Kasumi_Lee
Really Experienced
- Joined
- May 2, 2013
- Posts
- 257
For the background to this thread, read the original post.
The New Book Has Finally Been Approved
My latest update appended to the end of my original post noted that my revised cover had been rejected by the system yet again without even the courtesy of an email notification. There was no way anyone more liberal than a puritan could possibly consider the new cover to be inappropriate, and then I found that the system was reporting my ebook was blocked from Smashwords because it contains taboo erotica . . . despite the fact that Smashwords is the only retailer that accepts taboo erotica:
As a last resort, I called the customer service line which is only open for three hours a day four days a week. They have a US number and an Australian number (with no Australian hours listed), but when I phoned it out of curiosity it just rerouted to the main US number. In any case, I got through to someone and discovered that after a human had manually approved my revised cover, the system had rejected it again. The woman I spoke to explained that sometimes "the system fights us". In any case, she quickly unblocked the ebook and it FINALLY became available for preorder about an hour before I started writing this post.
Tech Problems, Not Malice
If you've read the original post, you'll know that I brought this on myself by submitting a cover that pushed the line too much as far as nudity is concerned, and the experience of dealing with D2D's customer service by email was punishment enough. But after finally getting to speak to a human being and have my problem solved with the click of a button, I have some perspective on what's actually going on at D2D.
It's easy to become convinced that companies like D2D (or Amazon, for that matter) whose services you need are maliciously screwing you over when you don't know the names or faces of the people tasked with deciding the fate of your hard work and the account you use to monetize it. D2D certainly didn't help their case with rude emails explaining the rules and their basis to me (as if I don't already fucking understand why it's a bad thing to let kids see boobies) or the imperious threats to terminate my account if problems like this occurred in the future.
But my considered conclusion is that D2D simply doesn't have the resources to deal with all these problems in the best way. The three-day response times for emails, the fact that customer service phone lines are only open from 11am to 2pm Monday to Thursday, and the fact that their backend personnel have their hands full with account migration and the many technical problems they encounter along the way; this is not a recipe for optimum customer service.
And according to the lady who solved my problem, their own filtering software adds to the problems by being glitchy. I told her about a previous issue (mentioned in my previous post) in which one of my stories' cover images got retroactively blocked from Smashwords by the software despite approving the exact same cover images for the French and German editions. Customer service reversed the wrongful ban, but claimed it was only because Smashwords had already approved it and coupled it with a veiled threat about complying with content rules. I guess it's easier to imply that the customer is at fault (which they sometimes are) than to admit that your system is broken.
Conclusion
The theory that Draft2Digital, headquartered in red state Oklahoma, is secretly searching for ways to cheat and punish us authors of smut doesn't hold (quite) as much credence in my head as it did over this past weekend, but I don't think I'll be publishing much via D2D for the time being. The fate of smut may well depend on the outcome of the next election if certain chapters of Project 2025 are anything to go by, but for now, all's well that ends well.
The New Book Has Finally Been Approved
My latest update appended to the end of my original post noted that my revised cover had been rejected by the system yet again without even the courtesy of an email notification. There was no way anyone more liberal than a puritan could possibly consider the new cover to be inappropriate, and then I found that the system was reporting my ebook was blocked from Smashwords because it contains taboo erotica . . . despite the fact that Smashwords is the only retailer that accepts taboo erotica:
As a last resort, I called the customer service line which is only open for three hours a day four days a week. They have a US number and an Australian number (with no Australian hours listed), but when I phoned it out of curiosity it just rerouted to the main US number. In any case, I got through to someone and discovered that after a human had manually approved my revised cover, the system had rejected it again. The woman I spoke to explained that sometimes "the system fights us". In any case, she quickly unblocked the ebook and it FINALLY became available for preorder about an hour before I started writing this post.
Tech Problems, Not Malice
If you've read the original post, you'll know that I brought this on myself by submitting a cover that pushed the line too much as far as nudity is concerned, and the experience of dealing with D2D's customer service by email was punishment enough. But after finally getting to speak to a human being and have my problem solved with the click of a button, I have some perspective on what's actually going on at D2D.
It's easy to become convinced that companies like D2D (or Amazon, for that matter) whose services you need are maliciously screwing you over when you don't know the names or faces of the people tasked with deciding the fate of your hard work and the account you use to monetize it. D2D certainly didn't help their case with rude emails explaining the rules and their basis to me (as if I don't already fucking understand why it's a bad thing to let kids see boobies) or the imperious threats to terminate my account if problems like this occurred in the future.
But my considered conclusion is that D2D simply doesn't have the resources to deal with all these problems in the best way. The three-day response times for emails, the fact that customer service phone lines are only open from 11am to 2pm Monday to Thursday, and the fact that their backend personnel have their hands full with account migration and the many technical problems they encounter along the way; this is not a recipe for optimum customer service.
And according to the lady who solved my problem, their own filtering software adds to the problems by being glitchy. I told her about a previous issue (mentioned in my previous post) in which one of my stories' cover images got retroactively blocked from Smashwords by the software despite approving the exact same cover images for the French and German editions. Customer service reversed the wrongful ban, but claimed it was only because Smashwords had already approved it and coupled it with a veiled threat about complying with content rules. I guess it's easier to imply that the customer is at fault (which they sometimes are) than to admit that your system is broken.
Conclusion
The theory that Draft2Digital, headquartered in red state Oklahoma, is secretly searching for ways to cheat and punish us authors of smut doesn't hold (quite) as much credence in my head as it did over this past weekend, but I don't think I'll be publishing much via D2D for the time being. The fate of smut may well depend on the outcome of the next election if certain chapters of Project 2025 are anything to go by, but for now, all's well that ends well.
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