Where is my smut?!

Okay you guys are probably curious as to what went on, so I just wanna explain things here.

A lot of the companies I sell through like Smashwords, Bookstrand, and AllRomanceEbooks have made some major crackdowns recently.  This is because there is a lot of pressure from PayPal.  See, when authors like me sell books on these distributor sites, the distributors collect the money and pay our commission through… you guessed it.  PayPal.

Apparently PayPal decided that it did NOT want to be associated with things like dubcon, incest, or even pseudoincest, so they made a HUGE crackdown on a bunch of sites, demanding the removal of stories that contain these subjects.  This suddenly has a bunch of indie authors getting very very worried about whether their work is objectionable or not, because the standards can be very strange.

For example, AllRomanceEbooks has decided that “pseudoincest,” which involves sex between step-relations, counts as incest.  It’s icky (and kinky!) but it’s perfectly legal in the real world, so a lot of authors that sold to that audience are now getting their books pulled off the shelves.  ARE also cracked down hard on any books with the “teen” tag, even if it was a story about 18 year olds.  Even stories where the subject is “I had sex with my best friend’s brother!” counts as incest.  Basically, these erotica sites are pushing for standards that REAL video porn doesn’t have to go through.

Now there’s nothing wrong with holding to certain standards, even if I disagree with them, and I’ll still be selling through whatever sites I can.  However, I just think these standards are silly to say the least.  Fiction is fiction, and it’s all in good fun.  You’d think that since there aren’t any real people involved, there would be FEWER standards compared to video porn.

Anyway, that’s just an explanation of some of the issues the erotica community has to deal with right now: because of all these crackdowns, people are removing a bunch of their work and they’re even afraid to write kinky things that they really like, for fear of their accounts being flagged, because PayPal is voicing some (I think irrational) complaints and is hitting companies hard over it.

I’m also running into some major trouble with my cover artist:  due to a major computer failure, I have been unable to contact him.  Hopefully we’ll get in touch this coming week.

I’m still writing however, so please don’t worry.  Smut will be coming up as soon as the dust settles.