Just in case you didn’t know: the market for erotica, erotic romance, and romance stories has exploded as ebook readers have become more popular. People love sex, whether it’s watching it, having it, or reading about it. Now that people can purchase whatever type of kinky read they want privately, people have been using their mobile readers to buy the type of story they want.
Many ebook distributors have picked up on this trend. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords, to name a few, all offer erotica sections filled to the brim with whatever niche of sexy story you find most exciting.
However, with the rise in popularity of stories depicting sex has come the rise of those who want to censor it. People seem to forget that what happens in a work of fiction is exactly that: fiction. It’s entirely made up. In particular, there are a few hot-button kinks that seem to get certain distributors’ panties in a bunch. The most common kinks to suffer censoring are pseudo incest (sexual relations between family members not related by blood) and dubious consent (a story where the consent for sex is implied).
In particular, a few ebook distributors have gone on what can be likened to a moral crusade, trying to disallow any stories they deem reprehensible, often using arbitrary standards to get rid of anything they want.
All Romance eBooks is particularly guilty of this. They claim to not want to sell these types of erotic stories, that they aren’t appropriate for their customers. All the erotic authors I know of who published these types of erotic stories through All Romance eBooks found them to be their best sellers. That is, before All Romance eBooks decided to tell the customers what they should buy. I myself experienced success through this distributor before they decided to arbitrarily get rid of me for making them money.
You tell me: is it a smart move in any way to refuse to publish what your customers want?
If you can take a moment, please
sign this petition to show All Romance eBooks that it is not okay to censor works of fiction. Stand up for the rights of authors to write what they want, and the rights of readers to purchase and read the types of stories they want.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please use this thread to discuss hot-button issues in the new world of ebooks like erotica and censorship.