A number of self-publishing companies exist, and most are rip-offs. Yes, they may turn out a quality-looking product, but they don’t get you an Amazon.com landing page for your title or you’re unable to sell your title across several platforms such as iBook or Nook. Worse, they are extremely expensive.
Without a doubt, Kindle Direct Publishing – a division of Amazon.com – offers the best deal, as it’s free and gets you a landing page with high SEO and your book’s various versions all linked, but they don’t get you on an ebook for Nook, iBook or Kobo. The simple solution is to also load your ebook to another self-publishing site that offers this option and that also is free, namely Draft2Digital.
Some may raise their hand here and ask “What Smashwords?” Well, Draft2Digital is tied to Smashwords. Based in California, Smashwords was founded in 2008 as an ebook publisher and distributor. As of early 2017, the company had published about 440,000 books. Since then, Draft2Digital purchased Smashwords; Draft2Digital became the publisher while Smashwords reverted to a distributor role. So talking about Draft2Digital is talking about Smashwords.
There are a couple of major benefits to using Draft2Digital. First and foremost is it offers one-stop shopping for all of the major ebooks formats (Kindle, iBook, Nook, Kobo) including ways readers can download them to their PC, laptop or tablet. That’s a lot easier than formatting a book for each of those vendors and uploading it at their websites. Secondly, Draft2Digital gives you a nice landing page for your book that gets fairly good play on search engines. Even better, you really don’t have to do anything to promote that page to get a search engine high ranking.
Of course, Draft2Digital carries some downsides. Its main problem is its new fees. First, there’s a sign-up fee. If you already have a Draft2Digital account, you’re fine. If you’re setting up an account for the first time, though, there’s a $20 “activation fee. Secondly, there’s a $12 “maintenance” fee. If you sell more than $100 in net royalties over the preceding 12 months, the “maintenance” fee is waved. This now becomes a question of net gain for authors – if you only sell $13 in net royalties, Draft2Digital is only going to give you a dollar of it. Very few indie authors sell more than a $100 in net royalties per year on Amazon/Kindle, which is where the bulk of their sales will come from, so Draft2Digital has turned itself into a losing proposition for most.
At the very least, your royalty rate on Draft2Digital probably will be insultingly low. Suppose that you get 60% royalties (which is Draft2Digital’s rough average for an ebook), which amounts to $5 per book sold. If you sold only three ebooks in a year, your royalty should be $15 total. After the “maintenance” fee, that means a net royalty of $3. That’s a royalty rate of 12%.
Draft2Digital says it created the fees to reduce the amount of “low quality” books that are sold on its site. No doubt the fees will achieve that goal. At the same time, Draft2Digital stands to make a tidy profit in fees (even though it already takes a cut each time you sell a book) at the expense of indie authors who are trying to sell their books on platforms that make a small percentage of overall ebook sales in the world. Further, many indie authors published good books years ago, found they couldn’t make sales, and so took a break from writing or moved on to other platforms; they’re about to be hit with a surprise.
If you are a successful author who is able to sell more than $100 in annual net royalties and hence avoid the maintenance fee, there are a couple of other cons to using Draft2Digital. One issue is its very finicky formatting rules. What is acceptable when uploading at Kindle Direct probably won’t cut it at Draft2Digital. That’s because Draft2Digital needs a format that works across-the-board for Nook, Kobo and iBook as well as Kindle. Getting your book formatted correctly can be frustrating the first time around. Another issue is that you’ll still need to upload your book separately at Kindle Direct if you want an Amazon.com page for your ebook. Though Draft2Digital can create a format that Kindle ebooks can read and shows up high on search engines, when most people want an ebook for their Kindle, they go to Amazon.com, which on search engines almost always shows up in a spot ahead of your Draft2Digital landing page.
I used to recommend to my clients that they use Draft2Digital to get their ebook on iBook, Nook and Kobo. After all, if you format your Kindle ebook to Draft2Digital’s specs, all you’ll need to do is add a paragraph on your title page about Smashwords/Draft2Digital, and you’ll be good to go across several platforms. But the “activation” and “maintenance” fees have turned it into a bad deal for most indie authors. The exception are those authors with strong, consistent marketing efforts and who regularly release new titles (Sales for your older books tend to decline over time, meaning you need to release new books to keep the income from royalties high). Given this, I only rarely recommend Draft2Digital to any clients anymore.
NOTE: This article was updated May 20, 2026.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional book editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of 80 books including the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.
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