Though I've long cheered about the great job that Direct2Digital does in rendering eBooks (i.e. not corrupting the books and not deleting included images), my latest examination of my D2D numbers has completely changed my mind.
While distributed sales have Never been that been of a factor in my overall sales, I always saw it as a way of gaining a couple new readers.
I'd been noticing a decrease in SW's distributed sales, years ago, and Amazon long had a problem with readers returning books they're spent a month reading for a full refund. However, after generating $42 in sales in 2018, my 2019 sales only amounted to $4. Out of 15 sales (5 of which were well under $1 to 'share' sites and libraries where you get paid pennies on the dollar), virtually ALL were returned by readers. Mind you, these are the exact SAME books which were selling earlier, so it's not a single 'unsuccessful' book. Rather, it's readers actively cheating the authors out of their honest pay.
While Apple faced the same problem a couple years ago, where returns were becoming a chronic problem, they resolved it by 'scoring' customers. Any Amazon customer who routinely returned items or negatively reviewed ALL their purchases were either severely limited, or banned outright. That seems to have resolved the issue, as I haven't noticed the problem continuing on Amazon lately. D2D, however, it simply letting it run rampant.
So, giving the diminishing returns on a measly 25% (30% - assorted fees), I'm going to cease distributing my books to 3rd party outlets. While it worked to expose me to new authors for a while, it's no longer beneficial to continue wasting time with it.
