Today should have been a good day. I have a new book. Well, sort of. A re-edited, re-formatted edition of my novel The Secret of the Sunken Temple, originally published in 2022 by a small press that has since closed its doors. I got my rights back, and decided to re-issue the book.

I am immensely proud of that story. I put a lot of time, effort, and imagination into it. I was looking forward to sharing it with the world again.

And then, with no warning, Draft2Digital announced it would now be charging users a maintenance fee.

For those unfamiliar with how self-publishing works, Draft2Digital is a distributor and printer. I upload the digital files of my books to D2D and they distribute the books to all the major retailers as well as libraries and independent bookstores. In exchange for providing me with this very convenient service, which saves me the hassle of having to upload the files to every single retailer individually, they take a small cut of each sale.

A reasonable arrangement.

And for quite a while, it was just that. A reasonable arrangement.

Then things started to go a little … off. First there were the content restrictions. I don’t mean obvious things, like AI-generated books or texts that promote terrorism or hate speech. No, I mean things like chakras, air fryers, meditation, prepper manuals, and more. Subjects for which D2D claimed there was already a market saturation.

Okay. Maybe?

Then came word that D2D could no longer guarantee distribution to Amazon. I figured, based on past experience and what I heard from other authors, that this was another example of Amazon flexing its muscles; trying to force authors to distribute through KDP rather than through a third party. Maybe your book will get on Amazon if you have a good track record and sell enough books. Maybe yes, maybe no. And if no, well, too bad, our decision is final.

And then yesterday, without warning, D2D announced new maintenance fees. Bad enough they are charging a new author fee of $20. Now even those who have been with D2D for years have to pay a maintenance fee on top of the cut D2D is already taking from every sale.

Even worse? The fee is not universally applied. To quote D2D directly: “An annual maintenance fee of $12 will apply to accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after D2D’s commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12-month period. If you earn $100 or more from your book sales over 12 months, you will not be charged this fee.”

The rationale offered by D2D is that this is a way to prevent AI slop from being submitted. How that works is never made clear. Some AI books sell better than human-made books, and would absolutely clear that $100 hurdle. Many many many human-made books will not.*

Including mine. I made well below that $100 threshold last year.

This is, to put it bluntly, a tax on the poor.

People who make decent money as self-published authors — who are making D2D money through their cut of each sale — are safe from this fee. D2D will happily continue to support them. But for those of us out here on the fringes, writing weird little novellas and short story collections with weird little audiences? Who sell a few dozen copies in a year? Well, too bad. By D2D’s standards, we are not a success.

We’re failures. Because we haven’t turned our passion for stories into enough money to make D2D happy.

So now I’m angry and embarrassed. I feel like an abject failure at the one thing I wanted to do with my life: tell stories. All because I don’t make enough money to be considered a success in the eyes of some CEO sitting in an air conditioned office a thousand miles away, who has never met me, and certainly never read my books. Or the books lovingly written by all of those other authors out there who struggle to be heard and seen through the noise of a very busy world.

I have spent today distracting and consoling myself. I’m designing book covers in Affinity.** I’m planning what to do with all the books I’ll be releasing later this year and into next year; not likely they will be distributed by D2D, no, not at all. And I’m figuring out how to move Vampires Save the Night: Heroes, Anti-Heroes, and Not-So-Reformed Villains off D2D and onto another platform such as PubShare (because, yes, apparently this fee applies to everyone, even if they’ve only published a single short story, which means D2D would be making way more than the cover price of an anthology by charging every single contributor a maintenance fee).

Maybe I and authors like me are failures in the eyes of D2D and the executives who run the company. But I am doing something I love, and (mostly) having fun in the process. A pity D2D can’t take to heart the spirit of its motto: “we succeed when our authors succeed.”

*And, of course, there is absolutely nothing to prevent D2D from raising that minimum threshold or the annual maintenance fee. Why not $200 in sales or $24 maintenance fee per year? Why not $500? Or a $1000?

** Here’s hoping Affinity does not turn into a money-grubbing AI cesspool. Here are a few full wrap-around covers for upcoming paperback anthologies. What do you think?