought it, I guess the question is: for how long?
I don't have any recommendations to replace the service Draft2Digital offers but I sell my books at my Payhip shop which is not a book retailer but you can sell all kinds of digital products there and I never had any issues with them so far.
Off to bed,
a coughing, sneezing Aimée
