Vanessa Finaughty

Need a book #editor? Let me help you write it right with my 15 years' experience!

@TuscanyBayBooks @Draft2Digital Were you able to keep your reviews?

And good riddance to you, @Draft2Digital : From:support@draft2digital.com Sat, Apr 18 at 12:32 PM Hello, Your account closure request has been processed. Your books (if any) have started the delisting process.  Please allow 1-3 days for retailers, 5-7 days for subscription sites and audiobook, and 2-3 weeks for print and libraries to fully delist your content. If you have payments owed, you will be paid any final funds owed to you so long as your account meets the following conditions: 1. You have valid tax info on file 2. You have a valid payment method on file  3. You have met the required payment threshold Once your final payment is sent, your payment details will also be removed. Your account is now closed at your request.

@CHamilton10315 @TuscanyBayBooks @Draft2Digital Yes, once the fees start, all they do is go up every year.

I got an email that essentially amounted to 'are you sure?' They make the argument that if I delete my account and want to come back then I'll have to pay to create a new account. First, I don't think I'm going to go back. Second, I expect in a year or less, they'll charge me a fee to maintain an account whether I have books on it or not.

@TuscanyBayBooks @CHamilton10315 @Draft2Digital Which platform do you use for your store?

We got the same e-mail. Told them pretty much the two things you listed and confirmed we wanted that account gone. We have our own store set up to sell e-books. Just entered into an agreement with a non-Amazon printer to produced pocket-sized paperback editions of our books that we'll offer on our website in case Amazon pulls the same stunt.

@CHamilton10315 @TuscanyBayBooks @Draft2Digital Don't give up. There is always another way. There are other aggregators and many of the bookstores allow indies to publish directly with them. Pllllllllease don't let these snakes stop you from writing!

@TuscanyBayBooks @Draft2Digital I just took the whole situation as the final sign that the idea of writing as anything more than just a fun hobby is a pipe dream. There was a window of time when it was possible to make a living off of writing (or at least breaking even). But I think that window has shut.

@joeroverbooks @Draft2Digital Were you able to keep your reviews?

I got a couple of my books moved over from @Draft2Digital to Amazon. Just waiting for the last place to delist them so I can add them to KU. (Ignore the paperbacks. Those are getting delisted too.) amazon.com/stores/Joe-Rov…

@Engineer7601 @Draft2digital_ @LeProjetSerret @Draft2Digital Because it's not really about AI. It's about some booksellers & libraries complaining about having to include small earners in their catalogues. They need to get rid of small earners to keep the big booksellers. They can't do that outright; it makes them look bad. So they do this

@Draft2digital_ @LeProjetSerret @Draft2Digital Then why are you penalizing real authors for the actions of the few with the $12 annual fee? How does that deter bad actors? It seems to me like just another hit against indie authors who are already struggling with visibility in this flood of AI grifters.

This is a ridiculous money grab, @Draft2Digital. A one time registration fee to eliminate AI slop grifters is a good idea, but charging authors who don't make enough money on your platform is wrong.

@hmdpublishing It means it's time to open my own store where I cannot be randomly sabotaged right when I'm getting ready to publish something important.

Draft2Digital is introducing new fees. What does this mean for indie authors? Keep an eye on your distribution costs! #SelfPublishing #IndieAuthor #SelfPublishing #IndieAuthor

@RabidChipmunk42 @JasonWMizer What they are really trying to purge is the small earners, because some booksellers and libraries are whining about it, and they are more important than we are.

Don't know if this helps, but here's some Q&A with D2D: tl;dr - they're trying to purge spam "writers" **Big Changes At Draft2Digital! Results of Q&A** By this time, most authors know that Draft2Digital, one of the main indie author distributors, has made some changes which will impact most authors using their service. They're instituting a one time $20 setup fee for new accounts, and more critically a $12 annual fee for existing accounts that don't earn at least $100 a year in revenue. This has had a lot of authors upset, scared, anxious, and even mad today. Above all else, there were TONS of questions and a lot of misinformation and partial info out there, so I set out to get better answers I had a lovely Zoom call this afternoon with Kris from Draft2Digital, where he took the time to go over what they were doing, why, and answered a bunch of the questions folks left on my other thread. So, here's the scoop! #First, let's look at the WHY. Over the time from 2022 to 2025, the number of new titles published per year went up by over 50%, rising from around a 2.3 million ISBNs issued from Bowker to over 4 million in 2025. That doesn't include books which are only uploaded to Kindle, as those don't get ISBNs. Most of that growth, sadly, is in the realm of rapidly produced spam books, which have been made far easier to produce since LLMs came on the scene. Kris told me that some months they decline as much as 70% of the titles uploaded to D2D, which is...a lot! The fallout from this on the retailer and library end has been a steady increase in hostility toward indie authors. Because Apple, Overdrive, B&N, and other D2D partners can't easily tell a indie author from a bookspammer, they have a tendency to tar and feather us all with the same brush. Kris mentioned that libraries have been pushing back hard against indie titles because of the raw quantity of spam content flooding the marketplace. #Why does this change help? It turns out D2D is actually pretty good at spotting accounts that do mass uploads. If someone is uploading a bunch of books a month to their platform, that account is already flagged for manual review. If it's a legitimate press putting up quality books, they know it; if it's not, they know that, too, and are likely declining most or all of those books. But the bookspammers have figured out a workaround. If they want to upload fifty books a month, they can open fifty D2D accounts and upload one book per account per month. This keeps the numbers low, so they look like a regular indie, and don't get as much attention paid to them. This has apparently been happening enough that it's reached a crisis point. D2D is adding the $20 fee for new accounts because, coupled with the $12 annual fee, that's enough revenue lost that they believe it will force the bookspammers to leave D2D and try going direct to retailers instead. This protects D2D's reputation, and the reps of authors using their platform for distribution. At the core, that's what Kris said this is all about: indie authors are having our overall reputation with retailers, libraries, etc. badly damaged by the amount of bookspam hitting the market right now. They're working to mitigate that damage. Now, there were other questions... I got answers for as many as I could! #Where do I find out when I will be charged? Login, go to Account, then click Account Status. You'll see the billing date there. #Are people who just have a D2D account for royalty share going to be billed? No. There is no $20 setup fee until you want to press publish. You can open an account to use their formatting tools and receive royalty shares without paying the $20 setup OR the $12 annual fee. You only pay the fees if you want to publish and distribute books. #How can I close my D2D account, if I want to avoid the fees? If you want to avoid the fees, best practice here is NOT to close your account, but rather just unpublish all your titles. You can even leave the titles listed, in case you want to make them live again. Provided your titles are pulled from distribution before the deadline when you get charged, you won't be charged. #But if I really want to close it anyway? If you want to close your account entirely, you'll want to write to D2D customer service. Remember, though - if you ever want to get a new D2D account, you'll have to pay the $20 setup fee. My advice would be to turn off distribution on the books and leave the current count live, but inactive. #Will people with Smashwords AND D2D accounts get double billed, since the merging software isn't here yet? No. The merging software is in beta right now and is expected to be live before May 15th, which is the earliest anyone will get charged the $12 fee. If for some reason the software to merge your Smashwords and D2D accounts isn't out by mid-May, Kris says you can write to their support and they will waive the fee for the second account this year. #Will D2D charge a lower rate to people from developing nations where money is tighter? Unfortunately, no. They've tried to find a sweet spot where the fee is large enough to deter the bookspammers, but low enough that it's affordable even by people who write and publish as a hobby. Unfortunately, that means people from nations where $12 buys a lot more than it does in the US are stuck paying the same price. #Is this legal? Yes, because they've put this information out long before anyone will be charged, and opting out of the charge is fairly easy - you simply de-list all your books from distribution. Again, you can leave the titles themselves up on D2D, inactive. All you need to do is turn off distribution. #Why not just increase their royalty share? Because that would do nothing to deter the bookspammers, and deterring bookspammers is the primary goal. If they increased the percentage they took from the current 15% to say 20%, that would reduce the income every author got by a small amount, but anyone who was profitable would still remain profitable. It wouldn't deter people from spamming dozens of computer generated books each month. People uploading lots of books to a single account are easy to spot; people uploading one book a month to a dozen accounts are much harder for D2D to find, and this will make that spam method much less effective. The hope is the spammers will leave D2D. #Can I still format books without paying? Yes. All of their tools and functions are available for free, except distribution. If you upload a book and turn on distribution, you'll have to pay the $20 setup fee (for any new accounts, from here on out - not for existing ones) and the $12 annual fee unless you hit $100 in sales. #How is the $12 annual fee being paid? The annual fee will be charged to the author's Account Ledger. The same place royalties are credited and payments are taken from. This can be viewed at Reports --> Account Ledger (draft2digital.com/reports/accoun…). If the Account Ledger goes negative (e.g. from the annual fee), then the author will have 30 days to bring it up to zero, which may happen if any future royalties get credited or simply by using a Credit Card. #How is the $100 minimum calculated? It's net receipts - what D2D pays us. So if we sell $100 worth of books at retailers and get paid $60 by D2D, that's not enough. We need to be paid $100 a year by D2D, which means about $167 worth of retailer sales (roughly). OK, that's what I've got right now! I am happy to field any other questions folks have that I can answer, and will send on any additional questions that folks come up with that I cannot. 📷 The bottom line here is simple: Bookspam - which is what I've taken to calling "the mass upload of poorly written, poorly produced books to retail channels" - represents a growing threat to indie publishing as a whole. As retailer trust in indie authors plummets, so too will our reach. And since they cannot tell us apart from the bookspammers, the longterm results of doing nothing will be a gradual erosion of indie publishing as a whole. Is this the best way to manage the problem? I honestly don't know. Given what Kris told me about the nature and scope of the problem (thousands of new spam accounts created every month, each uploading just a few books at a time to stay under the radar), the only other viable solution I could think of would be implementing a per title setup fee. That's something I doubt any of us really want, but the impression I am getting is that is increasingly something the retailers direct channels (KDP, B&N Press, KWL, etc) are considering. That would end bookspam cold. It would also end hobby publishing and make publishing from developing nations extremely difficult. D2D is trying to proceed with the minimum impact changes they could think of which would also have the desired effect: chasing off the bad actors currently messing things up for everyone else. I'm still not thrilled with the idea, but given what I now know about the WHY, I couldn't come up with a better solution that would impact fewer authors. I hope this message helps everyone. These aren't the easiest times to be a writer, but having information arms us to handle the challenges ahead more easily. 📷 Link (it's on FB): facebook.com/kevins.studio/…

I went wide on principle, because I don't like monopolies, and I was willing to put my feet and books where my mouth was. D2Ds new stance absolutely fucking sucks. I might as well just pay them and never make any money whatsoever off of my writing. I can't describe how much I hate this. 😠

@Draft2digital_ @LeProjetSerret @Engineer7601 @Draft2Digital You have already hurt legitimate authors. The whole problem is that you now see booksellers & libraries as your primary customers and not indie authors. I see now that being indie means NOT putting all my eggs in one basket, such as with an aggregator who can sabotage me at will.

@LeProjetSerret @Engineer7601 @Draft2Digital Adding registration or ISBN fees would likely hurt legitimate indie authors more than it deters bad actors. Our goal is to keep publishing accessible while improving quality controls and discoverability, so real authors aren’t penalized for the actions of a few.

@TuscanyBayBooks Thanks for this. I did try this once, years ago, but I couldn't wrap my head around it 🙄 Is it easier to use now?

@VanessaFin Or download Calibre, also free. Not only can you convert your word doc into any format (PDF, EPUB, etc) you can also edit the metadata to include author/publisher name & date plus attach the cover to the e-book file.

I learnt something new today. For authors who want your own bookstore, but can't convert the files to the popular e-book formats - you can do so for free via Google Docs. Just open your book in Google Docs, click the download button and choose from the download formats available.

@Jessenovels I hope it empowers you and others with more choices after the D2D sabotage to indies.

@VanessaFin Sweeet, I did not know this.

"Never put all your eggs in one basket," they taught us. Yet we all rushed off to join a book aggregator (thus putting all our eggs in one basket despite multiple retailers being involved). Weren't we the fools.

This conversion was the biggest barrier to me having my own store in the past. I have D2D's underhanded way of getting rid of small authors to thank for this new, empowering knowledge.

This topic could be important to many of you so I'm sharing it here. If you have any questions about audiobooks, please ask. I want to help make them accessible to the indie community.

@payhip Also, does Payhip have the function to convert a Word document to epub, etc., or do sellers need to convert it to e-book formats themselves?

@payhip Hi, when selling via Payhip, is there an option to split payments for some items? For example, if a multi-author e-book is sold, is there an option to split the royalties between more than one person, automated to pay each person their share?

@deidrejowen I've been mailing Smashwords' previous owner. He did **not** say this, but... based on what he did say, this is my personal conclusion. It will come out at some point if it's true. I mentioned this in my last mail; waiting to see if I get a response.

@VanessaFin Solid theory. Rather despicable if true.

In reality, Draft2Digital is struggling and some retailers and libraries are insisting on only bestsellers being submitted to them. My take... Easy solution: Force small earners to leave so they can fake not ditching us - because that would make them look bad. #Draft2Digital

Not to mention that D2D lowered the Smashwords royalties that authors earn earlier this year - making it even more difficult to meet their threshold. This max exodus was their desired outcome if you ask me.

It's become all about making the sellers happy, and too bad if authors are screwed in the process.