Here it comes

[sr71plt]

One, rather small, step that we can take is titles. "I Raped My Mother And Sister" might aid sales, but presents a target for the anit-porn crowd. "Family Adventure" describes the same thing, but doesn't raise a fed flag. Just a thought.

This points to what authors can really do at this point. Watch your titles, clean flag words out of your tags, your blurbs, and your excerpts. Yes, sales will go down. But there will be a book on offer longer than if you didn't do it--and regular readers will "get it" and continue to buy.

Distributors like Amazon don't do this because they want to--they're making big bucks off it and don't want to spend profits in policing action. They do it in response to specific customer complaints to specific, isolated books (at least for now). Unless regulators force Amazon to keyword search texts themselves and quibble each title (low likelilhood of this happening, but it might if this takes a high profile), they will gladly rely on individual customer complaints. The complaints will have to be based on title, tags, blurb, or excerpt unless the complainer buys the book and searches--a lower-liklihood proposition in itself.

(In my banned title complaint, quite evidently a single customer complained, the book got banned, the publisher objected, and Amazon didn't even bother to check out the content before reinstating it. And the kicker is that they banned the e-book version but never took down the print version. Their heart--and pocketbook--weren't into the banning.)

Just don't "in your face" stick out of the pack with your book display.

 

[sr71plt]

hate to break this to you Pilot . . .

Lovecraft68 is merely the blind leading the blind on this. This isn't his league at all. I'm working with the reality of this and have seen a title actually negotiated back onto Amazon (and as Selena has blogged, its sales soared elsewhere while it was banned at Amazon.)

All Lovecraft can offer you (as usual) is clueless "I wanna be king of the hill" yammer.

(And we've covered Selena as one of my publishers before. She worked the initial wave of this into a sales goldmine--for me as well as her. She's doing the same now. Among other things Lovecraft is clueless on is book marketing. )

 

[Handley_Page]

Anyone fancy starting a rival Pay system to Pal pal ?.
There's a marketing opportunity here. . .

 

[sr71plt]

Anyone fancy starting a rival Pay system to Pal pal ?.
There's a marketing opportunity here. . .

That would be nice--but it has to be applicable to products/services much broader than erotica. Statements coming back to a buyer that signal erotica/porn just doesn't work with the bulk of the market for erotica/porn. (We covered this on why something like CC Billing can't just be used.)

And apparently it might have to be off shore if what is really circumventing Paypal, as Paypal is claiming, are the U.S. banking regulations. And then someone signing up for it will have heightened IRS scrutiny. It's a swirling mess, getting you both coming and going.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

(And we've covered Selena as one of my publishers before. She worked the initial wave of this into a sales goldmine--for me as well as her. She's doing the same now. Among other things Lovecraft is clueless on is book marketing. )

I write for excessica as well. Are we getting the same emails here?

The ones I'm reading imply no payment processing for the excessica.com site in a months time and sites like bookstrand junking us entirely without a substantial cull/reworking on the backlist.

Selena is a genius, but the initial jinking to take advantage of Amazon's last bout of erotica-bashing relied on Amazon not actually being the monopoly everyone thinks they are. She was able to parlay the notoriety of being banned on Amazon into a lot of extra sales through B & N and others. Paypal is a monopoly, or at least seems to get away with the kind of behaviour only a monopoly can get away with.

She might be running a clever marketing game, and if she is I doff my cap to her brilliance, but trying to sell something without having a means to accept payment from customers feels like a much more substantial obstacle than one (amazon) retailer of many having a hissy fit over the contents of some books.

 

[sr71plt]

I mentioned cycles, didn't I? Yes, the era of wide-open erotica e-book sales might be cycling out. I, for one, having lived through other trends in publishing, considered that possibility before going into it. So, I went into it early, and big (over 100 titles across my pen names now), and it could stop altogether tomorrow and I wouldn't be a loser.

Innovators seeing the market will work with it and we'll see work arounds--using the energy and effort of people other than me. Then I'll get on the band wagon early for that too (I hope). My contribution to the whole is to have product ready to go when the wave starts--and to watch for where the grab holds are to get on the wagon.

Amazon, by the way, is still the elephant in the room on sales. And it never has accepted Paypal (does B&N? I haven't checked). So there are small problems and there are big problems. We aren't to the big problems yet--and when we are, I'll be looking toward the fixes that are coming in rather than trying to maintain a hold on systems cycling out.

As far as selling from eXcessica, I've always said that selling from either an individual or a single publisher website is small potatoes. You need to go to the large distribution sites that attract browsers in big numbers to see any but incidental profits. In this vein, having BookStrand go down is a problem (and the thread this shoots off of was a simple "it's happening" notification) to watch. EXcessica not being able to sell via Paypal from its website is a mere scratch.

And in the greater scheme of things, I wouldn't enjoy writing and publishing erotica at all if I depended on the paycheck from it. It's very nice (going to England for three weeks on the fall on profits from it), but I write the erotica because I enjoy doing it--and I publish it because I like to see it in print/Kindle and to share it. It's not arms and legs to me. (Which, I guess can be best illustrated by noting that I've never taken a dime from eXcessia for the 52 works I have published there--I've let all the profits be folded back into the publishing house to help keep it afloat. All of my monetary profits have come from works with other publishers.)

(And, as I said, I got on the bandwagon early and have already worked this wave well enough.)

 

[Stella_Omega]

Etsy for one, is working on a new payment option. I have a feeling it's because Etsy does allow adult hand-crafted items.

It has bugs in its bugs and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole at the moment but hey-- it could become something.

 

[sr71plt]

Etsy for one, is working on a new payment option. I have a feeling it's because Etsy does allow adult hand-crafted items.

It has bugs in its bugs and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole at the moment but hey-- it could become something.

Certainly something to watch--to be able to see where the grab bars on the wagon are if it becomes a suitable answer for a road you're trying to get moving on.

 

[Feotakahari]

I find it amusing that Excessica now has a category for books that have been banned from Amazon.

 

[sr71plt]

I find it amusing that Excessica now has a category for books that have been banned from Amazon.

What would you expect from a publisher named "EXcessica"? It's leading with the chin on this.

And yet it, too, has categories it won't represent. So, for you folks who somehow think it's against some law to cut a line of anything out of a product line--that it's some sort of unjustifiable censorship . . .

 

[lovecraft68]

This points to what authors can really do at this point. Watch your titles, clean flag words out of your tags, your blurbs, and your excerpts. Yes, sales will go down. But there will be a book on offer longer than if you didn't do it--and regular readers will "get it" and continue to buy.

This is a good point, but with a bit of a problem.

yes blatantly stupid titles like "I love to fuck mom" and the like are red flags as are covers that are pretty much pornographic. So yes the authors can help themselves out big time using a little common sense.

But on the other hand when it comes to tags/blurbs you do have to let the reader know what they are buying.

You can't have a book that contains incest and not point it out somewhere, because now someone stumbles into it and all hell breaks loose. Same with topics, you do have to advertise what is in the book to be fair to the buyers.

 

[lovecraft68]

I find it amusing that Excessica now has a category for books that have been banned from Amazon.

Banned means big bucks and notoriety.

A long time ago I was an instructor at a Martial arts academy. We were struggling to stay afloat because there was a lot of competition.

We would enter tournaments regularly against other schools and of course hope to win to prove we were the better place to learn from.

Well one night I lost it after my opponent hit me low for the third time and went ape shit on him inside the ring and again in a nasty street fight. I was banned from the tournaments for a year,and we had more students sign up with us in the next month than we had in the previous six.

Notoriety, controversy, infamy whatever you want to call it is attractive to people.

 

[sr71plt]

You can't have a book that contains incest and not point it out somewhere, because now someone stumbles into it and all hell breaks loose. Same with topics, you do have to advertise what is in the book to be fair to the buyers.

And a big part of the market doesn't want incest. It's illegal in reality and many consider close, biological incest as sick. So, if you write it, either find a publisher/distributor for it and live with it when/if it still gets choked out or don't try to publish it at all.

My book that was banned didn't contain anything illegal in reality. No incest, rape, snuff, or underage. Maybe that's why it got reinstated at Amazon. I didn't try selling anything over the edge of what is legal in real life.

 

[lovecraft68]

And a big part of the market doesn't want incest. It's illegal in reality and many consider close, biological incest as sick. So, if you write it, either find a publisher/distributor for it and live with it when/if it still gets choked out or don't try to publish it at all.

My book that was banned didn't contain anything illegal in reality. No incest, rape, snuff, or underage. Maybe that's why it got reinstated at Amazon. I didn't try selling anything over the edge of what is legal in real life.

First off I love the "there is no market for incest." Incest if allowed will outsell any other form of erotica just as it outviews every category here. The pseudo-incest sales prove that. You think these people who are reading "step" aren;t thinking its the real thing?

hell I bought two of them to check them out and it is fucking hilarious. One sentence in the beginning that it's their "step" mom then the rest of the story it's "Oh mom suck my cock" it's a joke that people don't want to buy incest.


But the point of this thread though isn't really so much about what is illegal, but censorship in general.

In the blog Selena states they are now targeting pseudo incest. Sex between step relatives is sleazy, but not illegal anywhere. Neither is BDSM, they are going after pretty much anything they want.

For me this is not about money, I have said many times I never plan on making a living from this shit its a hobby. This thing is about a handful deciding not only what we can write or sell, but what we can read and buy.

By trying to pretty much make it so publishers/sites won't carry erotica for fear of being "shut off" they are trying to control what we do.

When they target erotica, they initially target the "illegal" stuff. Incest/rape/ beastie. They start with this because they can justify it. Now they are moving to the next phase because no one has stood up to them on the first attack.

From here it will get worse, when erotica is forced out of the market they will find something else to go to and because they have already had success they will keep going. Soon you won't be able to buy or sell anything they consider questionable. It will continue right into the mainstream.

So try thinking beyond your little world because this has the potential to have some serious repercussions down the line, and not just for erotica.

 

[sr71plt]

First off I love the "there is no market for incest."

I stopped reading right there. Because this is one of your typical swiftboating lies. Point to those words in anything I've posted. You've put quote marks around them.

So, whatever else you posted, I didn't read it. Just like I've stopped reading your PMs.

 

[colddiesel]

I'm sure the heavier financial risk of chargebacks is part of this, but the main problem is again the failure to divide a clear cut-off point of what is and isn't acceptable. If it was purely financial, why are they bothering to home in on incest, pseudo-incest, etc? Surely all erotica, as an adult entertainment product, carries the same increased chargeback risk.

Bestiality, paedophilia and necrophilia are out of bounds. Now it seems like Incest (including pseudo-incest) and Rape (including the non-consent/unwilling fantasies) are about to join them. What's next? BDSM (as Selena mentioned)? LGBT erotica? In the absense of a clear line, how can an erotica publisher determine what they can or can't publish?

Maybe Selena should merge her publishing imprints and take the 'Lolita defence' - "Erotica, what erotica? We sell literary fiction here?"

One of my grand kids works in IT security for a financial institution. She told me that their systems would not be geared to to anything other than:

1. The additional costs of some sorts of transactions. I am also told that they can distinguish to a very fine degree, which could easily include some types of transactions but not others, or some authors and not others.

2. Anything illegal.

My grand-daughter told me that Lovecraft is essentially arguing with a machine, more precisely a computer programme put in place to stop the institution losing money - in this case through a too high % of disputed transactions. It was also her view that as the policing programmes improve, their capacity to make ever finer distinctions will increase.

To re-capitulate in the terms of your first sentence what is unacceptable is anything illegal, or anything which causes the institutuon to lose money on these high volume low value/profit transactions.

sr71plt has been pretty much on the money throughout this thread

 

[sr71plt]

Thanks, but I think Stella has been the most to the essential point on this thread.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

I think I would be happier with the financial explanation if it was actually given as the explanation. i.e. Paypal telling company X, 'We're no longer going to do business with you because the products you offer cost us too much in the higher risk of chargebacks', would be perfectly fine with me. Businesses are in business to make money.

By singling out specific categories it makes it look like a morality issue. i.e. We're not going to do business with you because we're frightened certain folks in the heartlands of the USA might kick up a fuss.

I guess I'm being hopelessly naive, but I think it's ridiculous to confuse writing fantasies about an illegal act with actually committing that illegal act. I guess that's the world we're stuck with, sadly.

 

[lovecraft68]

I think I would be happier with the financial explanation if it was actually given as the explanation. i.e. Paypal telling company X, 'We're no longer going to do business with you because the products you offer cost us too much in the higher risk of chargebacks', would be perfectly fine with me. Businesses are in business to make money.

By singling out specific categories it makes it look like a morality issue. i.e. We're not going to do business with you because we're frightened certain folks in the heartlands of the USA might kick up a fuss.

I guess I'm being hopelessly naive, but I think it's ridiculous to confuse writing fantasies about an illegal act with actually committing that illegal act. I guess that's the world we're stuck with, sadly.

Again well said. I admit I am a little in the dark with these "chargeback" issues.

For the amount of money the porn industry in general generates I am thinking the reward is far higher than the risk.

You're correct in that since they are targeting specific genre's they are making it about morals. And although you're right about fantasy not being the real thing, it has escalated to where they are targeting legal acts as well. Step-incest is not incest, nor is it a crime and BDSM's rules are safe sane and consensual there is no crime here.

The worst part of this is that they are now telling publishers that they are going to dictate what they can publish, they are going to dictate how they run their business.

The other thing that eludes me is the money they will lose. paypal gets money per transaction. How many e-books were sold and paid fro through paypal last year? As it is E-bay is down from where it was which means they are seeing less money from their main benefactor (parent company whatever, the bulk of their business is still through e-bay purchases)

If the publishers and others dig in here and tell them to go fuck themselves they will feel it in the pocket and open the door for competitors. I just cannot see what the thought process is here.

If anything they should have learned from e-bay who made it so hard on the sellers to kiss the buyers asses that they have lost thousands of sellers and are begging people to list. People told e-bay to Fuck off, it's time to tell these idiots the same thing.