Everything That Changed in 2026
A dated rundown of this year's distribution changes for indie authors: royalty restructuring, print costs, activation and maintenance fees, and what each one actually means.
By Maliven
It's been a year. If you've been writing rather than following publishing news, here's what moved while you weren't looking, in order, with the parts that matter to you rather than the parts that made good headlines.
January 1: the royalty structure changed
Draft2Digital and Smashwords replaced their per-store royalty formulas with two tiers. Ebooks priced at $2.99 or above earn 75%. Ebooks priced below $2.99 earn 40%.
The old formulas were genuinely difficult to reason about and simplifying them was overdue. But the tier line sits at $2.99, and short fiction mostly prices under it. If you write novelettes, serials, or standalone shorts, you very likely moved into the lower tier without receiving an email that said so, because the announcement led with 75%.
Worth doing: take your last statement, divide payment by units, and see which number you're actually getting.
February 1: print costs went up
D2D raised print-on-demand prices for all account holders, following a similar increase from IngramSpark the month before. Both companies rely on Ingram Book Group for fulfillment, so the change moving in lockstep isn't a coincidence, it's the same supplier repricing.
D2D updated its Print Price Calculator to show current rates alongside the new ones, and they've said they won't let a book sell below cost, automatically raising list price if a title would otherwise lose money per sale.
Worth doing: if you have print titles, run them through the calculator rather than waiting for an automatic price change to surprise you. An auto-raised list price affects how your book converts, and you'd rather choose that number yourself.
April: fees were announced
For the first time in the company's history, D2D introduced two charges. A $20 one-time activation fee for new accounts, and an annual maintenance fee assessed against each account's anniversary date.
The maintenance fee is waived if you earn $100 or more from sales over the preceding twelve months. Clearing that means selling somewhere around thirty to fifty ebooks a year at typical indie price points. The same structure applies to Smashwords authors, and books can be delisted to avoid the charge.
Worth doing: find your anniversary date under Account, then Account Status, and check your trailing twelve months against the threshold.
May 14: the fees went live
Rolling out per account anniversary, so most people won't see anything until their date comes around. If you joined in January 2026, your first assessment is January 2027.
This is the one with the longest tail. A fee announced in April and charged in stages over the following year means the reaction to it is spread out too, and a lot of authors haven't hit their date yet.
The pattern underneath
Four changes, all in the same direction, and they're all responses to the same pressure.
Wide distribution has a per-title cost that doesn't scale down when a title stops selling. Free uploads plus zero friction plus an enormous increase in publishing volume means distributors are carrying huge dormant catalogs at their own expense. Every lever available to them, whether it's tiered royalties, revenue thresholds, or activation fees, works by shifting some of that cost onto the smallest accounts.
That's not villainy, it's arithmetic. But it does mean the friction lands on new pen names, small backlists, short fiction, and authors coming back from a quiet year, which is a strange group to be charging for the privilege of trying.
What we're doing about it
Maliven runs the other way, and it's worth being specific about how rather than gesturing at it.
First, the thing that outranks every number below: nothing you write will ever put your account at risk. We don't remove fiction for its content, there's no review queue, and enforcement is about conduct rather than what your story is about. The single hard rule is about images: no sexual imagery of minors. That's the whole list.
70% of every sale at any price, with no tier line. 75% while you have at least one title listed free. No activation fee, no maintenance fee, and no revenue threshold you fall below. Payouts within a business day once you clear $10, in Bitcoin or USD, with no processing fee off the top. Unlimited pen names on one account. No review queue and no retailer above us who can decline your book after we've already said yes.
We can do that because we're not distributing anywhere. One storefront, direct sales, and a cost structure where a quiet book is close to free to carry. That's a smaller operation than wide distribution and it reaches fewer readers, which is the honest tradeoff and always will be.
What 2026 asks of you
Mostly it asks you to look at your own numbers instead of the headline ones, which is unglamorous advice and also the only kind that helps.
Find your real per-sale royalty. Find your real payment timeline. Find your anniversary date and your trailing twelve months. Find out which stores actually have your books versus which ones your dashboard says they went to.
Four small pieces of homework. None of them take an hour, and together they tell you whether the arrangement you're in is still the right one, which is a question a lot of authors haven't had reason to ask until this year.