Your books have been removed
or filtered by Amazon, the largest distributor of books in the world. This
negatively impacts your sales and you are forced to try and figure out how to
comply with their extremely ambiguous terms of service. After all, you are
writing books about adults for adults. You’ve put warnings in your blurbs. You
look at removal patterns, talk to your fellow authors and find, much to your
chagrin, that there is no pattern to use as a template to guide you in your
efforts to comply with these very ambiguous TOS.
Amazon will allow books that
are basically instruction manuals on child abuse (Example: To Train Up A Child by Michael and Debi Pearl), erotic fiction put
out by the Big Six mainstream publishers (Flowers
in the Attic, works by Marquis deSade, 50
Shades of Grey, The Story of O,
to name a few).
Feels like you just can’t
win, right?
Not necessarily.
Think about this:
BANNED BY AMAZON!
TOO HOT FOR AMAZON!
PG-13 AMAZON VERSION.
AUTHOR’S CUT AVAILABLE AT (insert other distributor)
Sound silly?
Sure it does, but guess
what? Does anyone remember the controversy surrounding Catcher in the Rye, Valley of the Dolls, The Satanic Verses? Take a
look at this list:
I distinctly remember the
outcry surrounding Valley of the Dolls
which was a huge contributor to the book’s success. After all, ban a book and
suddenly everyone wants a copy. Look at the phenomenon behind 50 Shades of Grey. “Mommy porn”, “Twilight rip-off”, yep, gotta get a
copy…
Your book has been banned by
Amazon. Wear this as a badge of honor. After all, you are definitely in good
company. But consider this…why not use that as a marketing tool?
If you are a self-published
author writing erotica or erotic romance, at some point, you will encounter the
Amazon banhammer for either your cover, content or both. So, what do you do?
Veteran self-published
authors are changing covers or looking at new designs for their covers so that
they can still be sensual but get past the Amazon censor police. Some authors are
mulling the idea of modifying content of already-published stories and trying
to figure out what keywords will get their books flagged so that they can avoid
these same keywords and still tell the story their characters dictate.
Hollywood may have the right
idea. With movies, there are the theatrical release, the director’s cut, the
unrated version, extended cut, etc. Now, if you’re going to buy a movie, are
you going for the theatrical version, or are you going for the one that has all
or most of the stuff that ended up on the editing room floor? Yep, me too.
So, let’s apply the same
idea to self-published books. The author considers two versions – one for
Amazon and one for other distributors who refuse to censor content because
they, like the author, believe that the characters should tell the story and
not the censor police. When marketing, stress that there are two versions of
the book – the PG-13 version found on Amazon and the Author’s cut/full version/over-18-only
versions available at (insert name of distributors).
Look, romance and erotic
romance are the largest selling genre in the world with the largest reader base
in the world. Each romance reader has friends, book clubs, Facebook pages, you
name it. They already pimp their favorite authors, so this just adds a little
spice to the mix.
Too much trouble, you say?
Not necessarily. If the self-pub industry gets on the bandwagon, this just
might work. Again, the proof is in the history. Look what happens when a book
is banned.
Hmmmm…
In today’s electronic age,
how difficult can it be to flag portions of a manuscript to be removed/modified
to upload to Amazon? After all, some authors are designing two covers and two
different blurbs for their books – one for Amazon (yeah, fruit as a cover for an
erotic romance) and one for other distributors (cover model eye candy – nom!).
Okay, so you don’t want to
mess with two versions of your books. Understandable. So, how about a tag line:
TOO HOT FOR AMAZON. TOO RACY FOR AMAZON. And after your book has been banned by
Amazon: BANNED BY AMAZON. Use big, bold letters or an asterisk in the title
with the notation in tiny print on the back of the cover.
Back in the day, when I was
in high school and Catcher in the Rye was
given as a reading assignment, I’ll never forget the parental insanity that
accompanied it. Yep, you guessed it…what book did everyone in the school
suddenly want to read? Valley of the
Dolls? Yep, even as young as I was at the time (13 or 14) I couldn’t wait
to get my hands on a copy. Story of O?
I remember my BFF kept her copy under her mattress and read it by flashlight. Joy of Sex? I was an adult and still
wouldn’t put that on my bookshelf; it stayed in a locked box, in a drawer in my
nightstand. And my book club talked about that one in whispers. Get the
picture?
If your book is banned by
Amazon, I’ll definitely want to read it and so will a lot of other folks. I
guess we’re either just pervy or proud that we flipped the censors the
“finger”.
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