Originally Posted on One Handed Writers.

I write the niches that I know and love. Rape and incest are on almost every ‘no list’ out there, but readers want it. Regardless of what you think about the kinks, erotica is fiction, and those people deserve their kinks catered to as well.

And who better to do it than someone who really, really gets hot about it? I get dozens of hits each week to The Keep from search terms like “rape erotica” and “incest stories” and “taboo smut”, and I want to deliver.

Sure, I write lots of other things – we’re also one of the top results for “fantasy erotica” for a reason – but I’d say about ¼ of what I have in my ‘to-edit’ file is ‘dubious consent’, incest, or all out rape.

I wanted to blog about this because it was a year ago that there was a call to arms about PayPal, about how it was treating companies that sold erotica, and how it made so many people rise up. People understood this was fiction, and should be protected, and they were angry about a corporation trying to force other corporations to agree with their morals.

Yet it died down, and people are once more comfortable, but they shouldn’t be. None of us should be. How long until one of the corporate bodies decide they want to get rid of pseudo-incest? Already it’s been filtered by Amazon, joined by ‘Dubious Consent’ and ‘Reluctance’, hidden away like a dirty secret. And that would be fine, if Amazon were open about these filters, about how they hide them away from people searching for them.

We absolutely should not be comfortable. This is the time, when companies are comfortable with our apathy, that we should be pushing. We need more sub-genres in erotica. With over 80k kindle books, one category is not enough.

We need to demand transparency in how they’re filtering things.

We need to demand more rights, not become comfortable with the ones we’ve already lost, for that’s only going to make them want to take more from us. Why wouldn’t they, when they know how easy we are to placate and how quickly our fury dies out?

A year afterwards, and the only people complaining about Amazon are pockets of people who are defeated and tired. Amazon pays our bills, and we don’t want to piss them off – but we pay theirs too. Over 80k books in erotica. How much money does Amazon make off us every day while still trying to pretend it doesn’t want us there? They’re simultaneously denying us and profiting off of us, and we need to tell them that people are okay with erotica! People want to be able to find it, and to be able to browse it by categories and kinks! We shouldn’t have to come up with our own schemes for manipulating search results so that when people search “Scifi Erotica” they can actually find us.

Amazon knows how long our fury lasts. Not even a year. They can out weather any storm that lasts a month or two, but if we keep pushing, they’ll know we don’t want to be denied – as readers and writers of erotica – any longer.

To send Amazon your thoughts on erotica, categories and filtered search results, contact them here: ecr@amazon.com