I was going to spend a little time looking at more covers after last week’s dive into my attempts to spring “The Night of the Storm” from Amazon’s “dungeon,” but instead I’m going to pry open the door to the dank little oubliette a bit and consider what it means that more of my books have ended up there.
The TL/DR is: if you’re searching for spicy books on Amazon, select “Books” from the search bar or your results will be good deal blander than you might like.
The “dungeon” is what indie writers (particularly writers of spicy stories) call Amazon’s search restrictions. When you search from Amazon’s front page with no filters applied, you get results from all across the site’s wide array of offerings. Your results will be a mix of books, ebooks, movies, garden supplies, kitchen tools, squirrel puppets, shoelaces … it’s kind of crazy, really, the stuff you can buy through Amazon. (I remember when you could only buy books back in the late ‘90s …)
But while your results will be quite varied, they won’t be complete. Some books, for example, won’t show up in general search results. Those are the books in the “dungeon.”
Typically, a book goes into the dungeon when it gets an update of some sort: a new cover, new blurb, changes to the content itself. From the dashboard you use to manage your books, you’ll see the status change from “Live” to “Changes In Review” when you submit a change, and in a few hours or a few days the changes are applied. What the “review” entails is a mystery, and a whole folklore has developed around what’s happening behind the scenes. For the most part, I suspect there are automated processes at play: scripts that are looking at the words used in blurbs and maybe the first few pages of the book, and at the contents of the cover. There may be human eyes involved, too, though with the volume of content flowing through that digital river, they’re probably used pretty strategically.
I don’t necessarily fault Amazon for keeping some books out of the general search: you don’t want to be pushing smut at people looking for hand puppets, for example. Of course, if people are in fact searching for hand puppet smut, then they should be able to find it. And if you know how to use Amazon’s search, that’s easy enough to do.
The problem is the inconsistent and haphazard application of search restrictions with no clear feedback to authors about why some books get the restrictions and some don’t. In the last month, it seems that Amazon has become much more aggressive at applying the restrictions, but finding patterns across the covers, titles, and blurbs (which seem to be the things most likely to trip the alarms) is nearly impossible. That’s made me, and many others, skittish about how we market our work: we want to make the spice level of our books clear to potential readers, but we don’t want to make them impossible to locate.
It seems unlikely that Amazon will ever explain, though, so rather than waste time trying to scrutinize the haphazard application of standards, I’d like to spread the word about using Amazon’s search more effectively.
If, for example, you’re looking for stories about sexy times at a vacation cabin (who isn’t?), you might go to Amazon and plug in “lake cabin swinger”:
In addition to a cheeky pineapple doormat and some delectable cabin design porn, you’ll see that there’s a nice sexy book (one of mine!) that might tickle you fancy. “Mapping the Boundaries of Love”, which collects all five books in the first arc of that series, does indeed fit the bill: there’s a nice lost weekend in a wilderness campsite by the lake, and also sexy times in a snowed in cabin. And while there are not in fact any swingers at the cabin, there are swingers in the middle three stories, so I think someone looking to scratch their “lake cabin swinger” itch would be pleased with this book.
But watch what happens if I make the same search but select “Books” from the category list:
This time I get not one but two Cornelia Quick lake cabin swinger books, and the one at the top — “The Night of the Storm” — fits the bill even better, involving (as the tag line announces) three couples, two cabins, and one stormy night. A potential reader who checks out “Mapping the Boundaries of Love” may stumble across “The Night of the Storm,” too, if they look at the rest of my books, and if they read “Mapping the Boundaries of Love” they’ll find “The Night of the Storm” in the list of Cornelia’s other books, but I prefer to get “The Night of the Storm” in front of the lake cabin swinger crowd by the most direct route possible.
Poor “The Night of the Storm,” though, got tossed in the search restricted dungeon, probably because an earlier version of the cover was too risque. It’s still available, and it’s still really, really hot, but it’s a little harder to find.
Different retailers have different approaches to delivering search results that might include spicy books. On some, you need to log in and disclose your age, and then you’ll only see the smut if you’re 18 or older. On others, like Smashwords, there’s a filter control that lets you include or exclude erotica (and even further refine to “mainstream” erotica only, as Smashwords is one of the few sites where more taboo topics have a home). Amazon’s approach is somewhere between the two, with a filter control available but not made very explicit.
So remember (graphic courtesy of Natalie Hothorne), “Always select Books in the dropdown box when searching for mature titles”:
Also, help out some of my favorite writers by checking out this great collection of dungeon-dwelling books, and peruse some of my own dungeon-dwellers.
Want a cheap and easy way to support me? Buy one of my books directly on Payhip: most are just $1, some come with spicier covers than Amazon and Smashwords permit, and you get discounts when you buy more than one.