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Originally Posted by crich70
Don't all publisher's have a set of guidelines on what they will and won't publish though? If I write a Murder Mystery and submit it to a publisher that only publishes Science Fiction that publisher will refuse to accept my manuscript for publication. And in the case of Erotic fiction there are sub-genre's and some publishers will publish one sub-genre of Erotic fiction and not another.
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It's very reasonable for a publisher to only accept manuscripts within a certain range of both main and subtopics. What bothers some of us is the language often used to describe those limits--not just "we don't publish this content" but "this type of content is offensive and gross and OF COURSE we don't publish it because DECENT people wouldn't want to read it." (Nobody says that directly, but some do put rather strong implications of that sort in their submissions guidelines.)
They're also prone to broad, vague terms like "no rape-for-titillation," without defining why some rapes (those that lead to the hero & heroine falling in love, usually) are acceptable, but others aren't. And terms like "no pedophilia," which apparently usually means "nobody under the age of 18 should have a sex drive, and certainly nobody should display sexual interest in anyone under 18 years of age." (Apparently, for some publishers, "pedophilia" includes "two 16-year-olds in love.")
I don't mind publishers saying, "we publish what we like to read... here's some guidelines so you don't waste your time sending us content outside of that scope." That's different from "NO necrophilia. The dead definitely don't do it for us - of course, we don't count the bloodsucking undead variety!" (So, are brain-eating undead okay for sex? How about ghosts?Is the problem with death, or inanimate status?)
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I think it's one thing for a company like Paypal to make a decision for a publisher as to what they will and won't allow said publisher to publish and for the publisher themselves to make that decision.
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Entirely agreed. The issue of publishers participating in mass censorship of some topics is a matter of raising awareness that there is a market for them, and it's not just "perverts." And while some publishers will never care to explore those markets, others would be happy to do so if they were aware that the topics themselves are legal subjects for books, and if there were no major stigma attached to publishing them.
The issue of payment providers banning those topics is different--obviously, they're aware of the market; since they have no personal stake in production (they don't have to find editors who'll read pseudo-incest stories) and no direct stigma for supporting the publishers, their ban is for different reasons: either economic (claims of high chargebacks) or moral.
Ebooks don't have a high chargeback rate. Payment processors are trying to impress *someone* with how "upright and moral" they are by instituting these restrictions.