Draft2Digital Fees 2026: $20 Fee, $12 Yearly, 75% Royalty

Draft2Digital started charging authors directly in 2026. For the first time in the company’s roughly 14-year history, there’s a $20 one-time activation fee for new accounts and a $12 yearly maintenance fee for low-earning accounts. At the same time, the Smashwords store — which Draft2Digital now runs — switched to a flat 75% royalty on ebooks priced $2.99 and up, and 40% below that. Here’s what each fee costs, what you earn per sale at every major channel, and when it still makes sense to go wide through D2D instead of publishing direct.

What Changed at Draft2Digital in 2026

Draft2Digital announced the two new fees on April 14–15, 2026. Until then, the company’s pitch was simple: no upfront costs, no setup fees, just a commission taken from your royalties. That model held for about fourteen years.

The company still takes its commission on every sale. The new fees sit on top of that: one is a one-time charge for new accounts, the other a recurring yearly charge that only hits accounts earning under a set threshold.

The $20 One-Time Activation Fee

The activation fee is $20, charged once, and it applies only to new accounts created on or after April 14, 2026. If your Draft2Digital account already existed before that date, you don’t pay it — ever.

The fee is non-refundable, and it covers your first year of account maintenance. You’re charged when you turn on distribution — when you actually start publishing books through the platform, not the moment you sign up. Create an account, poke around, and never publish, and you haven’t paid anything yet.

Twenty dollars isn’t a lot of money on its own. But it changes the psychology of the platform. Draft2Digital used to be the zero-risk way to test wide distribution: upload a book, tick some boxes, and if nothing sold, you’d lost nothing but time. Now there’s a small toll at the gate.

The $12 Yearly Maintenance Fee

The second fee is the one that matters more over time. Starting May 14, 2026, Draft2Digital charges a $12 annual maintenance fee to accounts whose net royalties — what you earn after D2D takes its commission — total less than $100 over the prior twelve months.

Here’s how it works:

• The fee is charged on your account anniversary, once a year.
• If you earned $100 or more in net royalties over the previous twelve months, the fee is waived.
• If you earned less than $100, the $12 comes out of royalties owed to you first.
• If your balance goes negative and stays negative for more than 30 days, Draft2Digital can suspend your distribution.

Earning $100 a year in net royalties is not a high bar if you have a book that sells steadily — roughly $8.33 a month. But plenty of authors don’t clear it. A backlist title selling two or three copies a month at $4.99 can easily land under $100 after the commission. A short story collection, a poetry chapbook, or a first novel that never found its audience will almost certainly fall short.

The Smashwords Store’s New Royalty Split

The fee changes arrived alongside a royalty change at the Smashwords store, and this one arguably matters more to your bottom line than either fee.

As of January 1, 2026, the Smashwords store pays a flat 75% of list price on ebooks priced $2.99 and up, and 40% on ebooks priced below $2.99. That’s down from roughly 80% or more under the old model. On a $4.99 ebook, you now earn $3.74 per sale through the Smashwords store.

The pricing cliff at $2.99 deserves your attention. Price a book at $2.99 and you earn 75%. Price it at $2.98 and you earn 40% — $1.19 instead of $2.24. A one-cent difference in list price cuts your royalty nearly in half. Price short works at $0.99 or $1.99 and you’re earning 40 cents or 80 cents per sale through the Smashwords store.

Smashwords Is Now a Store Only

There’s a structural change behind the royalty change. The Smashwords migration was completed in January 2026, and Smashwords is now a store only — no longer a separate publishing platform.

Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords back in March 2022, and the two platforms have been merging ever since. The migration is now done: D2D is the exclusive supplier of books to the Smashwords store. You publish through Draft2Digital and tick the Smashwords box in your distribution settings. There is no separate Smashwords upload anymore.

For authors who built their careers on Smashwords — and there are many, especially in romance, where Smashwords was long the friendliest store — this is the end of an era. Your books, reviews, and store presence carry over, but the publishing workflow is now entirely Draft2Digital’s. If you never used Smashwords and only know D2D, nothing in your workflow changes except the royalty rate on that one store.

What You Actually Earn: Per-Book Earnings on a $4.99 Ebook

Royalty percentages are abstract until you run them against a real price. Here’s what a single $4.99 ebook sale puts in your pocket at each major channel.

A few things jump out from this table.

First, the Smashwords store is now your best-paying D2D channel by a clear margin. At $3.74 on a $4.99 book, it beats Apple via D2D by about 74 cents per sale — ironic, given that the Smashwords rate just went down. The catch is that most readers don’t shop there: Smashwords is a small store compared to Amazon or Apple, so a great rate on a small number of sales doesn’t move your income much.

Second, the gap between going direct on Amazon and going wide through D2D is real but not enormous. On a $4.99 ebook, KDP direct pays about $3.49; Apple via D2D pays about $3.00. That’s a 49-cent difference per sale — roughly 14% less. Over a hundred sales, that’s $49. Over a thousand, it’s $490.

Third, library and international channels pay noticeably less. OverDrive pays about 46% of the library price per copy — roughly $2.30 on a $4.99 book. Vivlio pays 55%, or about $2.75. These channels rarely produce big numbers, but library sales reach readers who would never have bought your book.

The 10% vs 15% Discrepancy You Need to Know About

Here’s something that should make you pause before you trust any single number in this article — including the ones in the table above.

Draft2Digital’s FAQ says the company keeps about 10% of the retail price on sales through retailers like Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Tolino, which is where the roughly 60% author share comes from. But the Terms of Service, effective April 14, 2026, say 15% is deducted from payments received from sales channels.

Those two numbers don’t agree, and the difference is not trivial. On a $4.99 ebook, a 10% commission leaves you about $3.00 after the retailer takes its share. A 15% deduction leaves you closer to $2.75. That’s 25 cents per sale — on 500 sales, it’s $125.

This article leads with the 60% author share because that’s the figure in D2D’s royalty table and the one the company’s FAQ supports. But the Terms of Service are the legal document, and they say 15%. Check your own royalty statements before making any decision based on these numbers. If your statements show a number closer to the 15% deduction than the 10% commission, your real earnings are lower than the table above suggests, and the break-even math in the next section shifts in favor of going direct.

For a deeper independent breakdown of the fee changes, the Alliance of Independent Authors has a thorough analysis at selfpublishingadvice.org, and there’s a clear explainer of the Smashwords pricing shift at Chapter.

Go Wide vs Go Direct: The Break-Even Math

The real question behind all of this isn’t what the fees are. It’s whether you should still use Draft2Digital at all, or publish direct to each store yourself.

Going direct means uploading your book separately to Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and every other store you care about. You keep the full royalty at each store — 70% at KDP, 70% at Apple direct — instead of giving D2D its cut. Going wide through D2D means one upload, one dashboard, and one payment, but a smaller slice of every sale.

Start with the money. If you sell 100 copies a month on Apple Books at $4.99, going direct earns you roughly $349 (70% of $4.99, before any small fees). Going through D2D earns you roughly $300. That’s $49 a month — $588 a year. At 10 copies a month on Apple, the gap shrinks to about $5 a month, or $60 a year. Is $60 a year worth managing a separate Apple Books account, formatting a separate upload, and tracking a separate payment threshold? For most authors, no.

And Apple is the biggest non-Amazon store. Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Tolino typically sell fewer copies than Apple for most authors. At five copies a month on Kobo, the direct-vs-D2D gap is about $2.50 a month — less than the time it takes to log in is worth.

So the practical rule looks like this: if a store sells enough copies that the royalty gap exceeds the value of your time managing it, go direct there. If it doesn’t, let D2D handle it. For most authors, that means KDP direct for Amazon and D2D for everything else. The authors who go direct everywhere tend to be the ones selling hundreds of copies a month on multiple stores — at that point, the royalty gap pays for the admin work many times over.

There’s a second factor the royalty math misses: reach. D2D also distributes to OverDrive libraries, Vivlio, Tolino, and smaller retailers you’d never bother with on your own. Each might sell a copy a month, but together they add up — and they put your book in front of readers you’d never reach directly.

When the $12 Fee Bites: A Worked Example

Let’s make the maintenance fee concrete, because it’s easy to read “$12 a year” and shrug. Twelve dollars is nothing — until you look at it as a percentage of what a low-earning book actually brings in.

Take an author with one novel at $4.99, distributed wide through D2D, selling about two copies a month across Apple, Kobo, and the Smashwords store. That’s 24 sales a year, and at roughly $3.00 per sale after D2D’s cut, the net comes to around $60 for the year.

That author earned $60 net.

That author earned $60 net. The threshold for waiving the maintenance fee is $100, so the $12 fee applies, deducted from royalties owed. Take-home drops from $60 to $48 — a 20% cut, repeating every year the book stays under the threshold. Over five years, that author pays $60 in maintenance fees on a book that earned $300.

Now compare that with an author earning $120 a year net on the same book — four copies a month instead of two. The fee is waived entirely, so that author keeps all $120. The difference between earning $60 and earning $120 isn’t just $60 in royalties; it’s $72 in take-home pay, because crossing the $100 line also kills the fee.

This is the perverse part of the threshold design. Someone earning $95 a year loses $12 and keeps $83. Someone earning $105 keeps all $105. A $10 difference in sales becomes a $22 difference in take-home pay.

What can you do about it?

• Raise your price if your book can carry it. At $5.99 instead of $4.99, those same 24 sales bring in roughly $86 net instead of $60 — still under the threshold, but closer.
• Consolidate your catalog. The $100 threshold is per account, not per book. Two books earning $60 each clear the threshold together.
• Drive sales to the Smashwords store. At 75%, it’s your best D2D rate — $3.74 per sale instead of $3.00 on Apple — and it counts toward the same $100 threshold.
• Consider whether wide distribution is earning its keep. If your book sells two copies a month and almost all of them are on Amazon, the non-Amazon channels may not be worth the $12.

How D2D Compares: PublishDrive and KDP

Draft2Digital isn’t the only aggregator, and the fee change makes the comparison worth doing again.

PublishDrive works on a subscription model instead of a commission model. It’s free for one ebook. Paid plans run $16.99 to $99.99 a month for 3 to 48 books, or $13.99 to $83.99 a month if you pay yearly. On a subscription, you keep 100% of your royalties — PublishDrive takes no cut of each sale.

That flips the math. If you publish one book, PublishDrive’s free tier beats D2D’s commission on every sale. If you publish three books that sell well, a $16.99 monthly subscription costs about $204 a year — and you keep every cent of royalty. Compare that with D2D, where the commission on a few hundred sales a year can easily exceed $204. But if your books sell slowly, a monthly subscription is money out the door whether you sell or not, while D2D costs you nothing in a zero-sales month beyond the $12 annual fee. Subscriptions reward volume. Commissions reward patience.

KDP, meanwhile, remains the elephant in the room. Amazon pays 70% on ebooks priced $2.99 to $9.99, minus small delivery costs, and 35% outside that range. On a $4.99 ebook, that’s about $3.49 — better than any D2D channel except the Smashwords store, and Amazon sells more ebooks than every other store combined. That’s why almost every wide author still publishes direct to KDP and uses D2D for the rest.

One more comparison: D2D Print pays 45% of list price minus the unit printing cost, which depends heavily on page count and trim size. It’s competitive with other print-on-demand options, but it’s not the place to look for high margins.

The ISBN Rule: Don’t Create Duplicate Listings

If you publish on Amazon through KDP and also distribute wide through Draft2Digital (or IngramSpark for print), you need to own your ISBN. A free ISBN from KDP belongs to Amazon’s imprint and can’t be used elsewhere; a free ISBN from D2D has the same problem in reverse. Buy your own ISBNs from Bowker — one per format, one per edition — and use the same ISBN across every channel for the same edition of the same book.

And never tick the box for KDP Expanded Distribution when you’re also using D2D or IngramSpark. Expanded Distribution puts your book into the same extended channels D2D already serves, creating duplicate listings: two entries for the same book on the same store, which confuses readers, splits your reviews, and can cause one listing to be suppressed. Pick one distributor for the extended channels and stick with it.

This has nothing to do with the new fees, but it has everything to do with whether your wide distribution actually works. A duplicated listing can quietly cost you more sales in a month than the $12 fee costs you in a year.

Payment Thresholds and Getting Paid

Royalties don’t reach your bank account the moment a sale happens. Draft2Digital pays out monthly once your balance crosses a threshold that depends on your payment method:

• Direct deposit: $10
• International direct deposit: $20
• Payoneer: $20
• PayPal: $10
• Check: $100

For most US authors, direct deposit at $10 or PayPal at $10 is the practical choice. The $100 check threshold is the one to avoid: at two sales a month, it could take the better part of a year to accumulate $100, and your money just sits there.

Note that the $12 maintenance fee interacts with these thresholds: if your balance is small, the fee is deducted from royalties owed, which can push a payout below the threshold and delay it by another month.

Should You Still Use Draft2Digital in 2026?

After all of this — the $20 activation fee, the $12 maintenance fee, the lower Smashwords royalty, and the murky 10%-versus-15% commission question — is D2D still worth using?

For most authors, yes, with conditions.

The $20 activation fee is a one-time cost that you earn back after roughly seven sales at the Apple rate. The $12 maintenance fee only bites if you earn under $100 a year, and if you’re earning under $100 a year, the fee is a signal worth listening to — either your book needs more marketing, a better price, or a decision about whether wide distribution is the right call for that title.

What D2D still gives you is genuine: one upload that reaches Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Tolino, OverDrive libraries, Vivlio, and the Smashwords store. No exclusivity — the license is nonexclusive, and D2D takes no rights to your work. You can leave any time, and you can publish direct to KDP alongside it.

What would change the answer is volume. If you’re selling hundreds of copies a month outside Amazon, run the numbers on going direct to Apple and Kobo — the royalty gap at that volume pays for the extra admin many times over. If you have a large catalog that sells steadily, price out PublishDrive’s subscription against D2D’s commission. And if you’re brand-new with one book and no audience yet, consider starting on KDP and going wide once you know the book has legs.

The fees are real, the royalty cut is real, and the commission discrepancy deserves a straight answer from D2D. But the core trade hasn’t changed: D2D trades a slice of each sale for the convenience of reaching every store at once. For most authors, that trade is still worth making — with your eyes open, and with a check of your royalty statements against the rate card at least once a year.

If you sell your ebooks as digital products in other places too, the same pricing logic applies. Many authors sell their books as downloadable files on Etsy alongside wide distribution. Our guide to how to sell digital products on Etsy for beginners walks through that setup, and if you’re using AI tools to produce covers, formatting, or companion products, our guide to how to use AI for Etsy digital products covers the workflow without the hype.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the $20 Draft2Digital activation fee apply to existing accounts?

No. The $20 one-time activation fee applies only to new accounts created on or after April 14, 2026. If your account existed before that date, you never pay it. The fee is non-refundable, covers your first year of maintenance, and is charged when you turn on distribution.

How do I avoid the $12 yearly maintenance fee?

Earn $100 or more in net royalties — after D2D’s commission — over the twelve months before your account anniversary, and the fee is waived. The threshold is per account, not per book, so every title you have contributes. Earn under $100 and the $12 is deducted from royalties owed to you.

What is the Smashwords royalty rate in 2026?

As of January 1, 2026, the Smashwords store pays 75% of list price on ebooks priced $2.99 and up, and 40% below $2.99 — down from roughly 80% or more under the old model. On a $4.99 ebook, you earn $3.74 per sale through the Smashwords store.

Can I still publish to Smashwords directly?

No. The Smashwords migration was completed in January 2026, and Smashwords is now a store only. Draft2Digital, which acquired Smashwords in March 2022, is the exclusive supplier. You publish through Draft2Digital and tick the Smashwords box in your distribution settings.

Is Draft2Digital’s commission 10% or 15%?

Both figures appear in D2D’s own materials. The FAQ says about 10% of retail price, which supports the roughly 60% author share on retailers like Apple Books. The Terms of Service effective April 14, 2026 say 15% is deducted from payments received from sales channels. Check your own royalty statements — your actual per-sale earnings are the only number that settles it.

Should I use Draft2Digital or publish direct to each store?

For most authors, the best setup is both: publish direct to Amazon KDP, where the 70% royalty and the sales volume justify the extra work, and use D2D for Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and the smaller channels. Go direct to a store only when it sells enough copies that the royalty gap exceeds the value of your time managing a separate account.