#Draft2Digital’s new activation & maintenance fees📕 #selfpublishing #indieauthor #shorts #D2D #rant

While self-publishing for me has been a good creative outlet, this new development by Draft 2 Digital is hardly fair and grossly unwelcome. As an international author, the D2D threshold is US$20 for royalties before they transfer money to my bank account. US-based authors have US$10 as their threshold. At the moment, my royalties based on D2D are theoretical. And the annual fee of US$12 (for now) will reduce my royalties further. It’s like the first year of a superfund account which fees eat into it except that the marketplace is fickle for an author and there’s a great deal of uncertainty and fluctuation - I find anyway - in royalties. All a bit unfair and curious. D2D already receives 40% of royalties from each book sold and this strategy seems to be a self-inflicted wound on the long tail of books. When authors don’t sell books, D2D won’t get their cut either. This increases my self-publishing dependency on Amazon but D2D has taken the lazy approach instead of culling down the AI books that are uploaded on their platform. This is also an opportunity for indie authors to seek other self-publishing platforms. I’ve withdrawn my books from D2D as a result so I avoid their “maintenance fee.” I really don’t know what they’re maintaining…real estate maybe. What is frustrating is the admin issues this generates. Writers want to write, and readers want to read. The middleman has become too greedy and the dance continues. Rant over.