Draft2Digital just announced pretty harsh and limiting new practices. They will be charging a one time $20 new account fee and a $12 annual operating fee if you don't have at least $100 in sales in a 12 month period (after D2D takes their percentage, of course). This will make it difficult for indie publishers and self publishers to get into the business side of writing, and will negativity impact publishers that use them for some of their distribution: Mpresentspublishing only does about $3/month in digital sales after paying authors and printers so, in the near future, we'll be pulling out of Draft2Digital. This will mean a change in store availability and we apologize for any inconvenience; but we can't, in good conscience, support a company that has taken such a negative stance toward the authors that look to them. Novels have already moved in an effort to make them more physically available, so this mostly applies to digital sales.
At the same time, Barnes & Noble is placing a minimum price on books in an attempt to stem the massive flood of AI generated books that sell cheaply in order to be more profitable. While I think this is the wrong way to go about things, I can appreciate sellers doing everything in their power to stem the bleeding caused by unwanted AI content.
Ingram Spark, who handles most of our print distribution and will be taking over our ebook distribution, has been dropping their fees (they used to charge a lot for changes, but that, at the very least, is a thing of the past). There are other fees, such as converting print books to ebooks and vice-versa, that most authors won't ever encounter (they don't charge to set up an account, for example), and those fees aren't new. A side benefit to moving everything to IS, M Presents products are available on Amazon where most people shop (even though it costs less to buy directly from the publisher, but I digress)!
Aside from banning authors for reasons that don't make a lot of sense, Amazon KDP isn't charging any new fees.
If anything changes, this post will be updated.
