Porn or Erotica (Amazon) - what's the difference?

[Nezhul]

I was considering putting one of my stories on Amazon Direct Publishing, and as I was reading the rules I stumbled on the line that they do not accept Porn.

But I'm pretty sure that a lot of stories there have rather graphic sexual content, with detailed pussy, dicks, sex and fetish description.

So what IS porn in literature, and what is erotica? I don't understand.

 

[emap]

Honestly there isn't actually a definition.

Seriously, for the most part porn is something where it is only sex and no story. Which until recently was almost completely true in the way of the movies. Lately the porn sites, and full on movies have a story, Pirates, and I think there is a zombie one, plenty of vampire porn movies.

As for Amazon, and really any of the other ebook sites, it's a book by book determination. Some of them are little more than a pizza guy showing up and no money so sex to pay for a pizza. Not literally mind but some of them have a story to pad the pages in between the salacious parts. Which is little more than this happens, so let's fuck away for a bit.

Moan for bigfoot if you want to see what I mean. Very little in the way of story to it, it's some women in the woods get grabbed by bigfoot and taken to a house where they are held in cells and fucked. I didn't get all of the books to get the whole story but the one book I did get, for really cheap and was curious, was that. Which is porn, but it is accepted on Amazon. I think mostly because it was posted a while ago before they started with the whole no porn crap.

basically, to make a long story short, too late, submit your story to it. Amazon will look at it and say yes or no. More or less same as this site, just easier to get a yes here.

 

[Nezhul]

So basically I can still get a graphical descriptions of sex organs and whatnot, have a 15-page-long sex scene with all the juicy details, and it's still okay as long as I have some backstory to support it?

And by the way, now that you touched on kidnapped-by-bigfoot topic - maybe you know how does Amazon view non-consent/slavery things? I have this story in mind about people being kidnapped to be sold as slaves for rich people. It's a very glamourous depiction of slavery and a very clean one, but there's still all sorts of emotions like fear, aversion and whatnot. It's still in no way consensual, even though the heroine accepts it (and in the end gets a happy ending). There are still tears and stuff.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

I believe you'll find Amazon uses the same logic first suggested by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when deciding if a movie was pornographic or not. He wrote: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

 

[emap]

Nezhul you are thinking about this too hard. Amazon is a business, first, second, and third business, then it thinks about other things. What that means is most of what is posted in their stories is accepted until someone complains.

Course I need to back up one, there is I think a listing of not allowed things, like actual incest. Why there are step siblings and parents fucking each other in the incest stories not mom and son or dad and daughter, even though they are that. May or may not have beastiality not allowed, as I mention there is the bigfoot stories, and the same woman did one with dinosaurs. Granted those are animals not people, bigfoot being questionable if you talk to some of those nuts, but both are believed to not exist.

Means she sidestepped the beastiality with stories detailing human women screwing animals that are no longer around or likely are not to begin with. I think the dinosaur is a velociraptor, I didn't look long at the story. What I am saying is don't wonder if it will be posted or not, write the story up and try, most likely it will be accepted and posted, if you sell any is the question, and if it will be complained about.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Amazon has made millions of dollars off of porn and independent authors. They say they don't publish porn, but Erotica is a selection on the their categories. They do however hide erotica from their search engine. You could post in a different category, but then you take the chance of someone reporting the story as smut and having it pulled and maybe getting banned.

And if you get banned, good luck in collecting any of your past due royalties.