The good people at Amazon sent me an email yesterday which confirmed their decision to have The City of Earthly Desire pulled from the erotica category on their site. 

It was not an easy dialogue, but Amazon staff were very open and fair during our debate over the content of the novel.  Unfortunately, the erotica category still appears on the site when you search for the Kindle version of the novel.  I hope it goes away very soon.

To find out what all the fuss was about, download a copy of the novel if you haven't already done so.  There's a free e-book download on all Amazon sites until July 15th. 

http://www.amazon.com/The-City-Earthly-Desire-ebook/dp/B009GB6DUK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1373628792&sr=8-1

I humbly invite you to download an electronic version of my novel The City of Earthly Desire from Amazon . . . for free!  For the next five days - July 11 to 15 - the Kindle version of the book will be available on Amazon at no cost. 

You can still download and read the book even if you don't have a Kindle by downloading a free Kindle app.  

Please share the link below with anyone and everyone who might be interested.

Thanks for your support  . . . 

http://www.amazon.com/The-City-Earthly-Desire-ebook/dp/B009GB6DUK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1373536575&sr=8-1

Before I describe the compromises I had to make to get The City Of Earthly Desire removed from the erotica classification and the restricted search Amazon had imposed upon it, let me just take a moment to state, plainly and clearly, that real mastectomies and the conditions that cause them are no laughing matter.  The mastectomy I will describe is of a different nature entirely. 

In a prior blog post, I outlined how my novel had been placed into restricted search and the erotica category because of mature subject matter on its cover.  For more background on the boob controversy, you can read this post:

http://francisberger.weebly.com/4/post/2013/07/uh-oh-boobies-time-for-a-mastectomy-or-how-i-became-a-literary-censorship-surgeon.html

Well, the mastectomy I performed on the cover of my novel worked.  Here's the proof:

Hello,

We’ve reviewed your response concerning the following book(s):

The City of Earthly Desire (ASIN: B009GB6DUK)

After further review, we have decided to remove the search restrictions so your book(s) will now be found in our general product search results.

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience caused by this temporary restriction.

Best Regards,

Ariel B.
Amazon.com

Funny how an artistic representation of a female breast is all it takes to land one in the realm of Fifty Shades of Gray and lesser known titles like Kidnapped the Wrong Sister and Sherriff's Gay Revenge. 

All kidding aside, a big thanks to Amazon for getting The City Of Earthly Desire off the erotica list and back in fiction.  It would have been a sad irony to see a novel that is essentially anti-pornography get stuck in the pornography section for eternity.

Categorize this one under lesson learned!

A couple of days ago I went on Amazon.com and noticed The City of Earthly Desire had been removed from the historical fiction and literary categories I had assigned to it and had been placed into the erotica category.  I could not help but smile because I sort of saw it coming.  It's a strange book, mine.  A novel that deals with pornography without being explicitly pornographic.  I knew someone would eventually get confused over at Amazon. Regardless, suffice it to say I am not at all pleased with the novel being tossed into the erotica genre, especially without knowing about it, and I am in the midst of trying to extract the book from that risque genre and place it back in the fiction and literature section where it truly belongs.  

I asked Amazon what had prompted the re-categorization of the novel from literature to erotica.  Their response?  The book contains mature content and adult situations.  I argued that many novels that contain mature content and adult situations exist on Amazon without being classified as erotica.  My main point regarding my novel was this - as a genre, erotica has one goal and one goal only: to ignite sexual arousal and titillation in the reader.  Anyone who has read The City of Earthly Desire knows that the novel's focus is not to ignite sexual arousal.  On the contrary, the novel is deeply critical of lust and the forces that arouse the sexual passions.  Is there mature content?  Are there adult situations?  Of course.  How can there not be?  After all, the second half of the novel deals with strip clubs and the production of pornography; however, despite the risque subject matter, the novel itself is not pornographic in nature. 

My other concern about the novel's erotica classification was more business-minded.  Readers searching for erotica might stumble across The City of Earthly Desire and purchase it thinking they were going to get a steamy little tale of sweaty bodies and leather-domination;  they would be sadly disappointed to discover the novel did not contain all the explicit sex they craved.  On the flip side, potential readers interested in reading plain-old fiction might bypass the novel simply because they would think it was another panty-moistening epic penned by some sexually frustrated hack who lives in a dingy one-bedroom apartment above an adult novelty shop. 

Amazon acknowledged my concerns and admitted that their chief objection has less to do the text and had everything to do with the mature content on the book's cover.  What's the mature content?  Well, have a look at Egon Schiele's Mutter and Kind which graces the cover of my novel:

Do you see that nipple peaking out from the woman's left side?  That, my friends, is what I assume to be the mature content Amazon is so concerned about.  (Okay, the suggestive title doesn't help, but they didn't say anything about that!) 

So, what's a writer to do?  The answer is simple.  Become a surgeon and perform a mastectomy.  Eradicate the offensive mammary gland and maybe the mature content will go away.  Well, here is the post-surgery result: 

This is the image I hope will grace the cover of the novel and appear in thumbnails online from now on.  Did you spot the difference?  I hope Amazon does.  And I hope it's also enough to get The City of Earthly Desire off the erotica shelf and back in fiction where it belongs.  I'll post an update when I know the outcome. 

Until then, I have to admit I've been thinking about creating another cover for the book or, ideally, having someone else create a more professional cover for me.  I like Egon's image and I think it captures the essence of the book overall, but I have never been entirely satisfied with the cover I created.  That, however, is a tale for another day.   

A free Kindle e-book version of the novel will be available for download through Amazon.com from July 11 to 15.  So if you haven't had the chance to pick up the book yet . . . well, here it is.   

More details and links will come shortly. 

The online Urban Dictionary defines the slang term "sausage fest" in the following manner: 

"When the number of males in an environment/party/social gathering overwhelmingly exceeds the amount of females present." 

Now this might be a desirable environment for gay men, but most straight men prefer environments/parties/social gatherings where the male-female ratio is at least fifty-fifty and would vastly prefer the number of females to exceed the number of males present.  I don't think I have to go into the obvious reasons why . . .

So . . . what do sausage fests and many book marketing strategies - blog tours, Goodreads, Twitter, guest posts, Library Thing, etc. -  have in common?  Well, take the analogy of the sausage fest and rework the definition in the following way: 

Indie Book Marketing - "When the number of independent authors trying to market their books overwhelmingly exceeds the amount of readers present."

Over 10,000 independent books are tossed onto the market every day.  That's over 365,000 books in any given year.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of independent writers out there all simultaneously vying to get their work recognized by the reading public.  Most of these authors, yours truly among them, are following the same advice concerning viable marketing strategies for self-published books:  we start blogs, open Twitter accounts, create Facebook pages, go on blog tours, etc., in the hope that we will build a "social media platform" which will garner a "following" and build "critical mass" which will in turn . . . aw, whatever.   

More often than not, the only people you will encounter while you are trying to promote your work -  on blog tours, websites, book sites, Twitter and all the rest it - are other independent authors who are also desperately trying to promote their work through the same means and venues.  Like a classic sausage fest, the literary/book marketing sausage fest becomes a sad spectacle of a bunch of unknown authors crowded into some small, insignificant space all distractedly awaiting the arrival of a few treasured readers who, for reasons best left alone, never manage to make it to the party.

In other words it becomes a giant game of:

Author 1: "Hey! Are you a reader? Wanna buy my book?"
Author 2: "Uh . . . no.  I'm an author.  Wanna read my book?"

Thankfully, I have enough of a sense of humor and enough pessimism to survive even the most lopsided sausage fests.  But it does make one
wonder . . . how do you get the word out to readers? 

Time will tell.  Until then, I take mine with mustard.

I've been having quite a bit of fun with these Goodreads giveaways so I thought I'd do one more.  This one only lasts a week - enter quickly.