Earlier this summer, Barnes & Noble indicated they would be limiting the number of print titles they offer in their online store, and they de-listed thousands of self-published titles without warning, leading to an outcry from indie authors. (Fortunately, authors were given specific steps to follow to get their titles reinstated.)
Then, last week, Publishers Lunch reported that Barnes & Noble is still eliminating titles from BN.com, this time in both print and ebook format (sub required). Categories affected include erotica, public domain works, and summary titles (which are often low-quality). Barnes & Noble director Shannon DeVito told Publishers Lunch that this is part of a quality-control move and not aimed at major publishers. Moreover, she said, they’ve long had a content policy against pornography that hasn’t been enforced. Of course, reasonable people can disagree about whether an erotica title in fact crosses the line into porn, but DeVito indicated that problematic titles include taboo content in relation to age, consent, incest, and so on.
Some Draft2Digital authors will be affected by the changes. Draft2Digital is one of the biggest distributors of self-published content that works with Barnes & Noble. We talked with D2D’s COO, Dan Wood, to get more clarity on these changes and why Barnes & Noble is acting now.
B&N’s latest quality-control moves appear related to an increase in low-quality book content likely generated by AI. “Everyone within the industry is kind of struggling to deal with the onslaught,” Wood says. “I don’t think most people within the industry have a big problem with authors using tools to assist them with writing, but we don’t want a bunch of spam content. It’s generally not from authors but from people looking for passive income.” While erotica is one category where B&N is tightening things up, they’re also concerned about distribution of public domain works and low-quality summary works that confuse consumers, who might mistakenly buy the summaries instead of the original book. Fortunately for D2D, they stopped distributing public domain works a while back because of the difficulty of confirming the rightsholder across multiple territories. (Even if a work is in the public domain in the US, it may be protected in other countries, and vice versa.) So the main issue for D2D and B&N to work out is the erotica policy.
Erotica authors have always faced special challenges when distributing, selling, and advertising their work. As this issue’s item on romance notes, the heat level of romance has been continually rising since the advent of TikTok, since it allows authors to promote such material even when Amazon and Facebook do not. But erotica that centers on taboos makes it all more complicated. While Wood says that there was once a Wild West environment for all types of material in the early days of self-publishing, that time ended a while ago. (Barnes & Noble started limiting what material it would accept in 2017.) For years, Smashwords has been a go-to distributor for erotica authors writing about taboos, because Smashwords has a storefront to sell direct. (Smashwords is now merged with D2D.)
Draft2Digital has become adept over the years at distributing only the titles that each channel wants. Libraries, for example, don’t take the erotica, and each retailer can have varying policies regarding what they will accept. For Barnes & Noble, nothing is set in stone yet, Wood says. They’re still in conversation about what can be distributed and what can’t. Because D2D distributes to major online retailers that still accept titles that B&N wants to reject, there may be an opportunity to make an argument they should have policies similar to their competitors’ to avoid losing sales. Wood expects D2D to make an announcement by the end of the year with more guidance for authors on what’s acceptable for B&N distribution.
Wood says, “Unfortunately, I would say with both erotica and other types of content, [what’s acceptable] is always changing. And so just because something has been allowed before doesn’t mean the retailers are always going to allow it. Like back during the pandemic, very quickly, they made rules against making COVID [misinformation] books or things like that. So you just never know.” He added, “I know authors get frustrated because it’s very hard for us to define what is and isn’t allowed. They always want black-and-white rules. No one in the business gives us these exact rules, and so we’re kind of playing it by ear.”
Bottom line: In the end, only a small percentage of authors or titles will be affected. Out of the nearly 1 million titles that Draft2Digital distributes, B&N’s changes may affect maybe 10,000 titles. Authors will still potentially be able to distribute and sell their titles through other retailers, even if B&N is more strict about enforcement or makes their policies more exclusionary. And the Smashwords storefront for erotica (with or without taboos) remains open as well.
How Draft2Digital Deals with AI Content from Bad Actors
Retailers and distributors like Barnes & Noble and IngramSpark have been creating stricter policies to keep out low-quality content that’s now increasingly AI generated. Similarly, Draft2Digital has also had to keep an eye on the increased level of publishing activity on its platform. Right now, the volume of material coming into the platform has been trending at roughly 50 percent more than usual. Fortunately, Wood says it’s easy to track the bad actors because “normal authors don’t release 10 books in a day.” D2D looks at account statistics and other account data to help them identify players they might prefer not to host or enable. In the past, these sorts of players would use ghostwriters in developing countries or other cheap methods of generating material, but it’s now obviously AI. “We’ve always had a policy against low-quality works,” he says. “We think it’s in our best interest to send books to the retailers that the readers are going to actually want.” Generally, D2D shuts down the bad actors before the books even make it to the retailers. In some cases, if something slips past their monitoring, they will simply take all material down upon discovery.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
