Publishing on Amazon / KDP - recent experiences?

For a long time, we published eBooks on Amazon, but they had a policy change 5 or so years ago (from memory!) saying they were no longer publishing what they considered, "Pornography".

I noticed earlier today though that 2 of our eBooks (we used to repackage our best stories, competition entries or individual longer stories) are still published on Amazon - so they aren't deemed outright pornography in Amazon's eyes:

https://www.amazon.com/Lush-Erotica-Stories-Authors-ebook/dp/B00838YM8C/ref=pd_sbs_4[…]1f4-bc7c-b419f178a05f&pd_rd_wg=M2j7M&pd_rd_i=B00838YM8C&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/VIP-Sex-Stories-Lush-Authors-ebook/dp/B0096IQEZM/ref=sr_1_1?k[…]+erotica&qid=1637068249&rnid=2941120011&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

In theory then, if sex scenes are part of an overall story, then they should be fine. Their content guidelines say as much: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390 (cough, 50 Shades of Grey).

Here's a recent article on the subject too, which shows many are clearly getting published: https://redlightnetwork.net/sell-erotica-on-kindle/

I am thinking of publishing again on there. The best of the latest competition entries would be a good test for example (price = free), as they are longer and have more of a plot than your typical interweb "sex story".

Does anyone here have experience of publishing on Amazon (via KDP) over the last year or so? What did you publish? What is accepted as "ok" with them?

I published 4 books over the summer period

1 was a short anthology of some of my one off stories and poems.

3 were one of the long stories I published here - Tell Laura. The only change I made here was that instead of siblings, they became adoptive siblings and it has a new opening.

The sex is exactly as published here.

I had no problems from Amazon about content.

I publish under the pen name Chris Garner and while they are not best sellers by a long way, they are still available.

https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Garner/e/B096PSZ2T8

I know of another author here who publishes there, his genre is more specific focusing on Hot Wives and Cuckolding. I know he has been more successful than me. Again, he has had no problems with content. 2 of the stories he has published have been published here 1st.

https://www.amazon.com/Peter-G-Johnson/e/B097YY2ZW1

Not sure what Amazon deem pornography but they have specific categories for erotica when you select genre.

IMO I think you would be okay publishing selected stories from here.

Erotica is alive and well at Amazon.

It was over a year that i published, but things don't appear to have changed. The content rules are the obvious things: no incest, no , no non-consent, no beastiality, yadayadayada. The bigger caveats have to do with the cover art: no genitalia, and no implication of non-consent, which to them means any collars or restraints even hinted at. If you include any verboten subjects in your keywords, they'll put you in Amazon jail. Merely "dirty" words--cum, nipple, fuckdoll--work fine as keywords, and seemed to actually help my meager sales.

Quote by Ensorceled
which to them means any collars or restraints even hinted at

Drat, that torpedoes any chances of my comp entry making it in. It uses the words 'collar' and 'leash' once each.

My wife reads/skims all sorts of self-published crap in the free section on the Kindle store. Most of it's appallingly badly written, cliché nonsense. Billionaires, werewolves, witches, sometimes all three in one story. Hardly any of it seems to shy away from adult content, including explicit sex scenes. The level of proofreading is also laughable. Littered with errors - grammatical, spelling and syntactic - the funniest of which I read was a lass climbing onto her partner's 10' cock. Presumably with a stepladder.

I can only assume Amazon rely on people flagging stories that break their ToS, as there's no way they can proofread the volume of content that's published daily, and algorithms ain't that good.

Quite who would complain about someone's erotic novel to Amazon is unclear.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

Quote by Ensorceled
which to them means any collars or restraints even hinted at

Drat, that torpedoes any chances of my comp entry making it in. It uses the words 'collar' and 'leash' once each.

My wife reads/skims all sorts of self-published crap in the free section on the Kindle store. Most of it's appallingly badly written, cliché nonsense. Billionaires, werewolves, witches, sometimes all three in one story. Hardly any of it seems to shy away from adult content, including explicit sex scenes. The level of proofreading is also laughable. Littered with errors - grammatical, spelling and syntactic - the funniest of which I read was a lass climbing onto her partner's 10' cock. Presumably with a stepladder.

I can only assume Amazon rely on people flagging stories that break their ToS, as there's no way they can proofread the volume of content that's published daily, and algorithms ain't that good.

Quite who would complain about someone's erotic novel to Amazon is unclear.

To be clear, you can write about collars/restraints all you want, and put it in the keywords. You just can't hint at it in the cover image. All their rules are secret, this is just based on people's experiences.

And yeah, there's some laughably bad erotica on Amazon.

Quote by Ensorceled
You just can't hint at it in the cover image

Ah, right. I didn't read your post properly, sorry. I see you were talking about cover art now. I'll get back in my box.

Excellent information. Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Quote by nicola

For a long time, we published eBooks on Amazon, but they had a policy change 5 or so years ago (from memory!) saying they were no longer publishing what they considered, "Pornography".

I noticed earlier today though that 2 of our eBooks (we used to repackage our best stories, competition entries or individual longer stories) are still published on Amazon - so they aren't deemed outright pornography in Amazon's eyes:

https://www.amazon.com/Lush-Erotica-Stories-Authors-ebook/dp/B00838YM8C/ref=pd_sbs_4[…]1f4-bc7c-b419f178a05f&pd_rd_wg=M2j7M&pd_rd_i=B00838YM8C&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/VIP-Sex-Stories-Lush-Authors-ebook/dp/B0096IQEZM/ref=sr_1_1?k[…]+erotica&qid=1637068249&rnid=2941120011&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

In theory then, if sex scenes are part of an overall story, then they should be fine. Their content guidelines say as much: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390 (cough, 50 Shades of Grey).

Here's a recent article on the subject too, which shows many are clearly getting published: https://redlightnetwork.net/sell-erotica-on-kindle/

I am thinking of publishing again on there. The best of the latest competition entries would be a good test for example (price = free), as they are longer and have more of a plot than your typical interweb "sex story".

Does anyone here have experience of publishing on Amazon (via KDP) over the last year or so? What did you publish? What is accepted as "ok" with them?

Amazon's interpretation of 'pornography' is very much visual representations of sex. My first cover for a recent release, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JPBFHX1, accidentally featured the crinkles of a woman's arsehole. That caused all sorts of ruckus and earned me a ban from pre-releasing ebooks for a year. D'oh!

The big Zon have been quite happy to publish all of the filth which has fallen out from between my ears onto the page though, which is nice of them as it makes room for me to think about other things.

All the WFH stuff proved to be a good time to be an erotic writer on Amazon - I had more time to write and people seemed to have a lot more time to read, judging by the numbers.

Great to see you Abigail!

Thank you for the feedback. I think we may very well give it another go down the track.

The thing about Amazon, and yeah it was about five years ago, maybe more, is that they changed their search algorithms to filter out anything with an "erotica" tag. I experienced a huge difference in my title rankings after that happened. Since I placed some titles with excessica, I get more sales via Smashwords than Amazon, not that it's very many either way. Ebook publishing was very profitable for a people when it was a new thing, but then, as usually happens in other businesses, too many people jumped on the bandwagon and glutted the market, much of it being incompetent garbage. You can easily find a much higher quality of erotic writing, and some downright classy smut, here on Lush, so it's not easy for readers to sift through the ocean of available material on Amazon.

Thanks Mr. Lee!

On top of the time it was taking us for very little reward, that's why we gave up publishing on there in the first place. They were literally rejecting everything we tried to publish.

But as a way to get in front of a different audience to your typical search engine surfer, it does provide a cheap opportunity to market the site in another way, to a different audience.

I am not fussed about the venture not earning us anything. It would be set up to help writers here and they would get all royalties from their own publications.

We are mulling over if it's worth the time to set it up again or not. If the eBook generation to comply with their formatting requirements was automated, so too the cover design, then that would take a lot of the pain away. The eBooks would simply need proofreading / a little editing, then writers here could publish them themselves to get more exposure. It would benefit all parties.

If it's automation you're after, gimme a shout. I have a few tools available to take content, brand it and format it for ebooks.

If the dev team here have an API I can hook into, even better for getting hold of content and reformatting it. If not, worst case approach is to scrape it and pull out the required bits.

If the page metadata is set up with decent social graph tags, some of the content can be dragged out that way. Incidentally, this would be an excellent plus-point for having the portrait cover image format available, since it'll import directly into other systems. But if the intention is to make new covers or only make a single cover for an anthology, then it's of no consequence.

Either way, drop me a line with your thoughts on what you want to achieve here and I can dust off my thinking cap to see if there's a way to grab what you you need and format it as pain-free as possible.

This is a very thoughtful idea, Nicola. As far as I know, formatting, editing and cover design are all made simple on KDP. https://selfpublishing.com/kdp/ Good luck.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

If it's automation you're after, gimme a shout. I have a few tools available to take content, brand it and format it for ebooks.

If the dev team here have an API I can hook into, even better for getting hold of content and reformatting it. If not, worst case approach is to scrape it and pull out the required bits.

If the page metadata is set up with decent social graph tags, some of the content can be dragged out that way. Incidentally, this would be an excellent plus-point for having the portrait cover image format available, since it'll import directly into other systems. But if the intention is to make new covers or only make a single cover for an anthology, then it's of no consequence.

Either way, drop me a line with your thoughts on what you want to achieve here and I can dust off my thinking cap to see if there's a way to grab what you you need and format it as pain-free as possible.

Brilliant, thank you!

Quote by CallmeJayne

This is a very thoughtful idea, Nicola. As far as I know, formatting, editing and cover design are all made simple on KDP. https://selfpublishing.com/kdp/ Good luck.

It looks like they've realized it's a technical pain in the proverbial to format a book for Kindle and have come up with "Kindle Create" which I wasn't aware of.

Thank you too!

Quote by nicola

Quote by CallmeJayne

This is a very thoughtful idea, Nicola. As far as I know, formatting, editing and cover design are all made simple on KDP. https://selfpublishing.com/kdp/ Good luck.

It looks like they've realized it's a technical pain in the proverbial to format a book for Kindle and have come up with "Kindle Create" which I wasn't aware of.

Thank you too!

Coincidentally, I’ve just published a small collection of six of my Lush stories on Amazon. I used “Kindle Create” to help with the formatting, and it was pretty straightforward, even for someone as non-techie as me (and I really am very bad at this sort of thing). And I’m sure there are some very tech-savvy people on Lush who could make the finished product look much better than my feeble effort. And I used the "Cover Create" feature, which took no time at all using their templates and images.

More importantly, it went “online” very quickly. I was expecting it to take days, but it was available in the Marketplace within about five hours of submission. So I can’t imagine there was any human input! The stories are standard straight/lesbian fare, with nothing kinky. Maybe they have some sort of algorithm that searches for inappropriate words?

Annie x

I have the technical expertise of a toaster but I managed to self publish using KDP. It takes a bit of patience - weird formatting glitches after the upload etc - but I got there. No issues with content either.

It’ll be good to see Lush Publications on sale again. Go for it 🍷

I pen slapped a few times with Kindle Direct Publishing. I sort of think, its whoever is proof reading it if they ban it or not. Because I been putting some sizzling stuff out there like "Adventures Of Cheery's Friends 1 and 2" and it passes with flying colors and I know those two stories exceeds certain things that I've had banned before. I thought maybe they changed their policy's

I have several pen names with over 80 titles between them at Amazon. If you're experiencing glitches post upload, it might be the build program. I use Sigil, a wysiwyg program for epub files, and haven't had problems in 5+ years.