Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Book 1 Blocked by Amazon for content violations

Slight hiccup. So I have a three book series called Moments in Time, and finally published book 1 and 2 last week. 

Sunday night it started a FIVE day KDP Select FREE promotion. 

On Monday morning when I left for school, after 8 hours of being free, I had 1,300 free downloads. Effective marketing. 

So I expected twice that after a days work. When I got home from school, my book had been blocked by Amazon for violating their content guidelines. I inquired by replying to them WHAT content did I violate? after about a dozen back and forth emails, they responded that three people reported my book to Amazon as pornographic material. 

Well, ONE of these people's names I recognized immediately as a fellow author, member of several groups I belong to, and interact with. How can that be? Competition is fierce Amazon informed me, and it took three reports in a day to get blocked. It took me a half dozen emails from them to skim my book and tell me which chapters need to be 'modified.'

I have read steamier, Hotter, more graphically intense sexual experiences (Fifty Shades of Gray even) recently in other peoples works, that I had hoped my sex scenes would minimally rival theirs. Unfortunately, it seems perhaps at least one fellow author feared my sales would take away from theirs? I do not know. 

Time to re-write a few paragraphs in a few chapters, and hopefully by the weekend, I will re-release the modified book, under the same name, new ASIN number, and see how many people will report that! If I wanted to write about butterflies, unicorns and daisies, I wouldn't be writing in this genre. 

I am so excited that Amazon is in constant communication about this issue, and knowing a competitor is jealous of my work demonstrates that my writing is five star, well on a 'pornographic' content, I guess its a six star.

So watch out butterflies and daisies will be edited into my first book, and re-released this weekend. 

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