What the Maintenance Fee Actually Costs

In April, Draft2Digital announced fees for the first time in the company's history. A $20 activation charge for new accounts, and an annual maintenance fee that started rolling out on May 14 against each account's anniversary date. If you earn $100 or more from sales across twelve months, the maintenance fee is waived. The same structure applies to Smashwords authors.

Most of the coverage framed this as a fee. It's more useful to think of it as a floor.

The difference between a fee and a floor

A fee is something everybody pays. A floor is a line you have to stay above, and the only people who feel it are the ones underneath.

If you're selling well, none of this touches you. You clear $100 without thinking about it, the maintenance charge never fires, and the announcement was noise. That's most of the authors writing about it online, which is why a lot of the commentary reads as mild.

Underneath the line the experience is different. Clearing $100 in a year means moving somewhere around thirty to fifty ebooks at typical indie price points, and fewer than that only if you're priced high. For an author with three titles, or a new pen name with one, or a backlist that's gone quiet, thirty to fifty sales is not a formality. It's the whole year's performance, and now it's also the condition for staying listed without paying.

Who's actually under it

Three groups, mostly.

New pen names. Every pen name starts at zero. If you launch one in a genre you're testing, you have twelve months to find thirty readers or you're paying to keep it alive while it finds its feet. That's a tax on experimentation, applied precisely when a project is most fragile.

Deep backlists with slow titles. Authors who've been publishing for years accumulate books that sell two copies a quarter. Individually they're rounding errors. Collectively they're a catalog, and a catalog is how readers find you sideways, through a search for something adjacent to what you're known for. Under a per-account threshold this is fine if the account clears $100 overall. It gets uncomfortable when someone's whole account is quiet.

Writers who took a break. Illness, a day job, a bad year. Your books don't stop existing while you're not writing, but they do stop selling, and the meter is now running on that silence.

The honest case for it

Distributors have a genuine problem, and it's worth stating plainly rather than pretending the fee came from nowhere.

Every title in a catalog costs something to carry. Metadata upkeep, storage, store relationships, support tickets, the ongoing engineering of pushing files to a dozen retailers with a dozen different specs. That cost is per book and per account, and it doesn't scale down when a book stops selling. A distributor with a hundred thousand dormant titles is paying to hold up shelves nobody's looking at.

There's also the flood problem. Free distribution plus zero friction produces enormous volumes of upload, some of it serious and some of it not, and every distributor in 2026 is trying to find a lever that slows the second kind without discouraging the first. A financial threshold is a blunt lever but it's a real one, and D2D was explicit that authors can delist to avoid the charge.

None of that is unreasonable. It's just that the lever lands on the smallest accounts by design, and the smallest accounts include people who are early rather than finished.

What we do instead

Maliven doesn't charge to publish, doesn't charge to stay published, and doesn't have a sales threshold you fall below.

There's no activation fee. There's no annual charge. If a book sells nothing for three years it stays up, because a book sitting in a catalog costs us close to nothing and a reader finding it in year four is upside for both of us.

A floor is one way to lose a book. A content decision is a worse one, and that risk doesn't exist here either. 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. A quiet backlist is safe from the meter, and everything you wrote is safe from the ban email.

Pen names don't complicate this. You can run as many as you want on one account, and none of them have to prove themselves against a revenue floor to keep existing.

The rate is 70% of every sale, or 75% while you have at least one title listed free. Payouts go out within a business day once you clear $10, in Bitcoin or USD, with no processing fee coming off the top.

We can do this because the cost structure is different. We're not pushing files to a dozen retailers with a dozen specs, we're not maintaining store relationships, and we're not paying anyone to accept our catalog. One storefront, direct sales, low overhead per title. That's a smaller business than wide distribution, and it comes with a much smaller audience. But it means a quiet book isn't a liability we have to price for.

The thing worth checking

Go find your account anniversary date. On D2D it's under Account, then Account Status. Then look at your trailing twelve months and see how close you are to the line.

If you're comfortably over, this doesn't apply to you and you can stop thinking about it. If you're under, you have a decision to make about which titles are worth carrying where, and it's better to make that decision on a calendar you chose than on one that arrives in your inbox.