I woke up to an inbox full of self-publishing delights that dropped overnight.
Back in the Smashwords days, if you didn’t want your furry erotica pseudonym publicly linked to your middle-grade adventure pseudonym (for example), you had to have separate accounts. This was their own policy, not a shady workaround some scammer came up with. You could have exactly the same tax and payment details on multiple accounts; it was strictly to separate ventures that, for whatever reason, you didn’t want touching each other in the store.
(For contrast, Amazon’s store will not link your pseudonyms anywhere, and they will ban you forever not only if you try to create two accounts with the same tax and payment information but also if you or anyone else at your IP address sets up an account with different tax and payment information. Want to start up a small press under an LLC apart from your individual venture? Someone else in your household wants to self-publish a book? You’re in danger dot gif. Entirely different policies everywhere you go. While I believe being all-in with Amazon is a bad move in the long term, I completely understand why someone would take one look at the lay of the land and decide to jump through just one set of flaming hoops.)
Four years ago, Smashwords was consumed by competitor Draft 2 Digital (D2D). People who had been using Smashwords because they didn’t like D2D were understandably displeased. People who know how eliminating competition in the marketplace works were also understandably displeased. After the predictable “Nothing will change!”, “Things will only change for the better!”, and “This will only hurt a little bit!” cycle, they got to the part of the program that proved the doubters correct. I’m not going to haul out the list because I have enough shit to say about today, but the list is long. (Their cheerleaders go along with everything and say it’s fine, so they’re in no danger of losing their author base, they know this, and they proceed accordingly because they have no competition. Funny how that works, innit?)
My response to previous behavior was to go direct with Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo (which includes Overdrive/Libby because Kobo owns it). I kept D2D primarily for library access through Baker & Taylor (which has since ceased operations) and Hoopla. It took literally years of “slow processing times” to get into Hoopla in order to finally find out that they pay a tenth what other libraries do. To be clear, I don’t jack up my library prices to $60 like traditional publishers do. I’m saying I get $3 from a library purchase and 30 cents from Hoopla. If you’re doing numbers, that’s probably great for you, but I have one D2D account that’s been sitting at 30 cents forever because it got Hoopla’d once and D2D’s degradation of service from the Smashwords days includes a payment threshold that account will never reach at that pace.
D2D auto-migrated all those separate Smashwords accounts I mentioned earlier. They eventually devised a method to let you perform certain functions in linked accounts from one dashboard, but as far as they have communicated to me, a person with multiple accounts in need of consolidation, they’ve never worked out how to actually consolidate them into a single account. As of today, this has become flames-on-the-side-of-my-face significant rather than a mere irritant.
In multiple emails dated April 14, 2026, D2D announced a $20 activation fee for new accounts. They claim this will deter AI slop farmers. (Which is hilarious because one of the things on my list was D2D’s enthusiastic support for AI. They have gobbled so much AI dick. They’ve promoted it multiple times on their podcast. Posts on their blog began ending with outlines, kind of like prompts to “write a blog post hitting these talking points in this structure” and a human being didn’t proofread enough to take those out before posting or to notice that they’ve scraped the scammy part of the internet for review-manipulation strategies that will get you banned from any store that detects the activity. They got pilloried over an AI survey that was heavily weighted in favor of it and had to walk backwards with the quickness. I don’t know how they wrote this “AI is a burden” email with a straight face. Maybe they got AI to do it!)
If your business plan is “flood the zone with shit and the volume of suckers who step in it it will bring in thousands of dollars a month,” $20 is an insignificant, tax-deductible business expense. The only person stopped by making self-publishing pay-to-play is the earnest writer who hopes to make a little money and doesn’t have money to blow on entry fees.
That person doesn’t have to stop, though, because Amazon’s single set of flaming hoops is right over there, and those are free to jump through. So what D2D is accomplishing by making it less feasible to easily reach the wide market is forwarding market collapse by pushing more people toward Amazon exclusivity.
The way you prevent a flood of slop, if that’s your real objective, is analytics. I absolutely do not mean feeding every book you get into the plagiarism machine and taking AI’s word for it whether what it just stole was extruded from its AI cousin. It’s much easier and more ethical than that. Is an account uploading 10 novel-length titles per day? THAT’S NOT LEGIT. If you detect this suspicious activity, you put a pause on that account and send an email to ask what’s up. There is a use case in which an account might have a legitimate backlist to upload. Get the details. Keep a probationary eye on the account, and if the activity continues beyond the details they provided and you approved, shut the whole account down. Why are you wringing your hands like you have no control over the situation? The ability is there, if not the will, which just makes this look like a naked cash grab that forces authors earning the least money to pay for a problem that D2D has spent the past several years encouraging.
AI slop extruders actually benefit from this policy. A person painstakingly writing their books, who has just one to start with, will be paying fees until/unless they get enough traction to take off, which takes time. A slop peddler can dump 5000 books into the stream, and if one copy of only 5% of those books gets purchased, they’ll be well over the limit. You’re rewarding the behavior you claim you’ve made the policy to prevent. Good job.
The new account fee doesn’t apply to me, obviously. I’ve got a dozen old ones! I still get pissed off about ill-conceived policies that won’t do what they claim and cause collateral damage.
The announcement that does affect me and my multiple ancient accounts, from the same D2D email dated April 14, 2026, is the annual maintenance fee of $12 on “accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after D2D’s commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12-month period.” Remember, I’m mostly direct with the major retailers. (I’ll get to that “mostly” in a minute because nobody’s without sin today.) I’m mostly using D2D for library access, and “library” at this point is Hoopla, which pays 30 cents. I would have to get 334 Hoopla borrows on each account every year in order to meet the $100 threshold on each account. Some of those accounts contain only books published in the 1990s. Very old books occasionally get a sales burst when they make it on a “forgotten gems” kind of list, but none of those sales go through D2D because I’m direct with stores. So I would be on the hook for $144 of annual maintenance fees on multiple accounts mostly to have access to Hoopla and a few teeny tiny stores at which I have never sold a single copy. Obviously not worth it.
EDIT: I’ve subsequently heard D2D had a private talk with a certain Facebook group of authors who love AI because it helps them churn, and one of the promises allegedly made was that account consolidation would be possible by May 15, which is, curiously, a day after these fees go into effect on May 14. Considering how long it took them to simply migrate Smashwords accounts to their own platform and how many years people have been asking for the ability to consolidate their accounts with no movement in that direction, I’m skeptical this will be doable in less than 1 month. (EDIT TO THE EDIT: Per D2D’s Indie Advantage newsletter dated April 23: “Draft2Digital’s Account Merge tool is now available.”) I do believe they would have a same-day private meet with a group that has a conference that heavily promotes D2D, but as for the content of that meeting, I wasn’t there and don’t know either the full extent of what was discussed or how accurate this secondhand information is. Don’t blame me or the secondhand source; blame D2D for not sharing this information with every single one of their users.
EDIT: I saw someone with money to burn whining that the $149 annual fee they give to the Alliance of Independent Authors or the Authors Guild should exempt them from the $12 annual fee at D2D. You’re making less than $100 a year in wide distribution but you’re spending $149 a year on club membership? This is the “I spent $3600 on candles, please help me budget” meme. You’re not going to get sympathy from those of us going without medication in order to pay the electric bill.
Back to that damn “mostly.”
I’ve ranted about this before, but short version: Apple, for reasons I can only assume involve tax evasion, insists in the EU that they don’t sell digital stuff. They sell phones and computers and tablets! The stores that users of those phones, computers, and tablets are obligated to use are just there minding their own business, and the companies putting apps, music, and books into those stores are the actual sellers. Under EU law, sellers are required to display their phone number and address on the product page. That’s fine if you’re Sony! If you’re an individual, there may be numerous reasons you don’t want every rando with internet access to have your address and phone number.
(And once again, because this cannot be emphasized enough, Amazon doesn’t do this in the EU. Kobo doesn’t do this in the EU. Google Play doesn’t do this in the EU. Pretending not to be a store is exclusively Apple fuckery, so don’t fanboy at me about how it’s not the fault of the corporation you’ve made your personality.)
So the choices there are: 1. Let Apple display my address and phone number to every rando with an internet connection (no, absolutely not, never); 2. exclude the EU from Apple Books (the majority of my books are doing this); or 3. get to Apple via D2D so D2D’s phone and address show up on product pages in the EU (some books are here; hold that thought).
Sometime between the last time I successfully published a book direct with Kobo and trying to update WCAD with the new cover and better formatting, they consolidated their multipage process onto one page. When I tried to upload the new epub—which passed epub check and accessibility check and was accepted with zero problems by Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, and D2D—I got a generic error message that stated only a file size limit (which the file was well under) and epub or doc format (the file was a validated epub). Not only would it not accept that file, but it also wouldn’t take the file they’d been selling previously. Thinking they might not take epub3, I tried an epub2—no. I tried a Word doc—no. Wondering if overwriting an old file had gone janky, I tried uploading it in a new project—same useless, generic error message that I was fully in compliance with.
I removed WCAD from Kobo direct and put the updated version in D2D to reach Kobo and Overdrive/Libby.
If I can’t upload new files to Kobo, I can’t be direct with Kobo for future books.
So if I flounce from D2D, I’m not giving up just teeny tiny stores and Hoopla, but also EU Apple and future access to Kobo and Overdrive/Libby.
“Look on the bright side. At least there’s Barnes & Noble!”
On April 14, 2026, in an email buried amongst all those from D2D, Barnes & Noble announced:
1. A new minimum list price of $14.99 on print books to cover increased materials and shipping costs. Gas is fixin’ to be $10 a gallon thanks to my national embarrassment, so rising cost on physical goods, all parts of which need to be transported, doesn’t seem unreasonable; that said, this doesn’t affect me as either a self-publisher or book customer, so I won’t argue if people with actual stakes object.
2. A ban on public-domain content. Good. 1311 ebook versions of Pride and Prejudice aren’t contributing anything useful to your ecosystem. Should have done that ages ago.
3. A new limit of 100 titles per account, and if you’re already over, “we may remove titles from sale at our discretion.” This also doesn’t apply to me (I’m safe in the 50s), but I know people it will affect. Novellas add up real quick! They provide an email address if you need to “explore other options,” but the “we’ll just yoink books if we feel like it” is alarming verbiage.
4. Last but never least, “Under our Content Policy, Barnes & Noble Press may remove titles or close accounts at our sole discretion.” Great, protect your brand, freedom of association. You could, for example, refuse to sell books by slimy politicians if you wanted to. Love that for you. What’s this? “This may include titles that do not meet our minimum sales requirements.”
Reader, there is not a word in the aforementioned content policy about minimum sales requirements. There is not a word anywhere about minimum sales requirements. That could mean literally anything, different meanings at different times for different people, no disputing it because it’s not documented anywhere.
I have books originally published in the 1990s. Bestsellers from the 1990s don’t have brisk sales activity in 2026. I would guess We Were the Mulvaneys hasn’t moved a ton of units this year (have you ever even heard of it? I hadn’t), but it’s in no danger of disappearing because it’s protected by a giant Penguin. But if a self-published book sells the same number of copies as that book, it’s digital clutter they can chuck “at their discretion.”
Again, their store, their rules, nebulous as those may be. They’re entirely within their rights to make “we’re not making enough money from you” a reason to free themselves from the association. With D2D, Apple, and Kobo, I can point to a specific thing and say “this is making my life more difficult.” I don’t know with B&N, but it’s probably safe to assume there’s no long-term security there, given that they’re making threats like an abusive parent.
Which leaves me where?
I’m not paying D2D a cent, on any account, ever. As soon as I’m done with this post, I’m going to purge all of them, finally, and free myself from the lengthy list of their bullshit. No more Hoopla or tiny stores. (EDIT: I’m not even finished with the post and people who’ve made the same decision are reporting D2D is “overwhelmed” and asking for “patience.” Love to see it.)
I can move books back to Apple direct. (Fingers crossed those books are only deactivated. The Apple interface is the worst I’ve ever seen and I don’t want to start from scratch for even a handful.) That means no EU distribution, though, because I don’t even want people I like to have my phone number and address.
I’ll try again to upload that one book to Kobo (and, by extension, Libby) and update this if anything has changed there, but if it still doesn’t work, that book and future books won’t get to Kobo. (If I have to download Chrome, I’m going to need a friend to hold me back for a couple of days. That’s going to be it, isn’t it? Because if the site was really malfunctioning, there would have been an uproar. It was just me because only I am averse to corporate malware.)
Watch-and-wait approach to B&N, I guess, for now. They haven’t done anything that harms me yet, but the threat is there. My PTSD doesn’t like sustained feelings of precarity, but I’ve had enough therapy to sit with my feelings before acting. (It’s much better to act after prolonged marination in the resentment of being put in this position. Thanks, Therapy!)
EDIT: I completely forgot about Google! They’re mostly inoffensive in regard to self-publishing (yes, I’m aware of their offenses in every other regard), but I did forget they exist because it’s always a surprise when Google money appears in the bank because it so rarely happens.
I self-published for the first time in May 2009, just shy of 17 years ago. (I had to get a calculator to double check that math because damn.) With the exception of briefly placing a couple of books in KU as an experiment, I’ve been wide with the whole since-1996 backlist the entire time. I strongly believe it is bad, personally, to have all your eggs in Amazon’s basket. I strongly believe it is bad, for the industry, to hand Amazon the power of so much exclusivity.
Corporations will treat you as badly as they can get away with, and when there is nowhere left for you to go, the gloves come off. Amazon offers 70% royalties only because Apple did. Competition raised the bar and forced them to meet it. (Still waiting for competition to force them to drop the “download fee” that prevents you from ever getting a true 70%, but at this point, there’s no reason for them not to ride that one to the finish line.) A robust field of competitors trying to one-up each other by offering more attractive benefits and features is good for us, the people who use those benefits and features.
None of these corporations are behaving like they’re in competition at this point. They’ve given up trying to win us. Some have switched to exploiting us with membership fees. Some have adopted a “fuck you” attitude by giving you a choice of jeopardizing your safety or being locked out of a continent in their totally-not-a-store; or by threatening to maybe, possibly, under unspecified conditions delete your books; or by “simplifying” the process of uploading books to the point that it won’t tell you why it doesn’t work.
I’ve been doing this for 17 years. I have vast stores of institutional knowledge. I wouldn’t recommend a single one of these places. They’re all riding entirely on “Do you trust Amazon with your life? Y/N.” If you don’t trust Amazon, they’ve got you. Your opinion of them is irrelevant, so why would they do anything to be more attractive to you?
What are other people supposed to do? D2D’s fees will snort up all the money from authors in countries with currency weak against the dollar (the entire Global South, for starters) even if they’re selling a number of books that exempts other authors (fees based on net, not gross!). Last I checked, B&N allows only US accounts, so using them directly isn’t even an option for most of the world. Everyone who doesn’t want their phone number and address openly displayed online has the EU Apple problem.
Amazon’s single set of flaming hoops is sitting there smugly, waiting for the haters to jump.
Sometimes, like today, I think about saying fuck it and recklessly throwing all my eggs in one basket swung by a capricious monster who thinks all my eggs are belong to it. That would go against everything I believe in publishing-wise, sure, but those lofty ideals don’t get me much except a firehose of bullshit hitting me from multiple directions on a quarterly basis when every other company wants to get their profits up. Having standards is hard. It would be so much easier to drop them. One shit-hose is objectively better than five, that’s just math! Come on, give in.
Here’s the thing, though. I earned my PTSD diagnosis at the hands of people who wanted me to give up, give in, surrender, succumb, break. I didn’t have to learn twice that there’s no benefit to compliance, so I learned at an early age to hold onto what I knew was right and endure the damage I was going to get regardless.
Resistance is muscle that has to be exercised, and I’ve been hulked out all my life thanks to all this “overconcern” for justice I’ve been lugging around. This is not a case where I have a moral obligation to choose the least-bad option in order to prevent the worst option from coming to pass. Self-publishing is (especially now!) a luxury. If I don’t like any of the options available, there are no dire consequences of choosing none of them. Oh no, no company will be ripping me off. How will I ever survive?
If there is no competitor offering a better deal, I’m not going to lie down, put the boot on my face, and say, “Thank you for the shitty offer, my liege.”
So what’s looming on the horizon for me is not Amazon exclusivity but 2012 2.0, wherein I’ll say “fuck it, I quit” for the second and final time because publishing conditions are so rancid. I love writing. I will always write. However, every aspect of publishing, with the exception of getting paid for the trouble, is awful. There is no reason to publish other than money. None. The industry purse-string holders have ruined everything except getting paid, and now, inevitably, they’ve come around to “we, the people who have nothing to do with making the books, should extract more money than the percentage of sales we already get,” which is well on the path to “the people who make the books should be thankful for the exposure and get no money at all.”
And if the people who make the books don’t like that deal, corporations don’t need them anymore, do they? They can just press a button on the plagiarism machine they claim to be against when another party uses it and keep 100% of the proceeds for themselves.
Well, that sounds like a super melodramatic conclusion if you don’t have a spreadsheet documenting names and dates and patterns of bad behavior over a period of years. My day probably could have been better spent than writing 3700 words of “THIS FUCKSHIT AGAIN,” but at least it’s clarified some things for me.
If you’re one of the affected, do what you think is best for you. Just don’t forget they have no reason to ever make anything better, so they’ll only get worse. Plan for the future accordingly.
April 22 UPDATE: Kobo is working in Chrome, after all (yay but also dammit), so they are not lost to me. It looks like I had only 2 books with D2D for Apple, so that’s also not the worst news. While I love the idea of Bookshop.org access, it’s going to be the big collateral damage in this debacle. I’ve officially put in my account closure requests with D2D.
Now all that’s left to do is clean up links.
April 27 UPDATE: D2D’s “we understand some of you don’t like these changes” form response to account closure requests requires you to contact them AGAIN to insist that you do indeed understand exactly what they’re doing and do indeed want your account closed. I may have added a salty “and I’d sooner set a $20 bill on fire than open a new account with you” to the last one because I was fuming by that point.
I customarily bend over backwards to be kind to customer service reps, who are not the cause of any problem they are being contacted about, but sending me a form email removes the impression of a human being on the other end, and I am very disposed toward throwing hammers at bots at present.
Dealing with your company is making me a worse person. I want out. RELEASE ME.
Bonus April 27 UPDATE: If you have below-payment-threshold money (for example, 30 cents) in an account you want to close, you’re not yet done! They want you to go into your account, make sure your payment and tax details are accurate (though the wording in the email is far from that straightforward), and then reply to that email “immediately.” If your payment method is direct deposit or PayPal (sucks to be everybody else!), they can override the minimum payment threshold and pay out however little they owe you. They also graciously offer you the opportunity to relinquish the money and let them keep it!
This seems like a good time to remind everyone that every open-but-inactive account you leave lying around on the internet is a security risk. Name, address, phone, email, and password are bad enough in the event of a breach, but accounts that could potentially expose your banking and tax information can genuinely destroy your life. I don’t know anyone else’s situation, but given a choice between letting a company I hate keep my less-than-payment-threshold money and leaving the account open and inactive forever so those pennies remain mine on paper out of spite, I’d choose the relative security of closing the account.
April 28 UPDATE: I’m free! One less entity to reduce my quality of life at regular intervals!