Smashwords and Draft2Digital Aren't As Open As You Think

The reputation Smashwords and Draft2Digital have built among adult authors is that they're the permissive alternatives. Where Amazon dungeons your taboo work into invisible obscurity, the aggregators supposedly let it through. Where KDP's content guidelines are arbitrary and opaque, the aggregators publish their rules and stick to them. The marketing reads like a deliberate counter-positioning, and for safer categories of erotic fiction, the positioning holds up.

For taboo work specifically, the picture is more complicated. The aggregators are more permissive than Amazon in some ways, less permissive in others, and the differences matter enough that authors who don't understand them end up watching half their distribution disappear without ever being told it happened. The filtering at these companies is real, layered, and largely invisible from the author dashboard. If you're publishing through Smashwords or D2D and assuming your book reaches every retailer they promise, the realistic answer is that it usually doesn't.

Here's what's actually going on inside both companies, and why the gap between the published policy and the lived experience is so wide.

The distributor versus retailer distinction

The first thing worth understanding is that neither Smashwords nor Draft2Digital is selling your book directly to readers in most cases. They're distributors. Your manuscript gets uploaded, passes their internal review, and then they push the file out to a network of retailers: Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Tolino, OverDrive for libraries, plus a handful of smaller specialty stores. Smashwords also sells directly on smashwords.com, which is one of the few cases where the distributor and the retailer are the same company.

The author signs one agreement with the distributor. The distributor has separate agreements with each retailer. Those separate agreements include retailer-specific content rules that the distributor doesn't always pass through to the author with any clarity. Apple Books has one set of rules. Kobo has a different set, with country-specific variations. Barnes & Noble has another. Each one of those rules is enforced independently by the retailer, often after the distributor has already accepted your book.

What this means in practice is that your taboo title can be accepted by Smashwords, ship out to all the retailers, and then quietly rejected by Apple within the week, rejected by Kobo Germany but accepted by Kobo US, accepted by Barnes & Noble but never indexed in search, and listed on the Smashwords store itself without issue. The author dashboard typically shows "accepted" or "live" status without distinguishing between actually-on-sale and technically-on-sale-but-invisible. You find out which is which by checking each retailer manually, which most authors don't do because nothing in the workflow tells them they need to.

What Smashwords actually filters

Smashwords publishes a page on their site explaining their erotica controls and content tagging system, with the full policy in Section 9f of their Terms of Service. The document is reasonable and surprisingly transparent, at least for the categories Smashwords itself filters. Bestiality, content depicting minors, and a few other absolute categories get rejected outright. Most other adult content gets accepted with appropriate tagging.

The implication a lot of authors take from this is that anything not on the rejection list is fully distributed. That's where the gap opens. Smashwords accepting your book means Smashwords has accepted your book. It doesn't mean every retailer in the distribution chain will. The retailers downstream have their own filtering, and Smashwords' acceptance isn't a guarantee that the retailers will follow suit.

The categories that consistently cause downstream problems include step-relationship content, age-gap content with the lower-end characters in their late teens even if explicitly over eighteen, dubcon and noncon framings even when narratively justified, mind control, certain monster-romance scenarios, and anything in the "daddy" naming space outside specific romance contexts. Smashwords will publish all of these. Apple will reject most of them within days. Kobo's response varies by country. Barnes & Noble usually accepts but rarely surfaces.

The author who's done their homework on Smashwords' rules and assumes their book is reaching the whole network is, for these categories, getting maybe twenty to thirty percent of the distribution they were promised. The other seventy percent is happening in retailer-level rejection queues that the distributor doesn't surface back to the author.

Draft2Digital's quieter version of the same problem

Draft2Digital is less transparent than Smashwords about its filtering, but the same dynamic plays out with slightly different specifics. D2D accepts most adult content categories at the distributor level, then routes books out to retailers, then finds out alongside the author which ones got through.

The internal D2D guidance is a moving target. Categories that were accepted in 2024 are sometimes rejected in 2026 with no announcement of the change. The Apple Books rejection rate has trended upward steadily across 2025, with the steepest acceleration around the same time the Steam and Itch adult-content stories were breaking. Whether that's correlation or causation is impossible to know from outside, but the pattern is consistent. The processor pressure that's been reshaping the indie game and crowdfunding world has been reshaping the ebook distribution world at the same time, just with less press coverage.

D2D's response when authors push back tends to be polite and unhelpful. The company doesn't make the decisions, the retailers do, and D2D's options for advocating on behalf of taboo authors are functionally limited to forwarding the rejection email. The author can resubmit, can adjust the metadata, can try different categorization, and any of those might work or might not. The decision-making happens inside the retailer, with no visibility into the criteria.

Apple Books, the consistent rejecter

The retailer that causes the most distribution friction for taboo work is, almost without exception, Apple Books. The store has consistently had the strictest content filtering of any major ebook retailer, going back to the iBookstore launch in 2010. Apple's filtering criteria are not published anywhere a regular author can find them. The rejections come back through the distributor with generic language about "inappropriate content" or "doesn't meet our content guidelines."

What's clear from years of pattern observation is that Apple's filter is keyword-driven and category-driven, not narrative-driven. A book titled with the wrong combination of words gets rejected before anyone reads a page of it. A book in the wrong subcategory gets rejected for being in the wrong subcategory. The actual content of the writing matters less than the metadata, which means authors who title their books carefully and categorize aggressively into safer adjacent genres can sometimes slip work past the filter that more honestly-tagged books couldn't.

The workaround most experienced taboo authors use for Apple is to either skip them entirely, or maintain a separate cleaner-titled version of the book specifically for the Apple submission. Neither option is great. Skipping Apple costs you a real chunk of distribution. Maintaining separate versions doubles your work and introduces the risk that the wrong file gets uploaded to the wrong store. The decision usually comes down to whether the author wants to fight for the Apple distribution at all or just accept it as a market that doesn't serve them.

Kobo's country-by-country puzzle

Kobo is the more interesting case because the company is broadly more permissive than Apple but operates differently in different jurisdictions. Kobo Canada and Kobo US tend to accept most adult content with appropriate tagging. Kobo Germany has stricter rules driven by German youth protection law and rejects categories that the US and Canadian stores accept. Kobo Australia has had its own filtering periods, often tied to local political pressure. Kobo France is generally permissive but enforces specific tagging requirements with French-language metadata.

The result is that your book can be live on Kobo for North American readers, blocked for German readers, available with restrictions for Australian readers, and listed under specific category labels for French readers. None of this is visible to the author from the distributor dashboard. The author who's never checked the actual Kobo stores from different country versions has no way of knowing how their book actually appears in each market.

The good news is that Kobo's filtering, where it does apply, tends to be category-blocking rather than account-suspending. You don't get punished for trying to publish something that gets blocked in a specific country. The book just doesn't appear there.

Barnes & Noble's invisibility problem

Barnes & Noble accepts almost everything at the distributor level and surfaces almost nothing through their store search. The dynamic is closer to Amazon's dungeoning than to Apple's outright rejection. Your taboo book gets through B&N's filter, goes live, and then never appears in browse pages, never appears in category listings, never appears in search results except for exact-title matches. You can link directly to your book and the page works. Nobody finds it organically.

For most adult authors, B&N counts as accepted-but-meaningless distribution. The book is technically there. The sales it produces are technically real. The contribution to revenue is usually under five percent of the author's monthly numbers, and that's for authors who do well across the rest of the network. For taboo specifically, B&N tends to deliver almost nothing despite accepting the file.

What the realistic distribution map looks like

The honest picture for a taboo author publishing through Smashwords or D2D is this. Smashwords' own store works fine and contributes consistent revenue. Apple Books is a coin flip that usually lands on rejection, and even when it lands on acceptance, the book gets minimal visibility. Kobo works for North American markets and partially elsewhere. Barnes & Noble accepts the file and contributes negligible sales. The smaller retailers in the distribution chain are a mix of fine and irrelevant.

If your business plan assumes the aggregators are delivering you the full retailer network they promise, the plan is off. The actual delivered network for taboo work is usually three or four retailers in practice, even when the distributor agreement covers a dozen. Knowing that going in helps with the math. Discovering it after the launch, when the royalty numbers don't match expectations, is the harder version of the same lesson. For the broader picture of where adult fiction actually sells today, here's the publishing map, and the revenue numbers that come out of running it are worth a separate read.