On Draft2Digital, and Bookspam

Turmoil, upset, and no shortage of sturm und drang this week among the indie publishing community (i.e., self-pubbers like yr humble rhino.) Draft2Digital announced they they were no longer going to be allowing purely free signup and support: new accounts will be charged $20 setup, and sales must meet or exceed $100 annually or else the account is charged $12. Barnes & Noble has a similar, albeit less spelled out policy that accounts not meeting standards could be knifed. Amazon, as of this writing, has been mum, but Amazon also has incredibly deep pockets. They can--and I suspect do--lose money on their self-publishing platform, and it's barely a mote in their financial eye.

But boy, it was like D2D announced they'd be puppy-stomping, and indie authors would be funding it. What happened?

I'm speculating that it's the general issue of scale. When books took a while to produce, D2D naturally did not get as many uploaded to their service to distribute, and they both withhold a percentage of sales for their services and hold the royalties until they meet a certain threshold. My theory is that this is an incredibly thin-margin business, dependent upon a high enough ratio of books-that-sell to infrastructure-to-support. Keep that ratio happy, and the business keeps in the black. Upset the ratio, and it's into the red.

Again, just my theory: AI broke it.

Specifically, low-to-no content AI-generated or facilitated books, especially journals, planners, coloring and books which were the rage of get-rich-quick with self-publishing schemes and videos, mixed in with a fresh, new wave of short stories and novellas churned out in minutes by a LLM. It's easy. It's incredibly cheap, too, as model-makers are subsidizing their own tokens in their race to be the dominant engine and ubiquitous and a survivor before the anticipated AI business crash. In an afternoon, I could produce a dozen or more minimal-effort "products" and upload them, and for free! They'd be blasted out through D2D's distribution channels to all their partners. Even if one takes down a title for being slop, there's a dozen others out there.

Put another way: bookspam. Maybe this is the cynicism of age, or a tiny lucid moment of awareness, but any time a free platform is made available to distribute a money-making scheme, people will take advantage of it. From the first "MAKE MONEY FAST" schemes on Usenet, to the rise of email spam, to this. At scale, your crappy/dubious/fake product only needs to make a few pennies here and there to be funneled back to the originator. Low fuss, low cost. What's not to love?

So, there's plenty of rage about how-dare-you-take-away-this-free-service from writers who, let's face it, aren't making $100 in annual sales. I'm completely in that camp, by the way. I see this new charge as many things: a minor point of friction for would-be bookspammers, a way to ensure some income for Draft2Digital ($12 in the hand is more reliable than a percentage), and maybe, possibly, the first pushback against a tide of crap that is likely throwing off their content:costs ratio.

Amazon's been quiet about this, but are rolling out various self-identification markers on titles in their own KDP program (I solemnly swear I did/did not use AI) and I would not be surprised if this is the next move for everyone. The era of free rides may be over, but I don't think the blame lies at D2D's feet.

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