Draft2Digital Fee Announcement: Why? When? How Much!?

Why are they adding fees? - Costs are going up for everyone, across the board. Draft2Digital has to maintain its website, pay its customer service staff (and they generally have well-regarded customer service), and keep the lights on. In addition, they’ve seen a lot of AI slop get pushed onto the system, which requires them to check every book more for quality. That takes time. And money. If the small activation fee can deter some AI uploads, then that helps all of us, actual authors. What are the fees? And how much are they? Two fees are being implemented: Activation fee for new accounts Annual maintenance fee The activation fee is $20 for new accounts. If you have an account set up, but you don’t have any books, you are NOT subject to this fee. If you’ve had an account for years, if you were transferred over from the Smashwords merger, you don’t have to pay this fee. The annual maintenance fee is $12 for accounts that earn less than $100 in royalties each year. So the accounts that can least afford the fee. This fee is based on your account anniversary date. They look at the preceding 12 months of sales. For example, if you joined Draft2Digital this January 2026, your account won’t be reviewed for a potential annual maintenance fee until January 2027. So you have time to sell or prepare for this fee. So how can I avoid the annual maintenance fee? Well, I could sell more books. I know so many of us indie authors are not necessarily raking it in. It’s a once-a-year $12 fee; it’s a dollar a month. To avoid the fee, you need to earn between $8 and $9 a month in royalties. You can look at this as a challenge for the next year to get your sales up. And then you have more sales AND no fee. The other way to avoid this annual maintenance fee is to go to another platform. Barnes & Noble Press, Apple Books for Authors, Kobo Writing LIfe, and Voices by InAudio are all platforms that you can go sign up for. All allow you to upload and sell for free, but they take a cut of each sale. But that’s a lot of extra logins to manage. And uploads or reuploads for edits. You could switch to IngramSpark, another aggregator. At the time I’m recording this, IngramSpark doesn’t have any upload or change fees. HOWEVER, they’ve changed this policy MULTIPLE times in the past few years. If you want to do this dance again, if / when IngramSpark adds fees back, go ahead and switch to IngramSpark. You’ll get your eBooks to pretty much all the same places that Draft2Digital can. Another aggregator is PublishDrive. They have one free plan where you would only be able to publish 1 book on their platform, distribute to three channels, and only publish eBooks. For anything above that (more than on ebook, more than 3 retailers, more than one format), you’d be looking at a minimum of $13.99 A MONTH for their start plan. D2D Announcement: https://draft2digital.com/blog/understanding-d2ds-activation-and-maintenance-fees/ IngramSpark: https://www.ingramspark.com/pricing PublishDrive: https://publishdrive.com/pricing.html Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjvBO4kjuBSYe6Bi3RYQAQA/join Music from: Wondershare Filmora Sounds: "Something Cheer You Up" Stock video and images from Wondershare Filmora and Pexels How You Can Support This Channel and My Work: 👍Like, Subscribe, and Comment on this video! ✉️Subscribe to my monthly newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/52c7cd246b5b/authoryourambition ➕Follow me on my other channels: FB | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads https://www.facebook.com/1mkwilliams/ https://twitter.com/1mkwilliams https://www.instagram.com/1mkwilliams/ https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14420756.M_K_Williams ☕️Buy Me A Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/1mkwilliams 📚Check out my books and purchase them or request them at your library: https://1mkwilliams.com or https://payhip.com/MKWilliamsPublishingLLC Author Your Ambition Merch on Etsy: 📖https://www.etsy.com/shop/AuthorYourAmbition Partnership Opportunities: Interested in working together to collaborate on an upcoming video? Let's connect: http://authoryourambition.com/partnership-opportunities/ DISCLAIMER: Links included in this description might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you, but it can help me continue to create and put out more content. Thank you for supporting my channel so I can continue to provide you with free content each week!