Tanya Lisle

Creative on a health break

  • Draft2Digital and Nomadic Authors

    I may not be very active in the author world these days, but I do have books available through a variety of services, Draft2Digital among them. In theory, my books are just sitting there, available for those people who stumble across them to read and if someone checks it out, great! I’m not out there advertising or doing any kind of promotion because of reasons, so this is what I’m managing. I don’t need to make a lot of sales right now, so having all of this set and forgetting about it is great.

    But then there was the Draft2Digital update.

    The problem

    A previously free platform deciding to charge an account activation fee is never going to go over well. $20USD for the ability to publish through a number of channels that you might not be able to otherwise is worth the risk for some people. They let you publish your books to libraries, which was the biggest draw for me. It is where I get the second most sales, after all.

    The larger issue was that they were going to start charging $12USD annually if you did not make $100USD in royalties per year. If you’re a new author just getting started or writing in a niche that isn’t terribly popular, that’s a whole lot of sales. Most of us make most of our money via Amazon, with all other sales channels together adding up to a fraction of those Amazon sales.

    Add onto that the royalty split with Draft2Digital. They take typically 15% of the royalty of each book already. Not the sale price, the royalty that is being paid out by the sales channel. So if you have to earn at least $100USD after Draft2Digital takes their cut or pay an extra $12USD annually, well, that’s too much for a lot of people, especially given that this seems to be yet another change making it harder to get paid by the platform. 1Those payment thresholds came in around October.

    The explanation

    The explanation for all of this was ultimately uncovered via a post on Facebook in the 20Booksto50K group. The optics of giving an interview that is published on a Facebook group instead of making a public statement on any of your own public social media platforms, blog, or via email, is not good.

    What was stated in the post about this all being to keep AI publishers from taking advantage of the platform is also pretty questionable. The account fee seems reasonable in that regard, but the maintenance fee does not. From what I’ve seen, there was no consideration given to alternatives like checking the tax or banking information is only attached to one account, or even putting limitations on the volume you can publish until you are verified as a non-AI author.

    My thoughts

    I think that if it were either an account fee or a monthly fee, that would be reasonable. The implementation of both is what makes this look like a cash grab, or that they are hurting for money. Adding in that they are reportedly not paying out authors below the threshold when they close their accounts and this looks a lot like a service that hopes that you forget you have a subscription in order to bolster their finances. Given that you also cannot delete your account on your own, it reminds me of Adobe’s practices.

    Looking at this as a business decision that is being framed as an anti-AI strategy, $12USD annually for wide publication, or just a dollar monthly, is a pretty amazing deal! One that is better in the long term for the company than an account activation fee. PublishDrive charges far more, but they do not take anything from your royalties. They also charge per book rather than placing the fee on the whole account, which is a better deterrent for the mass publication of AI slop that Draft2Digital purports to be implementing these fees as a result of.

    I’m no expert and have been very out of the loop on many things, but I do think this is a business decision and not something to help authors. Tech companies are running into the need to increase revenue as investment funding becomes unstable or dries up. In the same way the mass layoffs in tech are being blamed on AI, I think AI is providing a convenient excuse for something else happening behind the scenes and is likely only one of several issues, with the larger problems being related to cash flow in some way.

    The great migration

    Naturally, a lot of authors are now leaving Draft2Digital. This is not the first time authors have made a grand exodus from a platform, nor will it be the last. Whether it’s the mass exit from Amazon in protest, or leaving PublishDrive when they implemented their fees, this is a thing I have seen a lot over the years. The reasons change, but the result is that authors are now going to have to spend a lot of time and efforts moving their books to some new place and hoping that their audience follows them.

    Ultimately, this is a lot of time, effort, and energy that could be better spent elsewhere. With the constantly changing landscape of the internet, the wisdom we all got about mailing lists can be echoed here. In the same way that you need a way to own your audience independent of platform, you also need a sales channel that you own independent of platform as well. Hopefully this will be the time authors set up store fronts, or even just an order form, that they can direct their audience to as a first line sales channel so that the next time something like this happens they can take their time dealing with it.

    Some authors are already doing this. There’s a list being maintained at Bear Mountain Books of authors you can support at this time!

    What I’m doing

    I’m also withdrawing my books from Draft2Digital. My books sell almost exclusively through libraries and, after the D2D cut, I’m only making 20-30 cents a sale. 2My bad on that one, I priced the libraries lower I have around $5 sitting in my account that I will never see as a result. It sucks, but ultimately I am not in a position to do what I need to in order to at least ensure I hit $12USD a year to cover the cost, much less the $100USD threshold to not incur the cost at all.

    I already sell direct through my own site and, beyond libraries, I only ever really sold through Amazon anyway so that isn’t a big change on my part. If you want one of my books, you can get it directly from Scrap Paper Entertainment.

    Lastly, I am getting some rest and getting back to writing. Hopefully everyone else can do the same soon.

  • Slow and steady

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen Scheduled for April 26, 2026

    I’m doing my best to take things a day at a time. I’ve had a few odd spikes in motivation, but as is the case with chronic fatigue, I cannot act on it without pretty severe consequences. It does mean I’ve spent a lot of time working on things outside of projects, like baking or cleaning or generally crossing off to do list items relating to chores around the house that have been sitting there for ages. Using that extra motivation on things that I don’t lose track of time on, you know?

    The Trilogy

    These first drafts require a lot more work than I thought. Every time I think that I’m getting close to the parts where I got the story pretty close, I realize just how little is actually salvageable. Which, like, not terrible for me. I am having a lot of fun reworking the story and finding out I get to do some fun things with it. 1Like killing off that character instead of just leaving them around as a way to exposition dump! Honestly, much better impact on the narrative that way. It’s still fun, even if I’m a little frustrated with just how much longer it takes me now to write something.

    Also, decided to get the tablet out and figure out some stuff with the covers! I still don’t know what the titles of these books are, but I think I have a general idea of what I’m doing with the art for each of the covers will be. I am leaning toward a long title this time around, though, albeit with a different font.jrwi

    Audiobooks

    I got another one edited! Two of them, actually! The second one was a lot shorter so it felt almost like cheating, but it’s still another one! I am going to need to start signing up for all the services to distribute the audiobook at some point, and figure out what to charge, but it’s getting closer ever so slowly. Please tell me what services you use for audiobooks so I can get that done.

    Twisted Eden Stuff

    I have a journal full of journaling prompts. I had plans to create some guided journals for Twisted Eden, but I didn’t want to do that without actually trying the prompts out myself to see which ones I found value from, or without figuring out how to modify those prompts so that they were actually helpful. After around a year, I finally picked it back up again to continue journaling with it. Not because it’s awful journaling, but because if I only have 20 minutes a day to spend on fun stuff, I am going to spend it on creative works than self improvement stuff, but I had a rough writing day and needed a break.

    Because Pretty Stuff

    If there’s one thing I don’t like writing, it is product descriptions. When I finally get these products actually and fully listed, you will see just how much I do not want to write these descriptions. But that part is at least done, so there’s that.

  • Getting back into it

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen Scheduled for April 26, 2026

    The return to normalcy has been slower than expected. Life does not stop throwing punches just because you’re already having a bad time, it seems. Still, the brain is getting back to normal and I am getting back to distracting myself with projects again. As much as less than half an hour a day on projects cam do that, but I take what I can get these days and I am damn happy about it.

    I have already decided, however, that I won’t be increasing my time to work on projects next month. Between the medication stuff and everything else, I just wasn’t able to actually use my increased time in March anyway. If I don’t use it, then I don’t know if I can handle it, much less if I can handle an increase. That’s just the way things go sometimes!

    The Trilogy

    The more I write this book, the more I realize I have a very definite pattern to how the pacing of these books go. Book 1 feels like a stand alone, book 2 feels like a whole different thing where all of the world building happens, and then book 3 is the fallout from the chaos after the twist at the end of book 2. This is the third trilogy I’ve written and the second one that has followed this pattern. It is very much a second book slump, but narratively it works out better this way so I’m not entirely mad about it. It is weird how different the first book in the trilogies turn out, but maybe I can just claim it’s a style thing?

    White Noise Game

    I had a moment of nostalgia remembering old escape room games. I’ve made one or two in my day back when Flash was a thing (and in Figma as part of my day job) and started thinking about puzzles. Then looking into what engines supported making escape room games. And then realizing I had notes for a backstory that I never got into for White Noise. It could be a lot of fun, provided I figure out how to draw well enough to create all the art assets, by which I mean the human faces and bodies.

    I really have to start drawing more if I keep picking up these game projects.

    Audiobooks

    The number of times things crashed because I tried to export and import files was honestly frustrating. I didn’t get any actual stuff done, despite how much time I ended up spending on just getting the files in place. For something that’s going to turn out to be under 3 hours 1At least from what I’m looking at so far this process is taking a damn long time.

    Because Pretty

    I started getting a whole lot of errors from the sites, which I ignored because that started a couple weeks ago. Turned out that there were a few things going wrong, so Because Pretty should be working again now. While I was at it and because I was having a good day for being upright, I did manage to finally price a few of the new products that I haven’t gotten around to listing yet. We’ll see when I feel like writing product descriptions, taking photos, and the rest of what I need to do to list these!

  • Working through the stress

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen Scheduled for April 26, 2026

    This has been a couple of weeks. Cat had her appointment with the specialist which… last time we were there she stopped breathing during what I thought was a routine procedure and ended up in the ICU so I have been stressed as a result. She is doing fine, though, which somehow did not make that stress lighten up even remotely. Turns out the new medication that’s doing great things for my energy is causing a whole lot of mental health issues. 1Did anyone warn me? Nope! Gotta remember to look up side effects of all my meds on my own just in case. The fun of chronic illness, folks!

    Follow that up with starting taxes and learning that being so disabled that I cannot hold down a job means I now owe more in taxes and this has been a very unfortunate couple of weeks for me.

    Hopefully life lightens up. Until then, I at least tried to distract myself with projects.

    Audiobooks

    This is turning out to be more of a pain than expected to work on. I’ve been moving more and more to working on the Linux side of my computer 2Thanks to all the Microslop and the sheer number of updates that have been breaking Windows in general lately where I just haven’t gotten things set up yet. Adding to that, it’s also a struggle to get some of the files moved between the different parts of the computer and there’s some things that I can’t install on this side of things and I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to get my workflow duplicated.

    Which, honestly, kind of fine? I still managed to finally finish the first pass edit of Syndicate after months, so now it’s just all the manual stuff that takes forever. Yay…

    The Trilogy

    While some people use bad moments in their lives to write great things, I am not one of those people. The writing happened, but it definitely slowed down while I dealt with life. It’s also a little slower in general because it turns out that, even though I am back in the part of the story where I can keep some stuff, I need to heavily restructure this part of the book still. I’m still setting up a bunch of foundational stuff for this new world, but at least things are happening alongside it so hopefully that makes sure the pacing doesn’t suffer and the audience isn’t too confused by the way this world works.

  • One thing finished!

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen Scheduled for April 26, 2026

    I am happy to announce that I made it through February without any major crashes, or even minor ones, as a result of working on projects! This means that I can increase my time on projects every day from 20 minutes to 25 for the month of March. I still can’t really handle more than 15 minutes at a time, so it will be split up into a 10 minute block and a 15 minute block, but I am super excited because the split has worked out pretty well. I am more often than not getting a chance to work on two things a day, which is pretty great for me. I don’t have to choose!

    The Trilogy

    This has been going slower than usual, but that makes sense. I’m still in the brand new part of the book where I am actually trying to do the world building. There’s been a lot of doubling back and rewriting things I just wrote, which is not something I usually do but feels right for this one.

    Chronic Fatigue Activity Tracker

    I finished this! To be fair, I did create this spreadsheet a couple years ago and have been refining it as I used it over the last couple years. I thought there was a lot more to do, but ultimately I realized I didn’t use a lot of it and stripped it down to just the bits I used. Most of my time was spent on writing a guide for it.

    And despite the last post, I do still want to talk about it more. Specifically, I want to talk about how it works so people can better customize it. I don’t know if people even want to use it, but you know. Just in case.

Other ventures

Scrap Paper Entertainment

Novels and stories

Because Pretty

Handmade items

Twisted Eden Publishing

Workbooks for writers

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