Update on Amazon Ebook Censorship

(UPDATE: Yay, it went through! Angela's Last Resort 1 is up again on Amazon! Now just to get ALR2 up and running. 

I'm also thinking of resubmitting The Doll, but with a new cover and title. Amazon seems to be blocking it behind its Adult filter suddenly, which has totally ruined my experiment with higher prices. How very annoying!

Sorry for all the boring Amazon-related crap, everybody. I promise to get some new captions up tomorrow, so just bear with me for a bit longer. :-) )

As mentioned in my last post, Amazon has blocked two of my ebooks, Angela's Last Resort and Angela's Last Resort 2, with no explanation as to why. I want to give a huge, HUGE thank you to all of you for sending me your sympathies and being patient as I deal with this whole mess.

I've spent most of the past thirty hours altering synopsis and tags, and even removing the occasional nipple, from all of my other ebooks still published on Amazon. It has been a lot of work. Hopefully I have finally removed whatever is causing them to arbitrarily censor my books, before they get around to messing with the rest. Fingers crossed, folks.

The most altered book is my Pledge Week Revenge: Sissy Makeover story, from last June. I have made a totally new cover, and changed the title to Panty Raiders' Punishment, which seems like a better title all around to me anyway. The book has never sold particularly well, though I have always been rather fond of it myself. I was worried that the original cover, which shows a girl's bottom with a tight red thong, would raise some more flags. The new cover shows only three shocked girls' faces, so shouldn't bother anyone. I hope.

The content of Panty Raiders and all my other stories has not been altered, beyond some basic spelling error removal, and such. Everything I have read on the Kindleboards forums has largely pointed to title and synopsis and tags as the usual source of censorship issues, as opposed to the actual story content.

But most importantly, late last night I sent Amazon an email asking to have them set to draft status, so that I could possibly edit them to remove whatever is catching the censor's eye, and they sent me another form letter in response. Which is totally useless, as usual.

However, it did mention that I could resubmit my blocked ebooks, but only with the content altered to fit their non-existent guidelines, etc. I suspect just removing a single word from each synopsis - forced - would actually be enough to satisfy them, but I also spent a good two hours rewriting parts of the first third of Angela's Last Resort. Most of my changes are very small, just a few words here or there, but some parts have new paragraphs, and whole sentences excised.

The basic story remains the exact same, but I have toned down the opening abduction scene a bit, and added in lots of humiliating, but consensual orgasms for Angela. God knows she needed them. :-)

I also added in a line wherein Angela, realizing her treatment is awakening her own long secret sexual fantasies, vows to at least act like she's not totally happy with her treatment at the hands of the Slave Island Resort staff. So really, now the whole story is consensual, even when she pretends it isn't. Oddly enough, none of this really alters the dynamic of the story itself. I kind of wish I had just written it that way from the beginning.

Anyway, I have also changed the title to Angela's Last Resort 1 (real clever, I know) and have now submitted the altered story back to Amazon. I'll wait and see if it passes muster and gets accepted. If it does, I will work on remaking Angela's Last Resort 2, as well.

So if all goes well, in a few days both of my books will be back for sale on Amazon, and if I'm really lucky, all my changes to the rest of my catalog will prevent anymore of these scary and annoying Amazon Censorship crises.

And then I might finally be able to get back to captioning and finishing my next ebook, which just so happens to be a sort-of origin story for the Midnight Surgeon. :-)

- B-Rex.

P.S. Oh yeah, and I might have finally found an ebook commerce site that won't censor my stories, ever again. Details coming soon.