Breaking Down the Changes at Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble

We will see more of this as discoverability continues to destabilize

I was going to send a different post today, but something bigger is happening in publishing right now.

Right now over in the publishing world we are watching the Creator Economy shift phases in real time.

For years, the dominant model was simple: open access, low friction, long-tail supply. Anyone could upload, publish, distribute.

Now we’re entering a different phase—one defined by trust, authenticity, and constraint…And the independent publishing world is exploding with commentary.

These two signals come from:

• Barnes & Noble via BN Press, their online publishing portal

• Draft2Digital, which is both a digital store (Smashwords) and a distributor to other stores and libraries

Both online portals have historically operated with open doors, primarily by taking a percentage fee of anything you sell. This is the gold standard in the publishing industry…But it’s changing quickly.

Here’s what’s changing:

Draft2Digital

Draft2Digital is introducing account activation and maintenance fees for the first time in its history.

First, there’s a one-time $20 fee for new accounts. If you already have an account, the activation fee doesn’t apply to you.

Second, they are introducing an annually paid account maintenance fee: $12 per year for accounts earning less than $100 in net proceeds over the previous 12 months. If you earn $100 or more, you won’t be charged. These fees begin May 14, 2026, based on your account anniversary date.

Their reasoning is direct. They’ve seen “a significant increase in automated and low-quality account creation,” and say this “onslaught from automated content farms” threatens reader trust in indie titles.

For lower-earning accounts, the fee also helps offset rising costs around compliance, security, infrastructure—and this bit feels indicative of where Draft2Digital and the industry may be moving.

Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Press is making a set of changes that are just as significant, even if they look less immediate on the surface.

First, there’s a minimum retail price for print books. All print titles must now be priced at $14.99 or higher. Starting April 22, 2026, you won’t be able to create new listings below that price, and by May 14, 2026, existing titles under that threshold may be removed from sale if not updated. The stated reason is rising printing and shipping costs.

Second, there’s a hard cap of 100 titles per account. Thankfully, a title can include multiple formats. If you exceed 100 titles, Barnes & Noble may remove titles at their discretion to bring your account into compliance. You can also remove titles yourself, or reach out to their eBook Merchant Team to explore options if you need to go beyond that limit.

Third, they are enforcing an original content requirement by removing public domain titles from the platform entirely. Going forward, public domain content will be immediately taken down, and accounts that continue to upload it may be closed.

And finally, they reiterate something that’s easy to overlook but important: they retain full discretion over account and title status.

Under their content policy, Barnes & Noble Press may remove titles or close accounts at any time, including for low sales performance or content that falls outside their guidelines. That’s not new to the Terms of Service—but seeing it emphasized indicates that the technology strain of carrying hobbyist accounts may be rising for this platform as well.

None of these changes feel like they’re being made lightly—they reflect real pressures these platforms are under.

None are particularly shocking when taken individually, either.

But together, and along with other changes at other platforms, they’re a strong signal about the evolving nature of business models in this industry, and what may be breaking down for the open portal model across the board.

Who Will Feel the Pain of These Changes

Draft2Digital

For the Draft2Digital changes, most independent authors are affected.

Amazon Exclusive Authors (KU Authors) Must Decide

Amazon’s exclusivity program KDP Select changed their terms of service last year to allow books in the program to also be available at libraries. Draft2Digital and PublishDrive were the main two options for the average independent author to get their books into libraries, and Draft2Digital was the only option that did not have upfront or title fees.

That means many authors with books in Kindle Unlimited moved their books to Draft2Digital just to be in libraries. It can take years to even get a book into some of the library systems, and can take more years before it starts circulating organically. Less established authors with small catalogs will now have to choose whether the commitment to libraries is worth the effort.

The most likely outcome is that authors who are primarily in exclusivity may wait until their backlist is substantial to distribute to libraries—but it could still take a year or more to reach the $100 threshold.

Wide Authors May Not Go As Wide

These changes will also hit slow-burn wide authors. They will especially hit authors who are already direct with the Big 5—Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, and Kobo—and who use Draft2Digital to reach fringe retailers and libraries—where revenue builds slowly over time.

I think there are three possible outcomes here that different authors may fall under:

1. The majority of less established wide authors either pay the fee or simply don’t use Draft2Digital anymore. I would guess that the majority of Draft2Digital users are not hitting the threshold, so they’ll need to pony up or close their accounts. As a note, if you are already on Draft2Digital, it’s unfortunately a little hard to figure out how to close your account, and if you use Books2Read links or have merged your Smashwords account, you may not be able to close your account without affecting other services.

2. Authors who want to keep using Draft2Digital may run a few bigger retailers through the accounts. Apple Books’s portal requires a Mac and has other challenges, and with the Barnes & Noble changes, authors may decide to run overage titles (or all of them) through Draft2Digital. These two retailers are the most popular ones to use Draft2Digital for anyway, so for many wide authors, the math will make sense. As a note, 10% of royalties is not a small amount—and when taken after hitting that $100 threshold is about the cost of the $12 fee anyway.

3. (Perhaps less likely) Draft2Digital offers coupons or codes to professional groups that allow legitimate authors to waive platform fees meant to keep out scammers. This would mean you’d have to be a member (usually paying) of an organization that has negotiated these codes. Other companies like IngramSpark and Bookvault offer these codes to professional organizations to waive various platforms fees and continue account growth, so the model is strongly established in the industry already.

   1. I want to be crystal clear that the company has not indicated they are open to this, and the communication indicates that this fee is actually to cover costs of maintaining those accounts, so they may have business reasons for not waiving it.

   2. That said, Draft2Digital has done a lot to establish its reputation among authors—a moment I will never forget is when they paid out royalties for a major retailer during a month where they hadn’t received the money from that retailer. There is a lot of goodwill in the community toward this company, and it could be worthwhile for them still.

   3. While business model changes are understandable, the company has solid word-of-mouth that could die hard over $12 a year. I’ll be curious see what their true goal is here—to keep out scammers, or to become a Software as a Service (SaaS) company of sorts. Because those are two very different and incompatible business models.

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, KidLit, Nonfiction and Other Small Genres May Be Less Available

For success on these platforms, genre matters more than people like to admit.

A lot of what works for wide works best in the romance and thriller genres. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, children’s, and most nonfiction—unless they cross into romance/thriller appeal—are much smaller audiences on these platforms. That’s true on Amazon too, but Amazon is big and the scale compensates.

While the fees are unlikely to affect me, as a primarily nonfiction author I can attest to the slow nature of movement on Draft2Digital. It has taken years for my books to get accepted to some channels, and more years for them to circulate.

AI-Assisted Creators

This is also going to affect AI-assisted creators, possibly more than anyone. Already, AI-heavy users—whether that’s in writing or translations—are getting swept up for uploading titles too quickly or low-quality content. Some of this is good and keeping real scammers out, but some of it is sweeping legitimate authors into the mix too. And with all of this being at the platform’s discretion, the rulings can become inconsistent, even when examined on a case-by-case basis.

Barnes & Noble

For the Barnes & Noble changes, fewer authors are affected but with greater pain for those authors.

Short Books and Retailer-Heavy Strategies Will Be Forced to Shift

Print costs rising is not new and not changing. Economic turmoil and senseless tariff wars have expedited these rising costs. Many established authors who are also working with Kickstarter, website sales, and special editions have already raised their prices on print books to better align to current pricing structures.

Still, $14.99 is a steep price for shorter books less than 100 pages. The hard force indicates more than printing costs, but also that the platform doesn’t want to service books that can’t produce higher revenue and profit.

Likewise, most authors still have a retailer-heavy approach to print and many price under $14.99 to improve ranking and sales. Price-matching is also a challenge. If you put your book on Barnes & Noble at $14.99, you likely have to change your prices on Amazon and at IngramSpark too. This move will either have authors not publishing at Barnes and Noble for books they want to price lower, or will move the whole industry to higher print book prices—and probably the outcome will be a mix of both.

Authors may also have less affordability when buying their books via print-on-demand (POD), which could force larger print runs.

Established Authors Will Hit the 100-Book Cap Easily

This is a major structural change. It directly impacts high-volume independent authors using rapid release strategies or even just having backlist-heavy catalogs. It is not unusual for any established author to have more than 100 titles—Nora Roberts, for example, has 200+ romance titles alone, and another 60+ titles under JD Robb. Many independent authors who are using these portals, especially those with multiple pen names, will have double that.

For authors who already have those books uploaded, it is a real time and money effort to take books down and get them reuploaded another way. This will cost authors money to fix, and the deadline to do so is surprisingly tight.

The threat of Barnes & Noble removing titles from your account at their discretion is something that I don’t recall ever seeing before from a major retailer. My honest read: it is unusually aggressive, it will cost established authors real money and time to fix, and it is likely to affect the authors who have helped build the platform the hardest.

My hope is that B&N will provide exceptions to this cap for its established authors. It sounds like the cap could be appealed on a case-by-case basis by contacting their eBook Merchant Team.

Authors With a Lot of Translations May Not Publish at Barnes & Noble

This change also affects anyone experimenting at scale. Translations are a huge part of managing a backlist of books, so even if you have 10 books, if each book is translated to 10 languages, that can drastically increase your back catalog.

Now, Barnes & Noble is a unique case in this because the storefront is US-only—so most translations would not perform well there anyway, and independent authors might not be prioritizing this retailer for translations anyway.

That said, they list their supported languages to include Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish—so there could be some issue for authors expanding their catalog availability this way on their site.

You may ask, why not have multiple accounts to handle these issues? To do this, you may need multiple tax IDs or multiple LLCs with EINs. All of this costs time, money, and has fewer guarantees to get you more accounts than you think. The approval process on Barnes & Noble can also be both arduous and random.

The History of Open Portal Platforms in the Publishing Industry

The easiest way to misunderstand this moment is to think it starts with AI.

It doesn’t.

D2D and B&N have been dealing with scammer issues for years—all open portal platforms do—and it’s expensive to solve them programmatically.

Google, for example, shut down new Google Play Books accounts for five years (2015-2020) because they needed to develop better detection systems to keep scammers out.

A few years ago, Amazon limited uploads on all accounts, even established ones, to three titles per day, with different formats counting as different titles. Any established author can tell you how frustrating this is to work around, especially when you’re trying to do a round of preorders or set up a bunch of translations across a series.

And if you’ve ever tried to run multiple accounts on theses platforms through legitimate means, like LLCs with separate EINs, you probably know that it is a headache at best. When Writer MBA tried to go wide with our cowritten books, we got shut down on three platforms for various but different reasons. We were legitimately a separate entity, we followed all the rules, but we were auto-rejected many times. I didn’t even bother at Amazon out of concern for our personal KDP accounts getting caught in an automated shutdown.

These are not easy problems, and these platforms have probably been considering these changes for the last decade.

AI didn’t create this problem. Fraud, low-quality uploads, account verification, compliance costs, infrastructure strain, and trust erosion have all been building for a long time. AI is simply the pressure multiplier that forced platforms to act.

This is Part of a Larger Shift Across the Creator Economy

Platforms are under increasing pressure to maintain trust, control costs, and reduce low-quality or automated content. And that pressure is going to keep showing up as:

• Platform fees

• Upload caps

• More verification

• More account shutdowns

• More “at our discretion” inconsistency

• More tight deadlines

• More aggressive consequences

Alongside that, I want to say that hopefully these changes mean that platforms will be able to offer more value for creators who operate like real businesses—who have real audiences, real catalogs, and real value to their books.

I do not think that either of these companies are implementing these changes lightly—and the tight deadlines and urgency around them are actually a bit concerning to me. At the least, they indicate major challenges around getting rid of scammers for both companies—and I sense that these challenges are systemic of the greater systems our publishing bubble lives inside.

This is what happens when the “open doors” phase of the internet collides with the “trust and quality control” phase and can no longer keep up.

And when that shift happens, it doesn’t just affect bad actors, it affects real creators too. Especially the ones building slowly, working in niches and genres, or treating wide as a long-term strategy instead of a fast return.

Many authors will experience this as being about AI, or will take their frustrations out on the companies themselves.

But the reality is bigger than AI.

AI is the accelerant, but it didn’t start the fire.

And the fact that it’s easier for companies to put these solutions in place than to solve for the problem programmatically is a larger indicator that the internet is changing. These are added signals to what I’m personally seeing—the business models that dictated the Algorithm Era are getting an overhaul.

This is exactly the kind of shift I’m going to be tracking in Letters on the Future. In the inaugural post on Monday, I’ll talk more about the underlying shifts that the publishing industry and the Creator Economy as a whole is experiencing, as well as what creators should be doing about it.

You can subscribe here:

Full disclosure: Letters on the Future is going to publish significantly more often than this publication and will cover the full Creator Economy as well as beyond it. But if you like analysis like this, you are going to love this new newsletter.

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