The 40% You Might Be Earning Without Realizing It

There's a number on your dashboard and there's a number in the announcement email, and in 2026 those two numbers stopped being the same thing for a lot of people.

Here's what happened. On January 1, Draft2Digital and Smashwords simplified their royalty structure. The old version was a tangle of per-store formulas that nobody could hold in their head. The new one is clean: 75% on ebooks priced at $2.99 or above, 40% on anything below that. Two tiers, one line, easy to explain.

Simplification is genuinely good. The old formulas were miserable. But the line landed at $2.99, and a whole category of writing lives underneath it.

Who's under the line

Short erotica. Novelettes. Serial installments. Standalone scenes. Anything that runs eight thousand words and sells for ninety-nine cents because eight thousand words at $3.99 gets you refund requests and one-star reviews about length.

That pricing isn't a mistake anyone's making. It's the correct price for the product. A reader paying a dollar for a twenty-minute read is getting fair value and knows it. Push that same file to $2.99 and the value proposition inverts, the reviews turn, and the also-boughts stop working. Authors writing short didn't price low out of insecurity. They priced low because it's where the sales are.

So the new structure is fine if you write novels and rough if you don't. Nobody announced it that way. The announcement said 75%.

The actual math

Take a $0.99 title. At 40%, you keep about forty cents per sale. At 70%, you keep about sixty-nine. At 75%, seventy-four.

That sounds small until you multiply it by a backlist. An author with forty short titles selling five copies a month each is moving 200 units. At forty cents, that's $80. At seventy cents, it's $140. Same books, same readers, same work. Sixty dollars a month is the difference, which over a year is enough to matter to almost everyone reading this.

Push it to $1.99 and the gap widens in absolute terms. Forty percent of $1.99 is eighty cents. Seventy percent is a dollar thirty-nine. You are handing over fifty-nine cents per sale for the privilege of pricing your book correctly.

At $2.99 the cliff resolves and you get 75%, which is a good rate. The problem is entirely about the shape of the cliff, and where authors of short work are standing relative to it.

Why the cliff exists at all

It's worth being fair here, because the reasoning isn't mysterious.

Distribution costs money per title, not per dollar. A ninety-nine cent book takes the same shelf space, the same metadata handling, the same store relationships, and the same support burden as a nine-dollar book, and returns a fraction of the revenue. When cheap titles flood in, the per-title cost stops being covered. Every wide distributor deals with this eventually. Some do it with fees, some with thresholds, some with tiered royalties.

That's a real business problem and a two-tier royalty is a reasonable answer to it.

The catch is who absorbs the cost. The authors who most need volume to make the numbers work are the ones who write short and price low, and they're the ones the tier catches. It's a solution that works by making the cheapest catalog less profitable to its own creators, which nudges those authors toward writing longer, pricing higher, or going elsewhere.

Plenty of them go elsewhere.

What we do instead

Maliven pays 70% of every sale regardless of price, and 75% if you have at least one title listed free. There's no price threshold, no cliff, and no tier you fall out of because a book is short.

A ninety-nine cent story earns the same percentage as a nine-dollar one. That's not generosity, it's a consequence of the structure. We sell direct, so there's no retailer taking a cut before the split happens and no per-store overhead to cover. The economics of a cheap title aren't worse for us, so we don't have to make them worse for you.

The 75% tier works the other direction from a fee. Instead of charging you for a small catalog, we raise your rate for putting one book free, because free books bring readers to the storefront and readers buy other things. You get paid more for doing the thing that helps both of us.

And none of this touches the thing that actually costs adult fiction authors the most, which is the risk of losing everything at once. Here that risk doesn't exist. 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. Nothing you write will ever put your account, or the backlist earning that 70%, at risk.

Payouts go out within a business day once you clear $10, in Bitcoin or USD, and there's no processing fee taken off the top.

What to do about it

If you write short, go look at your actual per-sale earnings rather than the headline rate. Divide what you were paid by units sold. If the number surprises you, that's the tier.

Then decide whether the distribution you're getting is worth the difference, because for some people it will be. Wide distribution into libraries and international stores is worth real money and you may be earning more at 40% through those channels than you would at 70% selling direct to a smaller audience. That math is yours to run and it depends entirely on where your readers already are.

But run it. The worst outcome is not knowing which tier you're in.