Author Beware: Theo Reads vs. Draft2Digital and Smashwords
If you're a romance author who's gone wide, you'd probably like to know how Theo Reads stacks up against Draft2Digital and Smashwords. I break it all down for you here. And if you're still curious after, grab some time on my calendar and let's talk.
Draft2Digital and Smashwords are your postmen.
Draft2Digital is a distributor. A very good one, but still just a pipe that moves your book to other locations. You upload once, they send your book to Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and a dozen others. They take 10% and pass the rest through.
So yes, D2D puts your book on platforms where new readers can find it.
But are they your readers? Or are they Amazon's readers, Kobo's readers, Apple's readers, who happened to land on your title this time because the algorithm felt like it? Because next time you publish, that same algorithm may not surface you at all. You'll start from zero again. New book, new launch, same hamster wheel, same frantic search for readers who have no particular reason to be loyal to you specifically. In fact, same hamster wheel of discount readers looking for a discounted deal, who may never be ready to pay full-price for any of your future books.
So D2D doesn't build your audience. It rents you access to someone else's.
Smashwords is D2D's own storefront. It pays 75% on titles priced $2.99 and up. Authors see that number and think: finally, someone is on my side. But Smashwords' reader traffic is almost entirely concentrated around its three annual sale events, where readers show up specifically for deep discounts. Discovery outside those windows is thin for most authors. A 75% royalty on a book you've discounted to free is still zero.
D2D and Smashwords built infrastructure and that's something for sure. But infrastructure is not a publishing partner, and it is not a business strategy; it is a pipe.
Why Amazon, Apple, and Kobo can afford 70% (the answer should make you furious)
It's true that Amazon pays 70% on direct ebook sales in the standard price range.
What's also true is that Amazon sells everything. Ebooks are a rounding error in a business built on cloud infrastructure, advertising, logistics, hardware, and Prime memberships. Apple's real margin is in hardware. Apple Books exists to make Apple devices feel worth buying, not to make your $4.99 romance profitable. Kobo is Rakuten's strategic chess piece against Amazon in international markets. Books are not their business, books are their excuse.
Those platforms can afford 70% because books are a rounding error in their broader business. Romance authors and their works are a rounding error and sometimes, a loss leader - they're building their other businesses on the backs of romance authors. For Theo Reads, books are the entire business. Which means the margin structure has to actually work.
Their 70% actually buys you a file hosting service and a transaction processor. Everything else, you pay for yourself, or you go without.
Your book cover? Your money. Your ads? Your money. Your market research? Your money, plus hours of your time on Reddit and Facebook groups, guessing. Your community? Find it yourself, if you can. And your explicit content? Pray Amazon's algorithm doesn't notice it this week.
That's what 70% buys you from the machine.
A note on Kindle Unlimited, because of course it always comes up
KU does not pay a percentage of your list price. It pays per page read from a shared monthly pool, roughly $0.0045 per page right now. On a standard 300-page romance at $4.99, that's about $1.35 per full read. An effective royalty of around 27%. KU also requires you to pull your book from Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and everywhere else just to participate
On top of that, many authors pay an Amazon tax by buying ads.
So, no book covers, no community, no trend analysis AND your books have to be exclusive AND you pay a tax.
Don't even get me started on the AI-written titles that are now flooding Amazon and tanking your earnings, because that's what happens when supply (stories) grows faster than demand (readers). It will get much, much worse.
We beat Kindle Unlimited across every feature and dimension that counts. Plus, your Theo Reads income is on top of everything else you're earning. Not instead of it.
The royalty rates
D2D takes 10% of whatever the retailer pays. Your actual take varies by retailer and price point.
What our rate actually pays for, and why it's worth more than their 70%
Look, I get why any author would want to sell on Amazon. There are a lot of readers buying shampoo and toilet paper and groceries on Amazon.
But do it knowing that the true cost of selling on Amazon is -
- Book cover costs = $60 to $500 per title, if you want something professional
- Reader acquisition costs = a few hundred dollars a month in ads before you even understand what you're doing
- Market research = at minimum, hours of your life
- A separate email platform like MailerLite or ConvertKit = $108 to $390 per year
- Author community with people who actually write in your category = n/a
- Risk if you write explicit content = a constant negotiation with a platform that has quietly buried authors' livelihoods without so much as an email explanation
Here's what your Theo Reads royalty covers.
- Free book covers. The vast majority of book covers on theoreads.com have been created by our in-house designer. Cost = $0. We don't advertise this because we can't do it at scale yet...but we're working on something that will let us do that soon.
- Market intelligence and trend reports (Theo Sees™). What readers in your category are actually responding to, by genre, by trope, by heat level, plus things of note that everyone is talking about right now. Check out our sample March Theo Sees™ to get an idea of what you'll get.
- Author rewards (The Author Kit). Many authors attend book clubs and book events where most swag ends up in the trash. Spice-coded, 3-D printed bookmarks don't. Readers collect them, use them, show them off. We ship you custom 3-D printed bookmarks that readers can't get anywhere else. Hand one to a reader and you've got their attention before you say a word.
- Marketing courses to grow your own audience. We want you to be a better marketer, not a more dependent one. We share free resources including: how to sell your books on Instagram (and how to use trial reels), crafting subject lines that get readers to open your emails, and writing book blurbs that sell your books. And, we're sharing more resources every week.
- Reader intelligence you can actually use. What orientations are readers looking for? Demographic data on your readers. Top keywords and filters. What your readers felt when they finished your story. Would they recommend your story to other readers?
- A community with a seat at the table. Monthly calls with authors. Input on product features before they ship. And chat with fellow authors or directly with me (Founder, Theo Reads) in our Discord.
- A platform that won't flinch at your content. Dark romance, explicit romance, sapphic romance, and erotica get buried on Amazon. Banned on Apple. Restricted on Kobo. We were built for this content, we're not embarrassed by it. And we market it to the readers who are actively looking for it.
- 1x1 direct messages between authors and your readers. Launching in June.
What each platform offers
About content warnings: TikTok and Reddit are full of readers begging and screaming for it, in thread after thread. Which books have dubcon? Which ones have cheating? Which ones have on-page SA? Readers want to know before they're 200 pages in. They have been asking every platform for years.
Every platform has ignored them. We built it because we listen.
We're not trying to out-Amazon Amazon. We're not trying to out-distribute D2D. We're not here to do what they do.
We're here to do it better. To take the weight of covers, marketing, market research, and community off your plate so you can focus on the only thing that actually matters: your craft. We'll figure out the rest for you.
And while we build all of that, we're not asking you to leave D2D or Amazon entirely. You need the money, we get it. We're saying bring that same backlist and also put it on Theo Reads. That's incremental revenue on a platform that is already punching way above its weight class.
The comparison that actually makes sense
Don't compare our rate to D2D's pass-through. Compare this:
What would it cost you to build what we've built, yourself, on Amazon?
Book covers. Readers you can notify of upcoming books and DM directly one-on-one. Market research. Marketing education built specifically for romance and erotica. Spice-coded 3-D printed bookmarks to give to your loyal readers (rewards given to authors on Theo Reads). Community. Content warning filters for your readers. Ready-made TikTok and Instagram graphics for your books, accessible right from your story detail page for you and your readers (coming soon).
We cover all of it.
Come publish with us.
If you write romance or erotica, and you want a platform that was built to serve you, not to tolerate you, here's what to do.
Bring your backlist. Earn up to 50% in royalty - the more books you bring, the higher the royalty; read author terms here. Keep everything you're already earning elsewhere.
Questions? Email us at realhumans@theoreads.com or join our Discord.