Saturday 25 February 2012

Smashwords to Remove Countless Erotica Titles from its Store

Like many people who publish with Smashwords, this morning I woke to find an email sitting in my inbox. Here is the bare bones of that email:

Today we are modifying our Terms of Service to clarify our policies regarding
erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest. If you write in any
of these categories, please carefully read the instructions below and remove
such content from Smashwords. If you don’t write in these categories, you can
disregard this message.

PayPal is requiring Smashwords to immediately begin removing the above-mentioned
categories of books. Please review your title(s) and proactively remove and
archive such works if you are affected.

I apologize for the short notice, and I’m especially sorry for any financial
or emotional hardship this may cause the authors and publishers affected by this
change.

As you may have heard, in the last couple weeks PayPal began aggressively enforcing
a prohibition against online retailers selling certain types of "obscene" content.
On Saturday, February 18, PayPal’s enforcement division contacted Smashwords
with an ultimatum. As with the other ebook retailers affected by this enforcement,
PayPal gave us only a few days to achieve compliance otherwise they threatened
to deactivate our PayPal services. I've had multiple conversations with PayPal
over the last several days to better understand their requirements. Their team
has been helpful, forthcoming and supportive of the Smashwords mission. I appreciate
their willingness to engage in dialogue. Although they have tried their best
to delineate their policies, gray areas remain.
I'm lucky, I don't write that kind of erotica. It also does nothing for me and, to be honest, does turn my stomach slightly. However, the titles of some of these books make them sound worse than they are. Many of the incest 'Daddy' stories are simply 'older men' stories and 'brother-sister' stories are step-siblings.
So what are they going to do about titles like that and where are they going to draw the line?
One of my collections, 'Some Love it Rough' certainly contains a couple of stories that might be considered too risqué for PayPal. Will it need to be pulled? I have no idea, but I'm certainly not going to volunteer to pull it!
Let's be clear. This isn't Smashword's fault; it's all down to PayPal. Some people make their living from this type of erotica and many of these books have previously been banned from Amazon, so the only way they're able to get them 'out there' has been through Smashwords.
The argument here shouldn't really be about whether these books should be published; it's more about censorship and freedom of speech. Should we be allowed to write whatever we want, or are Paypal right in drawing a line?


Friday 3 February 2012

Another KDP Select Success Story!


Everywhere I turn at the moment, I seem to be reading about authors who have enrolled their titles in Amazon's new program, KDP Select, and have gone from selling a handful of titles per month to hundreds overnight.

I'm thrilled to say that I can now join these authors!

Last week I put my romance novel, Escape, into the program and set it to go free for five days. During these five days, I gave out over 33,000 copies of the book. It sat at the #2 spot for the whole of the free kindle store on Amazon.co.uk for the majority of this time and got to #11 on Amazon.com. I'd done 'free days' on a couple of other titles and never saw anything like these numbers, so I was pretty excited to say the least!

After the five days, the title switched back to paid again, and guess what? The sales kept coming. On the first day, I sold 250 copies, the day after 120, the day after that, 150 (these numbers include 'borrows'). At this rate, I'm going to make what I normally make in a month in the space of a few days.

I don't know how long it's going to last, but I'm sure as hell going to enjoy it while it does!