The Indie Ebook Watershed? (part 2)

Last month I blogged about the scandal that hit the ebook market when UK high street retailer WH Smith fielded numerous complaints about books of a more - shall we say - adventurous nature appearing alongside kiddie books on their website. Their search engines were not filtering out adult content or indeed even flagging such content as appropriate for over 18s only. WH Smith's slightly knee-jerk reaction was to take its online store down completely while the matter was investigated.

you'd be surprised what else comes up in a search...

 

WH Smith gets its ebook feed from the Kobo store, as do many other online retailers of ebooks. In response to complaints from WH Smith, Kobo in turn pulled all "independently-published" ebooks from its virtual shelves. Don't ask me how it defined independently-published - anybody can set up a publishing company or imprint with little or no financial outlay. Only the taxmen in their various guises need to know the true legal entity of a business.

So. Fast-forward a few weeks. My ebooks are once again listed with Kobo (at least some of them are - my new release hasn't yet appeared there but I'm confident it will in time). They've not yet reappeared on WH Smith's shelves and I doubt they will. But is this the end of the story? I don't think so.

Online stores do deals with different ebook suppliers. Like Kobo, Barnes & Noble/Nook Press ebooks go out to small online stores throughout the world. For instance, here's one of my books in the Indigo ebook store. Indigo is a Canadian company with physical stores across the country.

And don't forget physical books. I have three paperbacks now, published via CreateSpace. This is US-only and frankly nobody ever buys books from the CreateSpace site itself - they buy via Amazon or via one of the many sites that CreateSpace distributes too across the world via its Expanded Distribution option. This optional extra distribution used to cost an extra $25 - now it's free - and I've actually sold more print books via Barnes & Noble than I have on Amazon itself.

So what's wrong with that? Well - I have no idea where my books are being sold. Google alerts doesn't seem to help here (you all have Google Alerts set up, don't you? Authors and non-authors alike, it's invaluable for knowing who's talking about you...). So I was surprised to find my paperbacks being sold on UK site Fishpond. No, I'd never heard of it either. Quite why anybody would even consider buying a UK book priced in dollars and shipped via the US, when they could buy it from Amazon.co.uk is beyond me - but what is disturbing is the description:   

black & white illustrations and Age Range: 15+ years.

Yes, really.

For the purposes of anyone who has not read my books, my thrillers are very dark, very graphic and absolutely in no way are suitable for under 18s. Oh, and there are no illustrations.

I have no idea where this information is coming from. It's not in my meta-data from CreateSpace, so who tagged my books and why? There's no "look-inside" feature, and I'd be horrified if people thought it might actually have illustrations and be suitable for mid-teenagers. I could possibly understand all books defaulting to an age-range (even if it's clearly the wrong one, and there is nothing that suggests it's a child or YA book), but to state it has illustrations? How? Why?

I've contacted Fishpond and they are looking at the my issue and hopefully amending the description. But what will happen if I change my book, re-upload and CreateSpace pushes a fresh copy out to all its satellite sites? And what else is out there that I know nothing about? How can I control  how my books are presented to the public?

Answer - I can't. And that's why I think this ebook watershed has only just begun.

Are We Ready Yet?

So you're all eagerly waiting the new book. You are, aren't you? I'm not just shouting into the abyss here?

Well the paperback is (unofficially) out. I had to publish it in order to be able to order stock myself. Amazon hasn't yet caught up, so it's not on my author page, but you can search for it. I'm not putting up links etc here until I've "launched" it properly in the next few weeks, although I've already sold three! The ebook will come out on most platforms around the same time - or a day or two beforehand. You can even pre-order at smashwords now in any ebook format that takes your fancy.

Whether it will ever be available at kobo or their subsidiaries remains to be seen. At present none of my titles are available there; not even my YA fantasy Edge of Dreams where the most erotic action is a single very chaste boy/girl kiss....

An Indie Ebook Watershed?

A couple of days ago, UK high-street retailer WH Smith took the unprecedented step of switching off its entire online store and replacing it with a “holding page” explaining the reasons for this action. This was apparently due to customer complaints after a number of ‘inappropriate’ books were retrieved by the website search engine while customers were looking for children’s books.  More information and examples can be found at a variety of online news sites, such as the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Mirror. Even the Guardian is getting in on the act.

For those readers unfamiliar with the store, WH Smith has a branch on most UK high streets and sells books, stationery items and magazines; the bigger stores also sell CDs and gifts. It has a generally wholesome image, promotes Richard & Judy book titles and is considered family-friendly. Not the place you’d expect to find hardcode pornography then – even the lads’ mags are doubtless regulated to the top-shelf where small fingers can’t innocently pick them up with a comic. I say doubtless because in all honestly, I’ve never looked …

So why do they exist in the online store? Because WH Smith – like many other retailers – takes a data feed from Kobo, an ebook retailer that publishes books from anybody and everybody with little or no vetting of the contents. Kobo itself takes data feeds from other ‘ebook aggregators’ – websites that distribute a book to multiple online retail sites on behalf of the author or publisher (and either charge a per-title flat-fee or take a cut of the profit in return for the service). Kobo is slightly different however in that it also allows authors to upload direct to the site.

This isn’t uncommon in the online retailing business. But as the sale of ebooks and ebook readers has taken the market by storm, ebook aggregators and retail sites have never really invested time or money in content-filtering – ensuring that not all books get published, and those that do are regulated and tagged appropriately to ensure that they do not fall into the wrong hands. Many of the books that have caused this furore have apparently violated the t&c of the sites in question and may even been illegal. WH Smith is potentially liable for prosecution - hence the reaction to pull the entire website.

And with the explosion in ebook sales comes the realisation that anything can be published. By anybody. Whether there is a market for it or not. Since Fifty Shades of Grey, there’s been a race to the bottom, even from the big publishers to produce ever more explicit erotica. Who can blame the independent authors for wanting a slice of a very lucrative pie? But with no gatekeepers, no content-filtering and little quality control from the online publishing/retail sites that Amazon’s KDP, Kobo Writing Life, Smashwords etc, there is nobody to police the increasingly smelly cess-pit of internet pornography. And some of the stuff out there is horrific. Just the other night I glanced through some new titles available via Smashwords. One in particular stood out with tags that would make your eyes water, a blurb that was offensive in the extreme and certainly not something any self-respecting author would want to be connected with. Does nobody at Smashwords even take a cursory glance at the titles uploaded?

Rape-fantasy and incest are not topics I would personally want to read about. I don’t believe in censorship, but if authors cannot or will not self-police or self-regulate, do we really have a choice? There is a world of difference between pornography written for titillation and memoirs about child-abuse. Or a textbook on healing or psychology, or the description of a rape in a crime novel. Do we deny victims of abuse a voice? It’s the glorification of it that is the issue – therefore simply searching for keywords or titles will never been a means of identifying books which should maybe be in a category all of their own, and invisible to store search engines unless explicitly invoked. But then who is to say that Fifty Shades or even titles like Lolita should be banned? Even Lady Chatterley's

Lover was considered indecent in its time. 

So what will happen now? I sense a watershed moment for ebooks. WH Smith has said it will remove 'all self-published books' before it re-opens its site. So that will leave Fifty Shades and other ‘legitimate’ erotica titles, and readers will lose the ability to buy some amazingly good books of all genres from writers who for a variety of reasons do not always publish with a publishing company. Kobo has already deactivated possibly all titles it considers to be self-published, regardless of genre or content - none of my titles are currently available to buy. Other ebook sites like Barnes & Noble, Apple and Sony are doubtless considering their own actions. Even the mighty Amazon has pulled several books recently. And how do you define self-published anyway? Anybody can set themselves up as a publisher. Anybody can buy ISBNs. We are in danger of throwing out the entire bathroom as well as the baby with the bathwater.

For the record, I think that WH Smith has made the right move in the short term. It remains to be seen how the company will deal with this crisis in the medium-to-long-term and how companies like Kobo react. Now you may say that children should not be surfing the net unsupervised and I agree with that. But even with supervision, do you really want your five-year-old seeing book covers and blurbs that are at best distasteful and at worst illegal? And imagine the online revenue that WH Smith is losing by pulling the entire online store while they work out what to do next. That shows you just how seriously they are taking these allegations and their concerns may not be unfounded if some of the offending titles are found to be illegally obscene and not just morally obscene.

Maybe sites like Amazon and Smashwords should be charging independent authors to upload a book for sale? Perhaps that would generate sufficient revenue to employ staff to vet books offered for publication. At the very least the retail sites should be employing better filters on their search engines. It's not rocket science these days.

I predict that October 2013 will be a turning point in self-publishing and ebook retailing and I hope we go forwards in the right direction.

Jumping On the Bandwagon

What do you type into google when you’re looking for something? The whole thing, or just what you consider to be the key words of whatever it is you’re searching for?

Take Twilight. Yes, I’ve read it and if I’m completely honest, I did rather enjoy it. That’s my guilty secret for the day. I even wrote a blog about it a while back. So if you were looking for all things Twilight online (films, books, T shirts, fake tan, anti-sparkle powder, vegetarian meals for vampires, central heating for werewolves made easy  – I’ll stop now, shall I?), you’d probably just type Twilight into a search engine, wouldn’t you? Or Hunger Games or whatever you’re into.

What else might you get?

How about Fifty Shades of Twilight? Lots of – well, you’ll have to go see for yourself. Or Twilight 2 New Moon parody (What if Edward Hooked Up With Jacob...?) which kind of speaks for itself.

Or maybe Fifty Shades Of Sparkling Vampires With Dragon Tattoos That Play Starvation Games, which defines itself as “a short parody of a spoof wrapped in a wet blanket of irreverence”. I’m not entirely sure how typing Twilight into amazon’s search engine produces that one, but there you go.

Clearly there’s a market for something that instantly captures the zeitgeist and provides alternative viewpoints or satirises the original. Sometimes I wonder how close to the line these authors walk – there are dozens of of Potter parodies and spoofs: Harry Putter and the Chamber of Cheesecakes anyone? And yet JK Rowling’s lawyers are quick to jump onto anything illegal concerning the HP brand, so parodies are presumably perfectly OK, if somewhat dubious in taste at times. To be fair, the blurb for Cheesecakes suggests an innocent romp through Potter-land and it all looks completely tasteful and rather a good read.

If Fifty Shades of Grey began life as Twilight fan fiction, then maybe trying to be original isn’t the way to sell lots of books. Clearly the more raunchy you can make your parody, the more books you are going to sell, which makes me wonder if erotica really is the next Big Thing. 

Maybe that’s where I'm going wrong. I should be exploring Katniss’ sex life instead, or working out what kind of creature a vampire-and-werewolf liaison would produce.

Ho hum.

Tales From the Closet

Are you a secret writer? Or do you shout about it at every opportunity?

I work at Cheshire Police Headquarters. It's a big lovely new building in Cheshire with excellent facilities (restaurant, sports hall, gym). There's a large workforce - both police officers and staff, and inevitably there are a few writers amongst us! Back in March last year, I got together with a few of them and we had a table in the corner of the restaurant selling books - at least they did. Since I only have ebooks, I just had some cards and sat there and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.

One of the guys writes thrillers like I do. He frequently posts on our intranet bulletin board advertising his books. I don't. Quite apart from the fact that I don't have any actual physical goods to sell, I just can't bring myself to do it.

I mean what if people I know actually read my books? I'm not overly concerned with whether or not they like them, although obviously it'd be great if they liked my stories and thought I was a good writer. But if they read my books, they'll read the whole story - and there are some bits that really aren't very nice. I don't write chick-lit, or fluff, or romance - not that there is anything wrong with them and I do occasionally read them, but I couldn't write them. No, I write some dark and nasty stuff and I do wonder whether people I know start looking at me differently, wondering how I could dream up such stuff, never mind commit it to paper/computer file. It must be the same for erotica writers - many of them write under pseudonyms for precisely that reason, because otherwise the people in the office would think they were just, well, maybe a bit kinky?

I do write nice stuff too. Edge of Dreams is YA fantasy and quite suitable for all to read. But it doesn't sell in anything like the quantities that Hamelin's Child does. Maybe because I don't promote it nearly as much, but maybe because Hamelin is a better story. Or as a very recent amazon review said: ... a story that doesn't so much hook you as grab you by the throat and force you to keep turning the pages until the very end.

I know people at work have bought my ebooks. I know they've read them. And sometimes I'm in the lift with guys and I'm wondering whether they're looking at me and seeing my books and whether they think I'm a bit weird, if not downright dangerous.