Draft2Digital: Hero to Zero as Indie Authors Betrayed by Unfair Practices
- 14 hours ago
- 6 min read
As a longtime publisher on Draft2Digital I've seen the deterioration of this company from being easy and helpful to greedy and author-hostile. Many indie authors once regarded Draft2Digital (D2D) as a hero in the self-publishing world, but that has drastically turned into a zero.
Draft2Digital claims to provide quick and simple distribution, pro formatting, and a platform supportive to writers of all experience levels, including young authors still working out the glitches in their p's and q's. Easy print book publishing is one reason many authors use D2D.
Now, many authors feel betrayed and let down. Far from being a helpful platform, D2D is increasingly a source of discouragement, money traps, and lost trust.
Unfair Fees Punish New and Struggling Authors
A major complaint regarding Draft2Digital revolves around its fees. Many authors find them unfair.
Annual $12 fee for low sellers
Authors selling less than $100 a year on D2D are charged an annual fee of $12. It might not seem like much, but it adds up. The brutal truth is, most eBooks sell fewer than 100 copies in their entire lifetime. D2D is charging struggling authors just to just to remain on the platform. This fee punishes young and beginning writers and those building their audiences.
$20 fee for new accounts
New authors must pay $20 to open an account. D2D claims this helps prevent abuse from AI-generated content or low-quality work. But many beginning writers produce imperfect books as part of their learning process. Charging them upfront barricades entry and discourages new voices. Other platforms like Amazon KDP and IngramSpark do not charge these fees, making D2D’s policy punitive rather than protective.
Imposing a fee to deposit earnings in PayPal accounts. When I asked why, I was told
"Paypal charges us, so we thought we'd share this fee with the authors." They do offer to deposit your earnings, if you have any, into your bank account. They will certainly take their fees out of it.
Other major platforms such as KDP and IngramSpark use direct deposit only. However, if you're just on D2D and want your payment through PayPal, you should know about this charge.
Easy Book Publishing - Not Quite
While D2D offers several decorative templates, standard formatting, like adding a space after a paragraph or scene break, fails completely. D2D strips away all your formatting including fonts and scene break spacing, and uses its own. The author has to learn the D2D way (for example 3 hard returns to get the space) or get stuck with a mess, as happened to me with my first publishing efforts through them.
The templates get can get annoying. You receive a nice icon to head your chapter, but between each scene break D2D places another icon, sometimes quite big and cluttery. If you want a paragraph aside or a quick scene break, it just looks ridiculous.
In order to control how your manuscript looks, you must submit it as an .epub file. This can involve extensive coding and formatting by the author. For a print book, a standard PDF is fine (again the author is responsible for creating this), but D2D will change any color pictures to low-grade black and white. This last comes as quite a shock to some.
Problems reported by users also include sudden account cancellations, or earnings withheld, breaking the trust one must have for those with whom we choose to work. Also, closing an account can be difficult, especially if you have a lot of books. The author has to fully unpublish and delete all books first, make sure they are gone from all retailers (even the ones you don't know about), then request account deletion through customer service.
Author Exploitation & Customer Support Issues
Many indie authors believe Draft2Digital is treating them as cash cows.
No Author Support
It's a competitive market for indie authors. We fight to get noticed, let alone known. In this daily struggle, D2D offers no support or guidance. Instead, the company concentrates on leeching ever more fees from authors to maximize its profits.
Customer service decline
D2D’s customer service, at one time, was excellent. Now, authors report slow responses, representatives with no knowledge of the issue, and downright rudeness. This sad deterioration of what once was a praiseworthy department leaves authors frustrated and abandoned when they need help the most.
Restrictive and Costly Print Book Editing
Print editions are integral for authors, but D2D’s policies can make managing print books a nightmare.
Editing restrictions
An author can make changes to print books only once every three months without paying a $25 fee. This policy traps those who discover errors, or want to update their work quickly, into forking over money they haven't even earned yet on the book. Other platforms such as IngramSpark and KDP do not charge editing fees for print books. Or any books.
Misleading advertising about distribution
It's not illegal, they admit it and you can google it too, but it is misleading. D2D advertises free global distribution, but neglects to mention they don't do the distribution themselves.
They go through IngramSpark (https://www.ingramspark.com), another aggregate, which then distributes to Kobo, B&N and other retailers. D2D has absolutely no control over this; and changes, pricing, and availability are harder to manage through D2D than if the author goes directly through the retailer.
The author can allow or un-allow various retailers during the publishing process on D2D, and eBooks are reasonably quick to update. However, if a retailer has a wrong listing, missing cover, anything of that kind, D2D is next to useless.
My experience - Indigo is selling (very) old versions of my eBooks. They get their books from Kobo, where mine have been properly updated. When I asked a D2D CS rep about this, I was eventually told the retailer had been notified. That was last year, and to this date no changes have been made. This type of problem backlashes on authors, who may find sales restricted because of it.
Confusing Rules and Author Responsibility
Certain policies create confusion and extra work for authors, who are trying to save themselves extra work by publishing through D2D. Nope.
No eBook distribution to Amazon
Although Amazon monopolizes 80-90% of the market for eBooks, D2D does not distribute digital books there. Authors are forced to manage Amazon publishing separately, which makes publishing more complex, and devalues D2D’s services.
Some authors have difficulty going through Amazon directly due to robot rejection of ID. It happened to me and others I know, and is a known problem. After a passport renewal I finally convinced the bot I am me, and am now on KDP.
The point being, authors who get bot-rejected by Amazon must rely on 3rd party aggregates to get onto the platform. D2D does distribute print books to Amazon (through Ingram), but if you don't want Amazon as a retailer for ethical or other reasons, you cannot opt out.
AI Policy and Author Responsibilities
D2D allows AI-generated or AI-assisted cover art and even AI-assisted writing, but some retailers they distribute to do not. Authors have to research and comply with each retailer’s rules themselves, which defeats the purpose of using an aggregator. Policy violations endanger an author's work and reputation.
Why Indie Authors Feel Betrayed
Although Draft2Digital began an attractive platform for indie authors, its ongoing and mounting unfair fees and recent policies alienate writers. The charges punish authors who are learning and growing, an important part of the author's career.
Editing restrictions, and rules which seem contradictory or are confusing, increase the workload of an author rather than lowering it. Not distributing to Amazon limits sales potential, since it controls such a massive market share; and, limited control over books can make authors feel powerless. Most authors write more than one book, and in my experience the complications, hence the work, increase exponentially.
Indie authors want a partner who supports writer growth, offers some modicum of protection, and implements policies in clear, fair ways. For many of us, Draft2Digital’s current approach is exploitation.
If you're considering D2D as an aggregate company, it's your party. However, with this one, due diligence is recommended, because you never know who's gonna show up to whack you on the head and steal your piggy bank.
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