Translate

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?

1 comment:

Pat Powers said...

So far, they're not saying a hell of a lot.