Amazon (KDP) cracking down on erotica. Again.

Emma Clark

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It is topics where there is a precedent for lawsuit being bought, and won, under the obscenity laws. Thus selling it presents a risk retailers might reasonably choose not to take.

Except--one of my titles that Amazon blocked--was far from obscene. It has a sexual relationship between a 19-year-old man and his (lonely) 30-something step-mother.

Again--far from obscene and quite tame, I'd say. And the cover was extremely tame as well.

Yet--it was blocked.

Disgusting.
And I don't give a shit that it was 'pseudo-incest'.
 

Ann_Mayburn

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Except I've never heard of a change.org petition being used for anything other than collecting names for future spamming...

Too true.

There are some way not erotica titles being swept up in the purge like my friend Laura Kay's books. They are WAY not erotica, sell really well, and are backed by big publishers so it's not only indie that are being targeted. I'm just hoping that now that the initial purge is done they'll start responding to the complaints and re-publishing some of the stuff they yanked.

--On a side note-- I agree that there was stuff on there that was terrible from both a moral and ethical standpoint. Yeah yeah freedom of speech la la la but I fail to see how books about raping your drunk daughter then raping the family dog are anything but rape porn in its truest sense of the word.

Face it, if you had a daughter and you found a family member with 'daughter/niece/etc' rape books wouldn't you be a bit worried about leaving her alone with them? Or your family dog? :p
 

K.D. West

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Too true.

There are some way not erotica titles being swept up in the purge like my friend Laura Kay's books. They are WAY not erotica, sell really well, and are backed by big publishers so it's not only indie that are being targeted. I'm just hoping that now that the initial purge is done they'll start responding to the complaints and re-publishing some of the stuff they yanked.

--On a side note-- I agree that there was stuff on there that was terrible from both a moral and ethical standpoint. Yeah yeah freedom of speech la la la but I fail to see how books about raping your drunk daughter then raping the family dog are anything but rape porn in its truest sense of the word.

Face it, if you had a daughter and you found a family member with 'daughter/niece/etc' rape books wouldn't you be a bit worried about leaving her alone with them? Or your family dog? :p

Again, freedom of speech is a non-issue. Amazon gets to sell what it wants to sell, and that's fine. But the utter lack of transparency or consistency still burns me.

And just to point out: Amazon's grand purge didn't sweep the sex out. The 100 Top Sellers list still has a bunch of erotic novels on it -- and some of them are still, I believe, self-published. So Amazon is trying to have it both ways.

ETA: Oh, and rape books revolt me — whether the non-consensual sex is statutory or forced. But consensual sex between adult, non-related humans...?
 
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mamiller512

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ETA: Oh, and rape books revolt me — whether the non-consensual sex is statutory or forced. But consensual sex between adult, non-related humans...?

As Emma Clark pointed out:

Except--one of my titles that Amazon blocked--was far from obscene. It has a sexual relationship between a 19-year-old man and his (lonely) 30-something step-mother.

It's obvious they are doing some data mining for certain key words such as "Virgin" and familial relationships. As with any search for "mother", step-"mother" would be included in the result.

Despite the issues with the petition and speculations that it may be a thinly-veiled spam effort, it is being circulated through other sites and might deserve some consideration.
 

Aussierotica

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I've been lurking in here for a while after an initial burst of activity, but a recent email from KDP has ticked me off to the point of unleashing some rage.

A certain book of mine (Tragedy of the Virgin Bride) has fallen foul of this latest purge. Funnily enough it's probably one of the tamest titles I've written and has been quietly selling for the last 12 months or so.

The reason for "Virgin Bride" is that is what the lead character was at the point of her death. Her husband was taken from her on her wedding night to fight off an invasion and, when she sees him again, they die within reach of each other, having not had the chance to remedy the situation.

I won't reveal the rest of the book, but that is the reason for Virgin in the title.

I'm not going to sign on the petition, but I am absolutely fuming at the arbitrariness of what Amazon has done. I've had one of my other books denied listing on another site due to what they perceive as dubious consent (which it isn't), but the site was up front about why they didn't want to list my book after I submitted it.

I do know that my writing can be tame compared to a lot of other Self-published (even some of the trad published), but I have been struggling to rise above the stigma of a self-pub and make my readers love me for my writing. This, well it irritates no end.
 
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nkkingston

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I think it might be a case of waiting a few weeks to see if any of the pulled books reappear. If Amazon is doing something similar to Kobo, it's pulling everything with key words then going through them to check for actual undesirable content. One of my publishers' books, "Patience is a Virgin" got pulled, when the whole point of the book is she's in her twenties.

The Amazon issue and the Kobo issue are slightly different, aren't they? Amazon's guidelines are notoriously poor, and I don't think being more specific would actually help people out to gain the system (well, not any more so than what people have already figured out). Key words probably should trigger a real person to check out certain books before they go on sale, and I don't think Amazon should release what those words are, but guidelines that specifically say "no incest, no underaged sex, no rape to titillate, no bestiality" wouldn't be that hard to make public.

Kobo's issue is a complete lack of vetting has bitten them in the arse. Those who've been seriously gaming the system aren't dodging filters, they're deliberately mistagging books to get them in front of as many people as possible. That's why people were stumbling across daddy-daughter incest in the kid's section. It's frankly a bizarre marketing strategy, and I'd be surprised if it really had much impact on sales, but I get the feeling some of the people employing it are basically trolls - they think it's funny that people are finding their book when they're browsing something else entirely.
 

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"Patience is a Virgin" got pulled, when the whole point of the book is she's in her twenties.

Kobo pulled it where Amazon hasn't, nkk? That so strange. It states clearly enough that the woman is 25. Jeez...
 

Torgo

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Kobo pulled it where Amazon hasn't, nkk? That so strange. It states clearly enough that the woman is 25. Jeez...

What we need to remember here is that it's unlikely a human has looked at it and decided to pull it. It has very probably been pulled on a keyword match.

I bet most of these false positives will be cleared up within a couple of weeks.
 

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What we need to remember here is that it's unlikely a human has looked at it and decided to pull it. It has very probably been pulled on a keyword match.

I bet most of these false positives will be cleared up within a couple of weeks.

I hope so. :) The age is quite cleary marked on the back cover read-up. Mind you, if they're taking the time to read through it to make sure...
 

Maryn

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That's an amusing thought, the process greatly slowed because the humans vetting each pulled title pause to read a little of this or that erotic work and seven hours later realize they never took a break for lunch, much less did their jobs.

Maryn, who's had days go that way
 

nkkingston

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Kobo have pulled it entirely, Amazon have pulled the ebook but not the paperback, which shows quite how stupid relying on an automated process for this is!
 

Alice Xavier

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I've been lurking in here for a while after an initial burst of activity, but a recent email from KDP has ticked me off to the point of unleashing some rage.

A certain book of mine (Tragedy of the Virgin Bride) has fallen foul of this latest purge. Funnily enough it's probably one of the tamest titles I've written and has been quietly selling for the last 12 months or so.

It is nothing more than the word 'virgin'. You're guilty by association. It's pretty frustrating. Either wait until this shitstorm has totally blown over and they start differentiating between raunchy smutty virgin titles and stories like this one, or change 'virgin' to 'maiden' or something and put it back up.

Kobo's issue is a complete lack of vetting has bitten them in the arse. Those who've been seriously gaming the system aren't dodging filters, they're deliberately mistagging books to get them in front of as many people as possible. That's why people were stumbling across daddy-daughter incest in the kid's section. It's frankly a bizarre marketing strategy, and I'd be surprised if it really had much impact on sales, but I get the feeling some of the people employing it are basically trolls - they think it's funny that people are finding their book when they're browsing something else entirely.

Kobo has a long, long history of severe incompetence and ineptitude. People stumbling across erotica books alongside children's books is not necessarily a result of authors deliberately tagging books in a way that they show up in innocuous searches, it's much more a result of Kobo's horrifically terrible search engine and obviously incompetent development team.

Other examples of how horrible this search engine is? If you stuff the author field with keywords instead of your pen name, your sales will go through the roof. So plenty of erotica authors sold well there until Kobo huffily told them to stop it or get banned. And then ignored everyone yelling at them to fix their PoS search engine so they didn't have to resort to tactics like that. The search engine, for some reason, favors older titles, so the authors I know that make the most money there had uploaded huge catalogs as soon as Writing Life opened. Authors who entered the game later make peanuts. That's how broken it is, so it's not surprising that less scrupulous authors were pulling shit like deliberate miscategorization to get their books seen.

As for the existence of PI and other "shocking" erotica sub-genres, keep in mind that Kobo had a "Taboo" erotica sub-category, and in the erotica world, taboo generally refers to edgy stuff like PI and dubcon. There are plenty of authors who have submitted support tickets regarding these titles, and Kobo support would address their issues no problem. They absolutely knew what they were selling. So that whole interview on the Telegraph where the Kobo CEO throws self-pubbers under the bus is infuriating and hypocritical. Personally, I don't think I'll be selling on Kobo anymore. Not like I ever made much money there anyway.

There is some good news, though. I've seen lots of reports of authors getting 'after further review, we've determined your book was blocked in error' emails from Amazon. Seems that they're remedying work by overzealous and/or inadequately trained reviewers carried out during the major purge. Some of the books getting blocked were worrying - we couldn't figure out what was wrong with them. Turns out those were ones that ended up being 'blocked in error'. So yeah, there are indeed a bunch of false positives.
 

Filigree

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Well, I don't know if this was related or not, but my very gritty (non-con in at least one scene) M/M space opera was pulled from Amazon sometime over the last two days. Still trying to figure that one out. I'm not happy about having it go back up with an 'Adult' tag, but if that's what it takes, so be it. Amazon is a major market and I'd like to stick with them.

I'm still wondering how many other explicit Loose Id books have been pulled from Kindle in this purge.
 

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WHSmith are back online.

Edit: was passed this link via another source (it attempts to order events). Strange enough, the article brings in the UK's "controversial anti-porn" issues (Internet porn, I presume etc), which then led me to this report: 300,000 attempts to access porn in Parliament. (The Express, figures obtained by The Huffington Post UK website)

:Shrug:
 
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nkkingston

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I love that FoI request. I think it's fair to say the vast majority of those hits weren't deliberate. Does make you wonder what happened in February, though. New filters?

The anti-porn thing is another very obvious "we want votes from people who don't know how the internet works" thing. Of course, most of the government also don't know how the internet works, which is why when reporters have pressed them on the issue it's all been mumbling about skin tones and key words and everything that amazon et al are proving right now is far too hamfisted to actually work.
 

Vbeacher

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In addition to what that post mentions, Amazon is blocking and removing titles that are about virgins. Just a heads up.

I think one of my biggest frustrations with Amazon is their lack of communication. They won't ever tell you what they find objectionable. Maybe it's a legal thing, but your only option is trial and error. When I first started putting ebooks up I pushed the envelope just to see what I could get away with. Everything was accepted! It wasn't till about six months later they started blocking some of my books, including 8 out of 10 of my top sellers. But I got the message of what they wanted and didn't, and haven't had trouble for quite a while other than the occasional cover they might have thought looked a bit racy or youngish. Until now, when suddenly words in the title or description are getting the books pulled back to draft status (though thankfully not blocked outright). First it was the 'step' word, and associated words, even though Amazon has never banned pseudo incest (nor admitted banning incest). Then they began to kick back books with words in their titles or descriptions which might make the characters seem youngish, like virgin, nymphet, or even 'girl'. Apparently 'babysitter' is forbidden too, regardless of the age of the character. Today I found 'school' is an issue, even if the school in question is metaphoric. And the other day 'slave' became an issue, which is odd because one of the first books whose title I had to change was changed to include slave and was accepted, as was another new book I completed only weeks ago. Now books with that word in descriptions or titles are being kicked back to draft. Also, some of my ebooks are being booted for covers which contain no nudity, which are mild, tasteful and which have been okay for years. Yes, they do contain images of bondage, but that's the subject of the story!
 

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Barnes and Noble has an erotica section, and then sub-sections within it for different types of erotica. All of it's gone at the moment. If you click on erotica you get a box saying "Sorry, we could not find what you were looking for". And all the books which were in it are similarly off-line. Tries a search on my main pen names and got the same box.