This has been a rough week for indie authors.
Draft2Digital, a company that does ebook distribution to a wide number of retail outlets and libraries, announced on Tuesday that they’re adding account fees for the first time. If you aren’t an author, that might sound reasonable–a company is there to make money after all, right?
But, the thing is, they already make money from authors in the form of a percentage split. This is a business model that’s never had fees because they make money from every sale. If I sell an ebook for $2.99, the platform it’s published through will keep about 30% of the sale price. At the risk of jinxing us all, even Amazon follows this model–they get their money as a cut from our sales, not by charging us a fee upfront.
Truthfully, I’d understand a fee, up to a point. Our books do take up space on their servers, after all, and that does cost them money. Having hundreds of thousands of books stored that aren’t generating sales could be a financial drain. Had they told us something along the lines of “we ran a cost analysis and have decided we need to charge authors a few dollars a month to publish with us,” I think most of us would have grumbled, but accepted it. And, honestly, if they’d done something like add a $2/month “subscription fee,” that would have made them more than the annual $12 “maintenance fee” anyway. I pay more than that a month to multiple sites I use to promote my books, after all. I would probably have accepted a small monthly fee and remained with D2D.
But, instead, they decided to lie and discriminate. First, they’re applying the fee only to accounts that earn under $100 a year. Framing is everything, guys! They could have said the fee applies to everyone but that earning more than $100/year gets you a waiver. But nope, they chose to punch down and openly target the lowest earners.
Second, they didn’t say any of that stuff I said above. Nothing about server space and operating costs. Instead, they said their platform has been overrun by books full of AI slop and now they have to pay human staff to quality-check the books. By only charging the lowest-earning authors, they’re suggesting, without saying it, that we’re the source of that slop.
Which is… insane? Whatever your opinion of generative AI in the arts, the fact is people don’t spend time generating a bunch of books and loading platforms like D2D full of them because it only makes them a few dollars a year. If we were the source of the slop, then we wouldn’t be subject to this punitive fee at all! It’s a cowardly lie, told because they know how many indie authors have a knee-jerk reaction to any reference to AI. I don’t believe AI is the reason for this fee at all, let alone that it’s the fault of authors earning less than a hundred dollars a year.
But, believe it or not, Draft2Digital isn’t the whole of why this week sucked for indies. Because two hours before I got the email from D2D, I got one from Barnes & Noble Press. They emailed to announce three new policies. Two of them are fine.
The first new policy is a soft limit of 100 titles per author. This one is pretty clearly also intended to police for AI overrun. I call it a “soft” limit because you can reach out if you have an actual need for more than a hundred titles. A person writing big fat novels is unlikely to have more than a hundred of them, after all, but if you’re selling ebook short stories, 100 is actually reasonable after a while. They seem to understand this, and to be willing to waive the limit if and when it’s proven necessary.
The second new policy is they aren’t allowing public domain books anymore. That’s a reasonable one, too. If a book is already in the public domain it’s surely already available in their store, likely in multiple forms. They make it clear in the email that their goal is to support indie authors. Reformatting/repackaging public domain works is outside the indie author realm. So again, I get it.
But the third? Their third policy is that ALL print books now have a minimum price of $14.99. Again, if you haven’t published on this type of platform before, that might sound reasonable. But it isn’t, because there’s already a formula in place that already determines minimum pricing, book by book.
Platforms like this have a formula for figuring out how much it (presumably) costs to print a book. There’s a base cost plus a per-page cost that ends in a dollar value. My novel, “Apprentice” is 508 pages. The print cost is $7.40.
My presumed royalty split on this book is 55% me/45% them… except the math is worked out in a way that’s already stacked against me. The seemingly logical way to calculate this would be:
- my book’s cover price: $17.99
- minus the $7.40 printing fee = $10.59
- $10.59 x 55% = 5.8245 which should mean $5.82 for me and $4.77 for them.
Instead, they take the percentage on the cover price then go from there:
My 55% royalty is actually more like 23% the way they do the math. But unfair and misleading royalty math isn’t even the issue here.
You can see how, with a 500+ page book like this, you wouldn’t be charging less than $14.99 anyway. I played with it just now, and if I were to reduce the book’s price to $14.99 my royalty would go down to 84 cents.
The problem is, not every book is over 500 pages. My novels are big, but most of my books are novellas that range from 10k to 40k words. I actually started publishing on BN because they still offer pocket paperbacks, something Amazon dropped ages ago. I was super excited to see my novellas in cute little paperbacks! I had one done and was working on the 2nd when they anounced this rule.
And, like, no way in hell am I charging fifteen dollars for a 95-page book???
It comes back to the same problem as Draft2Digital–they don’t want to bother with the lower margin on a smaller book. They know we aren’t going to charge $14.99 on a little book like my shorter novellas, and they don’t want to be bothered with books that make them less money.
I have an email out to Ingram Spark, asking if they have any plans of making a change like this before I switch my print business over to them, but so far it’s crickets.
So yeah… this week the industry that supports indie authors has decided to collectively tell us to go fuck ourselves.
In not unrelated news, my books are now all available on itch.io: Sara Blake – itch.io
