Hello, it’s been a while since I’ve been here. Not really writing any more but anyway…
I just had an email from Draft2Digital - in a nutshell, if you earn less than $100 a year via their platform, they’re going to charge you a $12/year “maintenance fee”.
This seems an odd move - charging people who haven’t made money to begin with. Surely it’d make sense to charge those who DO make money, unless there aren’t many of them? Really it just stinks of a cash grab.
Either way, I have also discovered two other things.
There is no way to remove your bank account details from their system.
There is no way to delete your account.
I currently feel like I’ve fallen into a trap. I’ve emailed them with a request to close my account (and apparently they might take a while as they have a high volume of emails right now. Go figure)
Anyway, thought I’d let you know in case it’s important/relevant to you and you missed it.
They already make money off the people who make money via their platform – they get a cut of that. The folks who make little or no money via the platform are presumably a net cost for them. Hence the fee.
Yes, I can imagine that cr.p takes up significant resources for no return.
I don’t have an issue with the charge at all. Mind you, being established on their platform and making over the minimum royalty rate it doesn’t impact me.
Smashwords and now D2D has never been anything but a place to store books with no sales since I joined Smashwords many many years ago. A couple of bucks here, a couple there.
D2D’s ebook basic formatting leaves a lot to be desired. No blank lines. No offsets. No space between their chapter headings and text below. It’s worse than the meatgrinder, in my opinion.
Collections can’t be deleted, only merged.
Their epub formatting is an embarrassment. I continue to use calibre.
And on and on.
In any case, I’m considering withdrawing all 60+ of my ebooks from their platform and shutting down my account. This measly 12-buck fee may just be the push I need.
Of course, it’s their platform. They can do what they want.
I’m sad about it, but “we will distribute anything you write to many platforms for free” has got to be a hard model to sustain, especially when Amazon can simply eat any fees for hosting, support, etc.
I don’t mind (and can afford) the $12/annual for them to be the “glue” for wide distribution. I’d rather not manage that on my own, and sure, my time is worth a buck a month.
I’d rather pay than see them fold. The whole indie book ecosystem will suffer as a result.
They absolutely can. My real beef with it, is that I can’t remove my bank details OR delete my account. Therefore they’re going to take money off me and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.
I’ve emailed them, but no reply yet. I should not have to email them. If they’re putting this fee in place then they should also have implemented something so that users such as myself can just get off the platform.
I have already met a couple of users on Reddit who have used that platform to publish their novels with AI. I don’t know whether to be happy for divine justice or sad for the poor self-published authors who are marginalized by pseudo-writers.
I’ll bet a word to your bank would take care of that. “Mr. Bank, I unfortunately gave my banking information to this company and it now appears they are going to misuse it.”
However, digging into their updated terms and condition reveals that what you said is correct. They should definitely have said this in the emails they sent out. Maybe they sent emails out in batches so some did, some didn’t. Mine didn’t.
But even so, after nearly two weeks I finally got them to delete my account. They didn’t want me to, and warned that if I rejoined in the future I’d be subject to their new sign-up fee. But that isn’t going to happen.
I am not happy having my banking details trapped in an online account I no longer use (and am unable to remove) and on that basis I insisted they fully remove my account, which they finally have.