Some good news for the indie authors (and all authors, really) today: Draft2Digital is now enabling…

thebibliosphere:

gaycowboyjesus:

thebibliosphere:

Some good news for the indie authors (and all authors, really) today: Draft2Digital is now enabling ebook distribution to bookshop.org, which means you can now support more authors and local indie bookstores with your ebook purchases.

It’ll likely take a while for distribution to roll out, but this is a huge part of bookshop.org continuing to challenge Amazon/Kindle, and partnering with Draft2Digital just made that a lot easier on the author side.

Unfortunately not nearly as good as it seems at least for anyone wanting to consume or sell erotica.

This is something that’s become increasingly problematic in publishing, both trad and indie, with more and more book print distributors and book retailers coming down harder on “erotic” content.

So while I’m disappointed, I’m not surprised.

There’s been a reason Erotica has thrived as a genre primarily on Amazon for a while now — but even there, we’ve seen increasing censorship, and authors struggling to get eyes on their work because the algorithm is hiding their work. (We call it the ‘erotica dungeon,’ and it’s not as fun as it sounds. It’s basically algorithmic death.)

And to any of my fellow Romance authors who think this doesn’t affect us: it already does.

Amazon and other publishers already discriminate and classify LGBTQ+ content as inherently more erotic than het-romance. You could write the sweetest, cutest, most tooth-rotting LGBT fluff on the planet with zero hardcore erotica in it, but because you’ve tagged it as LGBT, you’re inherently pushed toward the Erotica genre.

And really, it’s all just goal posts built on a foundation of shifting sands. Just because they’re letting your work slide today doesn’t mean they’ll do it forever.

And if that makes you mad because you don’t want to be lumped in with the icky, gross sex writers, well, I’d hold your hand when I say this, but I don’t want to: you’re part of the problem.

So either get good with Erotica existing and push back against this kind of thing, or watch your careers die. Your choice.