Censored by Amazon

I found out today that I've been censored by Amazon.com. No, they didn't remove my book. And no, I wasn't censored because of the content of it according to my publisher. I was censored based solely on the basis of its cover.

Several things to point out here.

1. This title with this cover had resided happily on Amazon for a year prior to this happening. It continues to reside on other sites at this time without apparent concern.


2. What Amazon has done is to remove my book from the "All Departments" search. So far, if you search by title in just the Kindle Store, you can find this title -- but who knows when that could change. What has happened is that I have been taken out of the most common search results utilized by visitors to the Amazon.com website.


3. The irony of this is that no actual woman was involved in the creation of this cover. This is a pencil sketch transformation of an image of a doll.


4. No official notice of this action by Amazon was ever received. In fact the only way it was discovered was when another author asked why their work had suddenly disappeared from the All Departments search and, after much prodding, was told that the cover would have to be changed without saying exactly how.


5. No changes of actual content have been requested -- again, so far.


6. Could Amazon's action have been prompted by this Attack Article that recently appeared in Slate - an article that was, btw to my second-hand knowledge, a trojan horse in the way it was sold to the interviewee who didn't realize that it would be used to attack her largest distributor.

So it looks like I'm coerced into creating a new bookcover just for Amazon to meet unspecified criteria from an unpublished policy. Call that one more item that I can check off of my Bucket List. Shouldn't everyone be censored at least once in their life? After all, you don't know where the line is until after you've crossed over it.

Amazon, you could have just come to me and asked for a new book cover.

D.B. Story