Why You Should Remove Your Books from Draft2Digital

On Draft2Digital's new fees, Barnes & Noble's changes, and why pulling your books over $12 is the wrong move.

The short answer is, if you’re not treating your author business like a business, then yes, go ahead and take your books down from Draft2Digital and close your account. Because right there, you’re not making a business decision. You’re making a decision based on emotions. So you’re probably not going to make it in this business anyway.

Bold statement? Maybe.

A little clickbaity? Probably.

But... I get it.

This is someone who was studying for their PhD in psychology (I pulled out for personal reasons), so I know that people do not like change. We hate it. The knee-jerk reaction is to run away from it. Change is unsafe. It’s unpredictable, and all our psychology systems kick in and make us turn away from it.

There’s actual science behind this. Kahneman and Tversky’s research on loss aversion showed that we feel losses roughly twice as intensely as we feel equivalent gains. So when something changes, even if the change is minor, our brains don’t weigh up the pros and cons rationally. They fixate on what we’re losing. Twelve dollars a year isn’t a lot of money. But it feels like a loss, and that’s what triggers the emotional response. It’s called status quo bias. We have a strong preference for the way things are, even when the way things are isn’t particularly serving us. Our brains are wired to treat change as a threat first and an opportunity second.

So I get the reaction. I do. But getting it doesn’t mean I agree with it.

What Changed?

Last week, unless you’ve been living in a cave, you will have seen two announcements.

One, Draft2Digital are going to start charging a $20 one-off sum for opening a new account with them. And also, they’re going to start charging authors who earn less than $100 a year a $12 yearly fee.

Plus, Barnes & Noble announced a 100 title cap.

And the internet lost its mind. Obviously.

So there are a few things here.

The Anti-AI Crowd Shouted for This

This is the bit that really gets me. The anti-AI crowd have been screaming for months, that companies and retailers need to do something about the things they lovingly call AI slop. Stop it being put on the retailers. Crack down. Take action. Protect real authors.

Well, congratulations. They listened.

I don’t know where I read it or heard it, so don’t quote me on this, but Draft2Digital had reported that on the day Charlie Kirk died, they had over seventy submissions of Charlie Kirk biographies submitted. Seventy. In one day. Now, we know they’re pretty much all going to be AI-generated. Slop, as it’s called. And this $12 fee is to try to negate those kinds of things happening. To put a barrier, even a small one, between the scammers and the platform.

But it wasn’t just Draft2Digital. Barnes & Noble also announced some changes on the same day.

New pricing requirements for print. All new print listings, paperbacks and hardcovers, must be priced at $14.99 or higher. Effective April 22nd, 2026 for new titles, and existing titles under this price point may be removed starting May 14th, 2026. This is going to hit low page count books like novellas, children’s books, and poetry collections, making them difficult to sell at a competitive price on the platform.

Title limits per account. A single B&N Press account is limited to a maximum of 100 titles. Each title can include both print and digital formats, representing one unit in the 100 title limit. Starting May 14th, 2026, accounts exceeding 100 titles may have excess titles removed at B&N’s discretion.

Again, this is to try to negate the AI-generated industry from flooding the market with books. This one, I haven’t seen so much outrage, but then the authors I know with in excess of 100 titles are all in KU, and so not on Barnes & Noble. But it would affect print. You can have those wide. So yes, I see this as a problem. Just a note that if you do have over 100 titles, you can reach out to B&N and arrange something.

But the bit that frustrates me. The industry asked for action. They got action. And now they’re angry about the action.

Pick a lane.

What Do I Think of These Changes?

The only thing that scares me, and I’m not cowering in the corner or anything, is that this could be the door opening to a slippery slope and us indies end up paying fees all over the place. These costs might be little but they do add up.

However, I’m also in the mind that I don’t just write books. I have an author business, and these are the expenses I incur. It gets added to my tax at the end of the year, and hey, it all helps towards me paying less to the tax man. That really is the only concern I have.

But let’s put this in perspective. I pay around $200 a year for Bookfunnel, and they do a lot less for me than Draft2Digital does. I’m not dissing Bookfunnel, it’s a great service, but that’s the point. I already pay for plenty of things that cost more than $12 a year. Office 365, cloud storage, Canva, Midjourney. Hell, I pay £90 a month to Claude. These are business expenses. They’re the cost of running an author business. Not one of them makes me want to shut up shop and go home.

And before anyone comes at me with some elitist crap about not everyone being able to afford this, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I have an author business. I run it like a business. Businesses have expenses. And quite frankly, $12 a year to have my books sitting in libraries across the world is not a bad deal. That’s a bargain.

If you can’t find $12 a year for your business, I’d argue the fee isn’t your biggest problem.

But What About Struggling Authors?

And yes, I know the argument that D2D are targeting struggling authors. But if you’re not earning over $100 a year, then your author business probably isn’t your main source of income. Why not see this as investing? Many authors have the dream of going full time, right? That is all this is. You’re investing in your business to get your books everywhere.

That’s not D2D punishing you. That’s you paying for a service that distributes your work globally. The audacity of them, right? (Sarcasm by the way)

I also see the argument that they aren’t charging authors who earn big.

Do you know why?

Because those authors are already paying them. For every ebook sold, D2D takes 10% off the top of that sale. An author who sells 100 books a year, which isn’t a lot, but if those 100 ebooks are $2.99, then the sale is $299. D2D gets paid $29.90. So why would they take the $12 on top of that? They’d be charging authors who earn twice. Would that be fair just because they have more income?

I’ll Be Paying the $12. Here’s Why.

Here’s the funny thing. I have over fifty books released and I’ll be charged the $12 a year. Not because my books don’t sell. They do. I’m in KU. But back in the early days of indie authoring we used to use D2D to make our books free on all retailers so Amazon would price match and we could run permafrees. Those books are still there doing their thing. They’re still free. So yes, technically I’m one of those authors earning less than $100 a year on D2D. Not because my books are terrible. But because they’re literally free and neither i nor D2D make an income from just them.

Will I pay the $12 to keep that going? Absolutely. Without even thinking about it. Because it’s $12. I spend more on one trip to Starbucks. It’s nothing. And the service I get for it is worth infinitely more than that.

Think Like a Business

But I’m sorry, I think if you start pulling your books because of this $12 charge, you’re making a mistake. A big one. You need to start thinking like a business. Or as a friend of mine, and fellow author, says over and over, us indies need to think about ourselves as publishers who also write books, not indies who publish.

You need the business mindset. Every successful author I know treats their author thing like a business, and they don’t have tantrums when other businesses lay out measures to protect themselves from scammers, because that is all D2D are doing. They’re protecting themselves. They’re protecting the platform. They’re protecting you, frankly, from being buried under a mountain of AI-generated garbage that devalues everything you’ve worked for.

Do they not have the right to do that?

Before I Go (I feel a little like Columbo here, and yes, you have to be old to get that reference)

One last thing. Back in around 2010, Nook got into some financial trouble. Payments to authors were at risk. D2D didn’t know if they were going to get that money back, but instead of leaving their authors hanging, they stepped in and covered the cost out of their own pocket. On the hope that Nook would eventually pay them.

Also …

D2D offer free formatting, extensive support, distribution to libraries and retailers worldwide, and they prioritise author control over rights. Their entire philosophy is that if authors succeed, D2D succeeds. They have shown that, not just in words, but by literally paying out of pocket when things went wrong so their authors didn’t suffer.

For $12 a year, you’re not just getting a service. You’re getting a company that has consistently had your back.

So by all means, pull your books. Close your account. Make that decision based on how the news made you feel rather than what it actually means for your business. But just know that’s exactly what it is. An emotional reaction. Not a business decision.