So I finally heard back from the support team at Kobo. The geniuses in their QA department have somehow concluded that the My Wildest Fantasy series is pseudo-incest. This despite the fact that Blake and Callie aren’t related in any way, shape, or form. Not by blood, not by marriage, not by adoption.
This is what you have to put up with as an erotica writer, folks. The next time you ask why we charge $2.99 for a short story, well, this is why. I’ve just lost all income for this series on one sales channel, and I’ll probably lose it on Apple as well. I’ve lost all momentum from the new releases, and from the purchases of this series which had become my best sellers.
Most distributors have always explicitly forbidden incest in their content policies. Personally, I don’t have anything against those stories, but if they don’t want to sell them, that’s their business. The ban against pseudo-incest was added later to prevent erotica authors from violating the spirit of the content policy by using step-relations or adoptions to skirt the legal definition of incest. Again, I don’t particularly like it, but I understand it and abide by it when it’s in place.
Apple and Kobo, however, have decided to take this to a whole new level of stupid. They are now defining stories as pseudo-incest just because they have an older man/younger woman relationship where the MCs have known each other at some time in the past. You like stories about your dad’s best friend or your best friend’s dad? Sorry. They’re BLOCKED. The male MC knew the female MC at some point when she was a child? BLOCKED. Really? Now we’re supposed to read their minds to understand what tortuous definition they’ve assigned to incest this week?
So where does this nonsense stop? Is the next step down the slippery slope going to be to get rid of all the brother’s best friend/best friend’s brother stories? OMG, that’s just exactly like stepbrother and stepsister stories, ya’ll!!!
And now you know why I’ve switched to writing romance under a new pen name and billionaire eroms as Kelli. 🙂
Kelli Wolfe 
Keep writing what you do, there’s always going to be haters but there are more who like your writing.than those who seek to block. Don’t give in, or it will never stop. Paying 2.99 for your books is a small fee to pay for reading your stories. If you change the way you write, you lose a piece of yourself.
Incest? Please not even close.
Stay true to yourself…and your readers…
Keep writing
debi
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The problem comes when the haters can destroy my income by blocking big chunks of my catalog on a whim or some creative interpretation of their intentionally vague content guidelines, which happens on a fairly regular basis.
There’s a term an erotica author friend of mine, Katrina Millings, coined for the result – erotica PTSD. You get to a point where you second guess everything you publish, and worry every time you make a change that it’s going to trigger a block or filter. It’s extremely stressful, and takes a lot of the fun out of writing. I’ve spent most of this year writing romance (albeit steamy romance), where authors aren’t subjected to this nonsense, and I’m not as stressed out and upset all the time. I’m not spending more time worrying about what Amazon and Google and Apple are going to do to fuck with me today than I am putting words on the page.
So it sucks, but unfortunately it’s just the way things are and for the sake of my health and sanity I’m shifting my focus from erotica to romance. It’s really not that big of a shift to take something like My Wildest Fantasy and move it from erotica to romance, and if I had it to do over again that’s exactly what I’d do. I did it with Obsessed, and I think it’s turned out pretty well so far. It’s very much one of *my* stories and it’s got very steamy sex, but it’s quite definitely a romance rather than erotica. Hopefully I can keep you guys happy with more stories like that, while I avoid getting ulcers from worrying about random smackdowns by the Erotica Police.
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