I guess it was always gonna come to this.
Here are my complex thoughts, as an author of several books, ranging from novels and short fiction to one of the earliest autism autobiographies....
(and an author for whom Draft2Digital, formerly Smashwords, was probably the platform I trusted most to support the rights of small-time authors)...
It's gonna be a loss for me. I make much less than $100 a year, let alone a month, from all sales of my books combined (including Draft2Digital plus everywhere else).
Honestly, at this point the number is probably even less than $12 a year. Paying this fee will almost certainly be an overall negative, in terms of income.
So... yeah. I'm not thrilled.
There was a time when my books were considered worth buying. That time is clearly past. I long ago gave up on the hope of it being my main income, or even a significant side gig.
And not only because times have changed, but because I have never made enough income from the books to replace even one day a week of a day job. My primary will-to-live, in the past two decades, has always been funneled into the long hours and stress of being a full-time pharmacy technician.
Leaving... not very much of me for anything else.
Sure, I still get my occasional bursts of creativity. But to channel them into making a living would take more than I can offer. I'm realizing I've never had the amount of free time and expendable money and energy that I'd need to put into the effort of staying relevant-- as an author, or any of the other creative things I do.
Not to mention marketing skills, which are a whole different thing from artistic talent. (Which of course is a big part of why the most popular art is seldom the most good.)
I do see where Draft2Digital is coming from.
Their explanation makes some sense. They're struggling against the destructive corporate wave that I've seen hitting every platform for small-time creatives. And they have limited weapons to fight it.
I can't see their budget from the inside, so I can't prove whether this decision was necessary-- but I can easily imagine how it could be.
The problem, from where I'm sitting (as I've watched it take over all the areas where independent artists try to scrape up a living)
For any system that's available to the public and widely known:
If there is any method of using the system to make profit-- or to achieve any goal that's desired, whether or not it's intended by the system-- people will find and use that method.
At least some people will choose to exploit it to the maximum, as much as they possibly can, no matter how much it harms others.
The people who already have the most access to money, time, influence, and other resources, will be the ones likely to exploit it the most.
If there are laws against doing this, they will be evaded by those who know how.
They will be evaded most, again, by the people with the most money, who have the most control over any legal consequences (treating fines as part of the cost of doing business; hiring lawyers to find loopholes and favorably interpret the laws; influence over courts; influence over politicians who help make and change the laws; influence over news media to sway what the public hears about all this).
This explains what always seems to happen to systems designed to choose a person for something on merit-based grounds-- hiring processes; literary awards (see, the Sad Puppies at the Hugos); presidential elections (see… basically everything)
And it also explains a lot about what keeps happening to services that advertise themselves as ways for artists to reach a following (social media sites, video platforms, online marketplaces) or as ways for individuals to offer services for money (delivery drivers, ridesharing, room rental)
Marketplaces always end up morphing into some variation of "the sellers who have the most ability to game the system end up being the only ones you can find, even if you're actively trying to support the smallest businesses," or some variation of "none of the sellers make much money at all; the company itself ends up with most of it."
Over the years, changes in technology have influenced this from all sides. The ability to share information about what's happening-- in real time, instantly, with a lot of people at once-- has kept both sides of the conflict in an arms race.
Small-time sellers, and buyers who want to support small-time sellers, are able to share updates about what strategies the rich are using to sabotage them and how they can get around it.
But the rich have the same tools to share information-- more of them-- and can usually stay on top of it faster... finding ways to insert themselves into whatever new method the other side has found for finding and supporting the underdogs (if they can't outcompete it, or make it illegal).
Through it all, those who have a process for Gaming the System have pretty much always stayed a few steps ahead, to leave even the most dedicated sincere artists in the dust and poverty.
And most recently, innovations in automation-- most notably machine-generated images and texts-- have handed a huge, additional advantage to those who were already set up for optimal gaming-of-the-system.
I don't know if it can be fixed.
And most platforms have not tried to fix it, but have just... willingly, gleefully gone along with it.
Because a platform whose entire purpose is making money doesn't care how the money is made. Just that it gets to them.
Etsy stopped making any effort to ensure that the items sold there were handmade, and now you can barely find the handmade stuff in their sea of drop-shipped sweatshop merchandise.
Amazon and practically all the other book-selling sites-- and the social media sites where authors link to their works for sale-- are just letting their algorithms do whatever brings them the most profit. Whether that means "only display the results posted by those who are already super-popular millionaires," or "display whatever someone's been able to mass-post the highest quantities of, in the past couple days."
I don't like that Draft2Digital has added this $12 gatekeeping fee. A lot of authors who've already long ago given up on making any more than $12 a year, due to the past couple decades of everything that's been happening to the hopes of small-time creatives, are just going to realize it's not worth the cost to them, and leave.
And from now on, those authors will be found only on the sites that are still letting them ride along for free, like Amazon.
Which, in practice, thanks to the algorithms on those sites, means they won't actually be found.
Goodbye to the era of being able to read new books that aren't by millionaires or machines.
That era had a foot in the grave fifteen years ago, really, but now it's got shovelfuls of dirt falling on its face.
And I don't know if Draft2Digital's choice is going to make any dent in it, in either direction.
But I at lease see the reasoning behind it. If every account has to pay $12 a year (plus $20 activation fee, if it's a new account), then that does remove some of the incentive for scammers to game their system and just have dozens of free accounts mass-posting LLM-generated garbage in the hope that some of it will actually sell.
And from what I can see (which, yes, could be entirely misleading!) Draft2Digital at least does seem to be showing more interest in actually fighting the problem than any of the other platforms.
With the exception of Archive Of Our Own. Which has been facing the same struggle against those who try to game it for profit... but whose approach has been to crack down on any attempts to sell anything at all on the platform. Because that's the only part of it that their team of volunteers actually has any hope of being able to identify and remove in a systemic, effective manner, without banning lots of innocent people as collateral damage.
And it's been working, mostly, so far. But, that does mean that any success an independent creator has on that platform is gonna be non-monetary success.
Draft2Digital is also going to hurt innocent people in the collateral damage of this decision. But probably less than all the other ebook platforms are hurting innocent people.
And, if that sounds dismal as hell... well, welcome to the world we live in.
So... for now, I will pay the annual $12 and continue having my books for sale on Draft2Digital/Smashwords, as well as the other sites, and available by request through private message or email.
And I no longer hope to make any significant amount of money from them. So feel free to ask, if you don't have the money to buy my stuff anywhere. I'll probably just give it away, at this point.
When the hope of making money runs out, all that's left is the hope of at least making some human connection through sharing of ideas. And even that has run pretty damn low for me lately.
