Originally posted on July 25, 2020 at https://ailovestogrow.wixsite.com/mysite/post/aaaaaand-banned
((EDIT: I’m...not banned? Look, I spent 3 days going through every metric I’m supposed to go through, and CENSORED was dungeoned. It stopped getting sales, my advertising was frozen and it stopped showing up on any search results using specific keywords. Then, today, it was as if nothing happened. So...either I’m sorry for jumping the gun or thank you whoever put me back after making a judgement call after reading my post. Regardless, I’m relieved but my nerves are very frayed.))
I’m writing this on my phone in bed because I can’t sleep. I didn’t plan on writing this, but I also didn’t plan on a lot of things. The following is my sleep-deprived ramblings so you can share in my despair train.
Known as being sent to the erotica dungeon, now CENSORED no longer shows up on the search function. There’s more to it, but that’s the easiest way to track if Amazon has decided a book is evil and so they put on their Brown Coats and toss my book into the bonfire for the good of the Fascist Party Amazon is apart of. I guess my author name has been tagged and so any book - even one clearly cutting out any explicit material - is getting the dungeon treatment. I’ve stopped getting reviews, so are any of you reviewing the books and not getting them published?
What should I do? I look around the Amazon store and see books that actually have explicity material which is just as salacious as mine not getting banned and allowing those authors to make a living. Are my books worth less because of the arbitrary ruling of some guy at some desk? Am I being targeted because I’m niche instead of mainstream? Can I fix this or is it time to throw in the towel?
I don’t know what to do. I’m going to try talking to a real person for the KDP and see if I can get some of this reversed, but looking through forums it isn’t hopeful. Amazon holds all the cards and they don’t like erotica. After that, all I can think of is trying my luck on literotica and a crowd funding site, but I never wanted to try that, simply because my stories work best as novels instead of serials. Would you honestly pay me money each month so you could get a book once a year? Not that I don’t think you wouldn’t like reading a weekly chapter, but my books are edited and not as chapters, but as a whole book. You all enjoy my book because of how chapters tie together, not just because I have one scene you like. I think, anyway. Regardless, if I went that route, Editor-kun would probably remain as a line editor (grammar fixer) but he’d no longer help as a content editor (plot fixer).
I’m going to have to move away from Amazon, probably, or at least get out of the KU program so I can publish on other sites. This saddens me because I know I will not get nearly as much visibility, but I’m not getting that now. 80% of my profits have come from KU, because erotica readers prefer reading some smut without the hassle of buying a book and putting it on their public kindle list.
I really don’t know what to do. I’m one person: how does a single person fight against the impossible?
Moving forward, I’ll probably try and get book 2 finished and published still, eventually. I’ve got so much of it done, it would be a shame not to at least finish it. Book 3 might take longer, but...I’m tired of fighting.
For a weird moment in time, I thought I was about to make it. Between sales and KU, I am on track to make a thousand dollars this month (not this month, but in September when I get the payments for July). Not enough to live on, but add in a few more books and a little marketing, in a couple of years I would have seriously been able to quit my job. Do you know what that would have meant to me? Do you understand how crushing it is to have that dream snatched away?
CENSORED had my hopes up there for a while because I thought I’d found a way to market my book in a roundabout way, and for a couple of weeks, it totally worked. The uncensored version became a best seller because you people were smart and clever enough to understand what I was doing with CENSORED. I guess Amazon didn’t like the fact I’d found a way to get around their censorship.
I do have another option, but it saddens me that I might have to give up so much to go there: I could stop writing erotica. I’m still a huge recluse and I don’t think I’ll ever publish under my own name, but this is the advantage of writing under a pseudonym, I can just use another one. The bad news is I’ll have to start building an audience from scratch and most of you probably will never see me again. Because if I’m honest with myself, I’m terrified someone would connect the dots and so I’ll find some genre so far removed from my current one there would never be any chance of crossover.
Email me your thoughts because that appears to be the only way I’ll see any of this. If nobody says anything, I’ll understand.
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