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Monday, October 17, 2016

Too Hot For Amazon Campaign



The Latvian Women's Double-Fucking team is still mad that their sport wasn't included in the Olympics this year. (I've been having fun posting pics with captions on Reddit of late, this is my most popular to date, over 1300 likes. Relevance to this post: this image is too hot for Amazon!)


Text of a post to my blog on Goodreads:

I'm an erotica writer who has had books banned by Amazon. You get enough books banned by Amazon, and you lose your Amazon account, so I've moved all my titles that even MIGHT get banned by Amazon to Smashwords and Barnes and Noble.

If you are an erotica writer who publishes on Amazon, you know what a minefield it can be. (If not, I'll be glad to go into detail in a thread devoted to that topic.) But the thing is, it's not just the writers who are being hurt by Amazon's peculiar censorship, it's the readers -- they are being denied the content they want by Amazon.

So I was thinking all the Smashwords authors whose content has been banned (Amazon prefers 'blocked" but it means "banned") by Amazon should get together and develop some marketing tools to let indie readers know the content they really want is on Smashwords and not Amazon.

One of the simplest and most powerful ways to do that, I think, would be to develop a "Too Hot For Amazon!" campaign which would involve letting readers know that the content that they want is on Smashwords, not Amazon . No individual author would own the campaign, it would be a group endeavor designed to benefit all the authors involved.

The campaign could involve:

1) Develop a "Too Hot For Amazon!" logo that all authors involved could put on their Smashwords titles to let readers know that this particular book is full of scorching hot content that readers seek

Edited to add: Here's that logo ...



2) Talk up the "Too Hot For Amazon!" topic on blogs, on message boards (like this one) to try to get readers and other authors interested in books on Smashwords and in their books ... of course, as part of it you could promote your OWN books as Too Hot For Amazon! while promoting the general notion that Smashwords is the place to go for content you can't get at Amazon.

3) Could also portray Amazon as fuddy-duddy and dull. This should be fairly easy since the content that authors are producing there tends to BE more fuddy-duddy and dull. What we want to do is attract readers who are not content with Amazon's product, and make them aware of the Amazon censorship that is making the product so dull.

4) Might even run some ads for your books on Smashwords that are "Too Hot for Amazon" 

I can do all of these things myself, for my books, but I'm just a single voice i n the wilderness. All of us working together, I think, will be able to pry many more readers loose from Amazon. So I thought I'd post here and see 

1) If there are a lot of other authors on Smashwords in my situation (I know there are) who
2) Like this idea and want to go with it.

I think it could benefit, not just Smashwords erotica writers, but ALL Smashwords writers, because it will bring greater attention to Smashwords, and erotica readers read a LOT of stuff besides erotica.

What say you, O solons of the Smashwords author group on Goodreads?

Monday, October 3, 2016

Erotic Slave Girls Of Outer Space: The Novel Is Now On Sale, Plus A Censored Version!

Click here or on the pic to get the book at Smashwords. This is the novel-length, uncensored version. If you have not purchased part 1 of "Slave Girls of Outer Space" this is your best option, because it includes Part 1 and Part 2 and is cheaper than buying both independently.

I seem to be writing novels lately. The second installment to my epic "Erotic Slave Girls of Outer Space" story, which was SUPPOSED to be a 20,000 word short story turned into a 40,000 word novelette. When I added it to my original 32,000 short story, I realized I had a perfectly good 72,000 word novel.


And so here is that 40,000 word novelette, "Erotic Slave Girls Of Outer Space: Part 2 -- Alien Harem." Dita and Maria are captured by the Zeskon Empire and endure all sorts of sexy things before … well, can't give the whole plot away, can I? But I can say I'm very proud of the planetary megastructure I envisioned for the story, a multi-layered transparent plastic sphere that surrounds an entire planet.


This is part 2 of "Erotic Slave Girls of Outer Space: Alien Harem." Click here or on the pic to buy it. If you have already purchased Part 1 of "Erotic Slave Girls of Outer Space," this is your best option as it is cheaper than purchasing the whole novel.

The ending DOES leave room for another book in the series. Because DAMN that was fun to write … if it's half as much fun to read as it was to write, it's gonna sell very well.

"Erotic Slave Girls of Outer Space: The Novel (Includes "The Anthrax Codex" and "Alien Harem") is basically parts 1 and 2 of “Slave Girls of Outer Space” stitched together and given uncensored, unabridged, unbelievable life. In part one I had fun with ideas about a sex-positive sex slave, bondage toys and zero-gee sex, and in part two I had fun with the effects sex pheromones might have among a breeding population of sexy humanoids whose brains are wired in subtly different ways that produce subtly different effects.

I also had fun with a set of futuristic bondage toys and the effect they might have on an escape attempt involving a banquet for prudes. I also have some fun with the idea of a sapient humanoid species whose women experience full-on estrus, you know, baboon-style estrus with the swollen labia and the willingess to fuck anything that moves.

And I'd like to apologize to prudes everywhere for all the fun I've been having imagining the possibilities kinky sex could have when paired with future technology and post-scarcity interstellar empires. Except I don't feel at all guilty about it.

But prudes notwithstanding, I understand that there are people who does not care for explicit sex scenes, so I edited the explicit sex scenes out for "Slave Girls Of Outer Space: The Novel" which is a censored version of "The Anthrax Codex" stitched together with a censored version of "Alien Harem" to create a censored version of "Erotic Slave Girls of Outer Space: The Novel." You still know what's going on, mostly, but in a third-person, briefly summarized sort of way. And the book remains very sexy, primarily because it still confronts sexual issues, practices and customs very directly. Just no explicit descriptions of people putting some of those practices into practice.

Two options to buy here: Smashwords or Barnes & Noble. This is the censored version, so if you want all the explicit sexy parts, do not buy it. But if you DON'T want the explicit sexy parts, this is the one to buy. It is still full of nude language and adult facial expressions, though. Fair warning! 

There is no censored version of "Alien Harem" being sold separately, because the censored version of "The Anthrax Codex" was offered for free. Like any good drug dealer, though I am willing to offer the first taste for free, the second taste is gonna cost ya. Bwahaahahahha!

The censored version of “Slave Girls Of Outer Space” is ONLY available on Smashwords and Barnes & Noble. The reason: despite the fact that I cut all the explicit sex scenes out of “Slave Girls Of Outer Space” to make it a merely sexy science fiction novel, I got a notice from Smashwords that the censored version of “Slave Girls of Outer Space” would have to be labeled “Adult” before it could be included in their Premium Catalog, which includes Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and about a dozen other distributors you've never heard of.

Well I felt that this was bullshit. The censored version is a lot like Philip Jose Farmer's “Flesh” or John Norman's “Gor” novels or “Kushiel's Dart” by Jacqueline Carrey, or “High Couch of Silistra” by Janet Morris, or “The Velderet” by Ceclia Tan, or a whole shitload of other SF books where sexuality is a central theme or sex is a constantly recurring event, but is not explicitly described.

And I also didn't CARE that the book wasn't to be distributed in the Premium Catalog, because I'd looked up my Smashwords sales records and found that the ONLY two markets in which my books are selling are Smashwords' own sites and Barnes & Noble. (I don't even bother with Amazon any more, they'd ban “Slave Girls of Outer Space” in a nanosecond). I'm doing well on Smashwords and Barnes and Noble, sales are growing, but the Premium Catalog, I've had a total of two sales
.
So I had this thought: “fuck the Premium Catalog.” Well a more complex thought than that. One of the reasons I wrote the censored version of “Slave Girls of Outer Space” is that I wanted to get the book out from behind the Adult barrier that distributors hide “erotica” behind. For almost every distributor, if you want to see “Adult” materials, you have to opt in by clocking on a button or some text somewhere on a webpage. And that text/button is generally not prominent. (Kudoes to Smashwords for putting their opt-in text in a prominent place, though, it's right up there in the blue bar at the top of the page.) The opt-in button is VERY hard to find on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

So searches within those sites do not show up your books if they are labeled adult. And most customers don't bother with looking for opt-in boxes, they just look for what they want and if they don't find it, shrug and move on.

So the “Adult” censorship wall, DESPITE the claims that it doesn't really exist because there are opt-in buttons for it, is real and quite a problem for erotica writers. But that's where my habit of being generous with plot and characterization and so forth pays off … because after stripping out ALL the explicit sex from my 75,000 word erotica version of “Slave Girls of Outer Space” I STILL had 55,000 words worth of plot and characterization.

A novel's worth. And I feel I should be rewarded for my attention to story and characterization by being able to publish the non-explicit version of my story, and garner attention for it and my OTHER novels and stories, from OUTSIDE the paywall.

And since neither Smashwords nor Barnes & Noble have ANY problems with my non-explicit novel NOT being labeled adult, I published to both of them separately. If Philip Jose Farmer and John Norman and all those others can do it, so can I. Hopefully more readers who will enjoy my work will find it this way.