repost - Should retailers start charging authors to publish their books?

 

Hi Nick, Welcome back to a new edition of the Reedsy marketing newsletter! If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know I’ve recently been focusing solely on AI visibility. But today, I have to take a hiatus from that and talk about the elephant of the week instead: Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble’s latest changes. Here’s a quick recap of the situation: Draft2Digital’s changes: New accounts incur an “activation fee” of $20, charged only if the account is used to publish and distribute books. Existing accounts are unaffected by this. All accounts are now subject to an annual “maintenance fee” of $12. This fee is only charged to accounts whose earnings (net proceeds after D2D’s commission) are under $100 for the past year. The maintenance fee goes into effect on May 14, 2026, and is charged on the anniversary of the creation of the account. An important note (that D2D hasn’t been very good at communicating): the maintenance fee only applies to accounts that have books actively being distributed. If all your books are unlisted, or if you only use D2D for formatting or for the Books2Read links, you can keep your account free of charge. Barnes & Noble Press’ changes: Minimum pricing: B&N Press print books must have a retail price of $14.99 or above. Any titles priced below that will be removed from sale starting May 14, 2026. Title limit: A single Barnes & Noble Press account will have a limit of 100 individual titles. Each title can be available in both print and digital format and count as one of the 100 titles you can publish. Any titles above that limit may be removed at B&N Press’ discretion starting May 14, 2026. At first glance, these changes aren’t related — except for their announcement date. But in reality, they both answer the same problem. The AI bookspam wave “Bookspam” is a term coined by author Kevin McLaughlin to describe a problem we’ve been seeing since the release of GPT-3: scammers using AI to spam out thousands of books on retailers. With AI agents, it’s easy now to just create an agent (using OpenClaw, for example) that: Writes a book; Formats it for ebook and print distribution; Uploads it to retailers (KDP, D2D, B&N, etc.); and Publishes it. I’d estimate a workflow like this takes 5-10 minutes to run. Which means one could theoretically publish over 100 AI-generated books every single day. And there are likely thousands of scammers out there doing just that.  We (authors and readers) don’t always see it. These books rarely sell more than a handful of copies, and so get little to no visibility. But a handful of sales across thousands of titles is still enough money to keep scammers going. And these days, companies like Draft2Digital, Barnes & Noble Press, or Kindle Direct Publishing are definitely feeling the bookspam wave. In a recent interview with Kevin McLaughlin, D2D’s CEO Kris Austin mentioned that Draft2Digital regularly has to decline as much as 70% of the titles uploaded to their platform for publication. In other words, up to 70% of books uploaded to D2D every single day are spam (mostly AI-generated spam). And I expect that percentage to be similar on KDP, B&N, Kobo, and every other major retailer (or distributor). Now, Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble have actively tried to combat this. D2D has gotten pretty good at detecting bookspam and shuts down any accounts showing irregular activity, while B&N Press recently implemented the title limit to limit new accounts pumping hundreds of books a month (not to penalize genuine authors with a big backlist). But unfortunately, scammers are full of resources: instead of publishing hundreds of books under the same account (which would result in a red flag), they started creating hundreds of accounts, each publishing one book, thus flying under D2D’s spam-detection radar. Which brings us to this week’s changes: new accounts are now subject to an activation fee, and all accounts must pay a yearly maintenance fee (unless they are above the $100 earnings threshold). Should publishing be free? Thanks to KDP, Smashwords, and Draft2Digital, authors have been able to publish a book on many retailers for free. The business model was simple: by taking a cut of your royalties, these publishing platforms made money if you made money. In the AI age, this doesn’t seem sustainable anymore. Distributors like Draft2Digital have a responsibility to the retailers they work with, and part of that responsibility is to make sure that the books they send to them don’t infringe on copyrights, don’t contain plagiarism, and aren’t full of AI-generated nonsense. Running these checks has a cost — and not running them would have a much higher cost, as retailers would just start treating all D2D books (and all indie books in general) as spam.  So what’s the solution? We just saw it: introducing fees high enough to prohibit scammers, but low enough to keep publishing accessible. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other retailers and distributors follow suit and introduce similar fees for publication — whether on an annual subscription basis, or on a per-title basis. Is this sad news? Yes and no. I think we’d gotten too used to publishing being free. For most people, writing — and publishing — books is a hobby. And I hate to break it to you, but all hobbies cost money. If you like hiking, you’ll need gear. You’ll need a car (most likely). You’ll need to pay park (and/or parking) fees. All that is more expensive than $12 a year. Until now, publishing was a hobby you could invest money in, but didn’t have to.  And even if this changes, at $12 a year, it still remains the most accessible hobby out there. Not only that: it’s the only hobby I know where you can realistically expect to make some money (or even a living) if you do things right: write a great book, learn about marketing, and have a bit of luck. And since you’re already subscribed to this newsletter, you’ve got the marketing part ticked off already. 😉 So if you’ve been among the authors distraught about these changes, I invite you to look at them in a new way. If they indeed limit bookspam, they should be a welcome change, as they will raise everyone’s visibility (except the scammers). And if you see that $12 fee as a penalty, take it as an extra motivation to reach that $100 threshold. Ask yourself: what can I do to boost my sales on Draft2Digital’s retailers (or libraries)? Or even better: get in touch with Draft2Digital reps to ask them that question.  Despite all the changes, I still believe that this is the best time to be an author. We have more opportunities than ever before: more roads to publication, more retailers, and more business models. So don’t let those fees stop you — treat them as an investment into your future success. Happy writing, and happy marketing, Ricardo