Dear All Romance eBooks,
Burt Mavericks ~ Double Teamed By Daddy And Uncle
Let’s talk about your self pubbed authors and your new categories. Namely Family & Relationships.
I am getting really tired of seeing crap like Seducing Daddy and For Daddy’s Love and Double Teamed By Daddy & Uncle and Daddy’s DP Girl.
That shit is not even erotica really it’s poorly titled porn at best. I have seen better titles and more imaginative works for free on Nifty Erotic frankly. It’s not Romance and I personally do not find it the least bit “romantic”. I don’t care how well it sells people.
YOU named your company All Romance eBooks I did not. YOU decided to focus on Romance I did not make that business decision for you. This is not Romance. It’s crap!
Go throw it in with the fucking Omnilit Sci-Fi books side. Oh, the Sci-Fi boys would get all upset with you dirtying up their section. Well why the fuck are you kicking it in the Romance buyer’s face then? Do we some how deserve the honor of your Porn section labeled as Romance so you can hide it?
Just dump this thinly veiled incest junk it will only get you in trouble with Paypal as seen with the latest Siren/Bookstrand bruhaha and the self pubbed authors doing it are a bunch of crazy self entitled juveniles to say the least and not a single one of them seems to know how to use Google and most importantly this shit is pissing your customers off from the comments I have seen.
They do not appreciate your implication that Romance is nothing more than Porn etc etc etc. You will lose that argument by the way.
Go start a PMP: Pretty Much Porn web site or something if you have so much time to kill and need to make a few bucks off the dirty birds. Porn sites on the internet are nothing new and no one is keeping you from doing one. I don’t think Paypal will work with you on that but I am sure you can find the right “experts” to do an age appropriate online shop with you know restriction warnings and all that and in your face labels to sell your incest and rape fic to an audience that will appreciate that honesty. Which is more than Bookstrand is doing about their problem.
We keep having this ongoing issue with vendor honesty and the proper labeling of eBooks and people trying to ignore the rules and sell Porn on supposedly non-Porn websites without proper warnings even by the limited online standards that everyone uses. Hell, even Live Journal has an age restriction warning page. Most Erotic Romance Authors have that on their websites by default.
Tags: eBook Commentary
Ann Mayburn wrote,
If you really want to be icked out, check out their YA/Juvie book section. There are some really good indie YA books, and there are a bunch of ‘I F’d my Dad’ books. In fact, right on top is one of their best sellers in their YA category, ‘I f’d my best friend’s dad’
Urk.
Link | February 19th, 2012 at 9:13 am
TeddyPig wrote,
I expect these places to be run by adults and more and more I think they are run by 13 year old girls with no adult supervision who are not interested in running anything but they make more money than they did babysitting.
Link | February 19th, 2012 at 9:18 am
Merrian wrote,
Good call out, but it will take PayPal to act before they have any reason to change.
Link | February 19th, 2012 at 8:56 pm
kel wrote,
Although ARe was once my go-to for romance ebooks, I’ve stopped buying there. I just don’t want to wade through the skeevy dreck to find the good stuff.
Do you know if BoB sells all the top ePublishers on your list? I’d love an alternative to just using the publisher websites…
Link | February 19th, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Jodie wrote,
Kel, Yep, BoB is my goto site for ebooks.
Link | February 20th, 2012 at 5:16 am
Tam wrote,
I only go to ARe now when I know what I’m looking for. I still appreciate the buy 10 get one free, but I no longer go and browse the “new releases” because there are usually only 2 or 3 “real” books on each page, the rest is expensive poor quality dreck.
I’ve never checked out YA, but I am shocked if I f’ed my Dad’s BF is in there. My understanding is YA is books aimed at those under 18. Not books for adults ABOUT those under 18 having sex.
Link | February 20th, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Ann Mayburn wrote,
Just as a follow up, I emailed ARE about the incest/daddy books in the YA section and they right away went through and removed them along with sending me a nice email apologizing. While I have no idea how they’ll handle the rest, and no idea how their new shelving system is going to work, I can say that they addressed my issue right away which was nice.
Link | February 20th, 2012 at 6:37 pm
TeddyPig wrote,
Well as I pointed out this did not just happen people have been commenting about this problem to me for months now. The whole Siren/Bookstrand thing was the spark.
As I said in email to them just now when did “Family & Relationships” become a category in Romance? It’s too vague it’s not obvious like Scottish Romances or Western Romances or Contemporary Romances. Historical Romances and all the sub categories there.
It just seems too “created” for incest type stuff right? I mean Romance in a family? Am I off here? I would hate to be seen as too sensitive. You know how I hate being seen as sensitive.
It’s a shame that the customers are more concerned about this than the people running the store.
Link | February 20th, 2012 at 6:43 pm
Merrian wrote,
So did they remove them from the YA section or the store entirely I wonder? If they are still in the store they are still violating PayPal’s TOS. I love the ‘skeevy dreck’ term for this stuff by the way. Snark-is-you Teddypig but in this instance you can’t be too sensitive enough I think.
Link | February 21st, 2012 at 1:03 am
Merrian wrote,
Look what I found in AREs family and relationships section front page list :
http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-theanalredemptionofpastorgreen039slactatingharlot-674020-144.html
Pastor Green knows, the only thing sweeter than a young woman with lactating breasts. Is one who seeks redemption of her sins through hard anal sex. Let the healing begin…
and lots of the psuedo incest books with daddy in the title. The Mutliple Partners section has the obvious porn titles as well and I think the BDSM section has some pretty ugly stuff. ARE have just shuffled things around so they are not so obvious.
Link | February 21st, 2012 at 1:27 am
Wahoo Suze wrote,
The brouhaha begins, and ARe have taken the skeevy shit off their main page, which is nice. What I like about ARe is their metadata. I can FIND stuff there. I’ve kind of moved away from BoB because I search for a book, and it doesn’t show up.
I actually bought a book from BoB when it showed up in their featured books, and when I went back later couldn’t find it. I search by author and by title, nothing. I went to my library, clicked on it and clicked on the other books by link, and all the author’s other books came up EXCEPT that one.
I was eventually able to find some books by tediously search through the books in the category by author name in alphabetical order, but what a pain the ass that is.
So, to sum up my incoherent post, ARe is cleaning up their store in response to the PayPal thing, and the Dear Author thread is getting a little acrimonious about the difference between porn and erotica.
Link | February 21st, 2012 at 11:48 pm
TeddyPig wrote,
For ages now I and other gay men have always bought books that were porn.
The Leatherman’s Handbook is a prime example.
Drummer Magazine was a very important Gay BDSM magazine sold only in adult book stores.
Jack Fritscher: Leather Blues is an important book to me in fact I reviewed it here on the site but it is still porn and Jack calls it porn.
Samuel Steward was Phil Andros a very important gay writer who wrote porn and I reviewed his biography Secret Historian here on the website. Phil Andros was still a porn writer.
John Preston: Mr. Benson was published in Drummer Magazine a porn magazine for Gay BDSM but his story no matter how BDSM Romance is still essentially written for the porn market.
So I do not get the over justifications or the need to somehow be validated by selling your porn shit on a non-porn website to customers that are not looking for it in the first place. Not to mention the fact that you do not want to ever take a chance of kids finding it.
What the hell is all the drama about? If your stories are any good people will find you even if you have to sell your shit through porn websites.
Hell, I buy most of my videos from Bijou Videos because they have the early 70s stuff. I don’t go shopping for porn movies at Amazon. Even if they sell some of it. They don’t specialize in it or stock the good shit.
Why do these clowns even want their porn stories stacked in with Harlequin and the rest of the romance? It does not fit it looks ridiculous and they are only pissing people off acting like a bunch of immature brats who do not know better. Just because you once wrote a romance does not mean all your sci-fi should be sold on the same shelf or sold by the same store.
We will not even start on why the hell anyone with an inkling of sense would list their porn stories under Young Adult.
Link | February 22nd, 2012 at 12:27 am
Merrian wrote,
I was very taken by the paypal/TOS thing being a conspiracy against indi authors by the estb authors/publishers jealous of the indi success theory that has appeared on the DA thread. But then Siren’s email was really amusing as well except they have banned all indi author’s so the few have affected the many others.
It is a great point you make about calling something what it is and then creating a place to sell it.
I know the stories I love like JL Langley’s books or Voinov’s Dark Soul series or anything by Joey Hill and As She’s told by Anneke Jacob which (to me) is out on the edge of BDSM erotica but still hanging in there, are likely to be someone elses porn when they are my erotica. I don’t want to trawl through books such as ‘the anal redemption of pastor green’s lactating harlot’, etc to get to them though.
The daddy/daughter/babysitter/etc books unnerve me because I can’t not think about power and abuse yet I will read dubcon stories happily (because I think, in an erotica sotry there will be an equitable balancing). I want to read about secret babies and don’t want a ‘family/relationships’ category to dump stories like this in my face when I am looking for them.
I think there is not just the element of inappropriate place but that of involuntary choice here too. Am I reacting more strongly because I feel ambushed and forced out of my comfort zone? Is it also because books are my safe place and the mixing of porn of this sort into my genre retail space attacks that mental compartment?
Watching porn is another thing entirely for me and something that I am OK with which probably makes me pretty strange and mixed up that I have had such a strong reaction to what has happened with ARe over the past six months or so.
I have just ordered Joanna Russ’ 1985 essays ‘Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts’ as an aid to being thoughtful about this because I don’t want to kneejerk my confort zone issues into censorship. Thanks for the space to talk this through.
Link | February 22nd, 2012 at 2:05 am
TeddyPig wrote,
“Watching porn is another thing entirely for me and something that I am OK with which probably makes me pretty strange and mixed up that I have had such a strong reaction to what has happened with ARe over the past six months or so.”
See I don’t worry about the strong reaction as being inappropriate.
The difference between porn and erotica and to some extent Erotic Romance can be nothing more than presentation at times. It’s a very slim judgement call but it is still a judgement call that can be made from experience.
Half these guys bitching are all well I don’t write porn I write stories “to get people off” and the rest. It is apparent they are solely playing name games and blame games to try and bend rules and get around definitions they do not like in the real world. It’s like a Live Journal debate to them. Which is why they purposefully flooded Bookstrand and then All Romance eBooks with their crap and they are proud of that fact.
They are not proud of what they write though and it shows. I am used to people being more open and honest. Yeah, I buy porn so what? Yeah, I write porn so what?
These guys are as I said immature and slimy as shit.
“the element of inappropriate place but that of involuntary choice here too”
Exactly! It’s like they are saying well All Romance eBooks had a bathroom so no one should have minded me shitting on the front porch in full view of the neighbors.
The whole it’s a conspiracy by the Romance powers that be for a Harlequin takeover of Bookstrand is a hoot.
Link | February 22nd, 2012 at 6:18 am
Kel wrote,
This has bothered me for some time. I’d glad someone has had the guts to speak out and tell it like it is! This crap isn’t erotica it’s porn!
I’m sick of these sites being flooded with this crap.!
Link | February 23rd, 2012 at 9:48 am
Kel wrote,
http://www.bookstrand.com/uncle-dominics-touch Pseudo incest book that’s still listed on Bookstrand. It looks like they haven’t cleaned out the site entirely.
Link | February 23rd, 2012 at 10:28 am
Suzi wrote,
I keep seeing people linking this and your other post on this subject as a good statement of what is going on and how people should feel on the whole PayPal/Bookstrand/ARe debacle, and having read them I now feel the urge to clarify a few things.
First off, I’m a relatively new writer to the scene; I’ve only been doing this for a month now. I started, along with several others, when a well-known published erotica writer started discussing her work on a forum we all frequent. One of the things she told us was that Bookstrand and ARe were perfectly fine with publishing erotica, including pseudo-incest, and with us making racy covers for the stories (if you prefer to call them “skanky” that’s fine; again we were going by what we were told was acceptable). We read the ToS and didn’t see anything that would disagree with this. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but if I had known that these sites actually *weren’t* for publishing erotica, I wouldn’t have published there. Also, ARe require a link to your published works before they approve you as a writer there, so they knew full well what everyone was writing before it went up there.
So, as you might imagine, I find it a little bit offensive for you to be calling us all “immature”, “slimy as shit” and “crazy self-entitled juveniles” when it seems quite clear you don’t have even half of the story.
Furthermore, the argument that this is all because of “chargebacks” from porn seems to be lacking somewhat when it’s only a few sub-genres of erotica that are being targetted in this way. Unless of course PayPal have done an in-depth analysis of every payment and chargeback over several years and shown that it is those sub-genres that have the most chargebacks out of all erotica sub-genres – in which case I’d genuinely like to see those numbers as I think they’d be fascinating. But until they say they’ll no longer allow any erotica to be bought via PayPal or they’ll no longer work with any site selling any adult matierial, I really don’t think that it’s chargebacks driving this.
I could go on, but I don’t want to end up writing an essay on the subject. I just wanted to correct a few of your apparent misconceptions and give a different side to this discussion.
Link | February 27th, 2012 at 6:30 am
TeddyPig wrote,
“Also, ARe require a link to your published works before they approve you as a writer there, so they knew full well what everyone was writing before it went up there.”
Which is how they found out people were sending them links to some tame shit they had done and then turning around when they got access and spam flooding their website with a ton of hard core porn. Which is where my “immature five year olds” comment came from and I stand by that comment.
“I really don’t think” yeah, we know.
I don’t care what some insane bitch told you.
Selena Kitt says shit that makes me roll my eyes it is so out to lunch and trying to get people upset over stuff that has been going on for years now. Why is her publishing website eXcessica not a more viable retailer if she is making big bucks?
Marlene Sexton is just as much a whack job. Listen if you have not figured out there are some nut cases promoting porn to everybody like it’s some new frontier of easy money then you really need some life experience there before writing something like porn.
If you want to get into who is telling lies then obviously writing and “selling porn” is a bit harder than they are making it out to be right?
I have been buying porn forever. First from adult bookstores to get my Drummer Magazine and then from Gay Bookstores who always carried porn.
BUT!!!!
Even Gay Bookstores carried the fucking porn in the back room and made sure that any kids that might wander in did not get in there.
You are an adult see… I expect you to know better than to let kids see you naked. Same with your porn got it?
I am not asking too much as a consumer in setting limits to tell you NO on what we will buy and where we will buy it.
All Romance eBooks has that same right. Paypal has that same right. Bookstrand has that same right. It’s the same idea as that little sign… No Shirt No Shoes No Service. So what if that hurts your little fee fees? We do not mind you writing Porn we do not want to see it in our stores with no age verification sitting next to our Nora Roberts or Judy Blume.
Samhain and Loose ID and several other top ePublishers carry many of these restrictions No incest, No Rape… etc etc etc in their TOS for what they will publish and sell are you now saying they are wrong too? Or is this all about Paypal only because the tin foil conspiracy hat told you so?
What am I saying that is so unreasonable… or even better happening right now on the internet as we speak that is hard to understand?
Here let’s be constructive for a change… here is what you can do.
Go find one of the millions of porn sites on the internet selling shit and sell your shit there.
Go bother Selena Kitt to get her ass in gear and make eXcessica a viable alternative to All Romance eBooks or something. Instead of trying to change Paypal rules which has not happened since 2003 when this whole no porn thing began. Talk about a waste of effort there.
Quit expecting us as consumers to support you when you are not making any sense and demanding rights you do not, will not, and should not, have selling porn. Bunch of fucking freaks! Go do the hard work of getting together a viable porn selling website if nothing meets your needs and stop expecting everyone to do it for you so you can sit around and make easy money.
You want to know what a slippery slope is in my opinion? Letting crazy people try to tell me I am wrong when they are essentially arguing to take away my right to set my own god damned limits on my own fucking website because it interferes with their supposed “right of access” to making a profit selling sexy time books to kids who can not use those age verified and locked down porn websites.
If you do not want to be stigmatized selling porn off a porn website then stop writing it.
PS… Why does the eXcessica website give me bad GeoCities flash backs?
Link | February 27th, 2012 at 6:45 am
TeddyPig wrote,
Comments closed
When I start getting people writing fucking huge ass statements of nothing but NUH UH having a complete hissy fit over the fact I actually talked to someone working at ARe and found out the dirt about what was going on. And that I know a bit about WHY things are the way they are with bank processing.
Then the truth has been told. It’s not up for debate because that ARe person is not here and the lawyer from my bank is not here either.
And yes Paypal has a right to say what they will insure in a business transaction. You do not get to change or reinterpret business law on a whim so shut the fuck up you are not a lawyer you are a writer so it’s not up for debate go to hell.
I do not imagine the people in charge I talked to from ARe were lying about the problems their website experienced when they provided that bit of information in regards to those unauthorized porn uploads because at the time we chatted that was not even a question I had asked they volunteered it…
They still had not taken anything down.
So forget it between a porn writer who owns nothing and a person whose job it is to run a major eBook vendor website that they are personally responsible for well the silly writer loses because all they have is conjecture and what they heard from some other numb nuts porn writer not facts and not what I saw with my own eyes that was going on that website. I have posted several fine examples already to prove yes it was porn and no it was not of any quality.
You want fair don’t look for it here because this is not your place. Life is not fair and no one said I had to be either.
Link | March 1st, 2012 at 2:55 pm