Pornocalypse 2015 - Part Two (The Barnes and Noble Version)

PSA: Barnes and Noble has made keywords and publisher names unsearchable on their site.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news twice in a week, but here we go again. This time it's the folks over at Barnes and Noble. I've had reports (that I've now verified) that erotic keywords are being severely restricted. A search for "menage" comes up with a total of 3,661 titles. BDSM returns 6,988 titles, and incest comes back with just over 1,000 titles. Subkinks (like father-daughter or mother-son incest) are coming up at 20 to 40 total. Now, I haven't checked the erotica keyword search results on Barnes and Noble in over a year, I admit, but back then, menage returned somewhere around 175,000 results, BDSM 110,000, incest about 80,000. For menage to suddenly come back with less than 4,000 books - it's pretty clear that something's happened.

Another interesting search restriction that's been verified is that searching for a publisher on Barnes and Noble returns no results (unless the publisher's name is in an anthology or listed somewhere other than the "publisher" field - our Excessica anthologies come up, for example, but none of our books do, and yes, they used to!) From Excessica to MacMillan - no results. For small publishers, this is a disaster. Many small pubs have spent years building a brand, and have readers who search those publishers for new books on the larger distributors. This eliminates that as an option (unless you do a search from Google - the results clearly come up there - which serves to prove further that this is a Barnes and Noble restriction.)

The conclusion we can draw here is that publishers and keywords are now restricted from the general search on Barnes and Noble.

My guess is this - Barnes and Noble is using a nuclear "quick fix" option. (Like when they dropped ranks on books by 1000 a few years ago - or anchored other books to keep them out of the Top 100...) They wanted to make keywords unsearchable going into the holiday season and in doing so they had to turn off publishers as a search term. I think keywords and publisher search were linked in their system somehow. So when they shut off one, they shut off the other--like throwing off a breaker to turn off one light in the house.

Barnes and Noble has been known to panic like this in the past.

And now, we'll see - but I think they'll move on to individual books that have keyword-stuffed titles still coming up in searches. Because those are the books still showing when you search for things like "menage" and "BDSM." Most of them have long keyword-stuffed titles that Barnes and Noble's search engine is still finding.  Suppressing publisher and keyword searches decimated the titles available that come up in a search - and made less work for them. Now instead of 200K titles they have to comb through, they have to go through only a fraction of that.

If you're an erotica author thinking, "Ohhh! I'll just keyword-stuff my titles then!" let me say one thing - I wouldn't if I were you.

Earlier this year, Barnes and Noble threatened to close Excessica's account if we didn't get rid of keywords in parenthesis after our titles. We had to go through and remove them all and clean things up or face being banned from publishing on Barnes and Noble. I didn't blog about it at the time because we seemed to be targeted as a publisher - I didn't hear anything through the erotica grapevine about it happening across the board. I'm sure a few others were targeted as well, but it didn't seem to be widespread.

This, however, is a sweeping change I think all erotica authors need to know about. I know, in the wake of KU 2.0, many erotica authors went wide with their books and were starting to gain some traction on Barnes and Noble. I have a feeling this is going to ruin Christmas for quite a few.

Thanks, Barnes and Noble. Amazon didn't give us any warning or use any lube, but just because you got sloppy seconds doesn't make it hurt any less.

Pass the eggnog, erotica authors. We're gonna need it. Because while the storefronts will be safe "for the children!" this holiday season, none of the grownups will be able to find your books. Again.

 
Selena Kitt
www.selenakitt.com
Erotic Fiction You Won't Forget
LATEST RELEASE: A Modern Wicked Fairy Tale: Peter and the Wolf

The Future of (self) Publishing

At this moment I have the #1, #6 and #9 bestsellers in erotica on Amazon. That may change in the next moment. They move up and down. But I've been in the top ten for six months and I am making $10,000 a month on Amazon Kindle.

How did that happen?

When I started Excessica in March of 2008, the biggest ebook distributor on the block was a company called "Fictionwise." In order to get into their storefront, you had to be a publisher with 10 or more authors and 25 available (not public domain) titles. I wasn't a publisher, and I didn't have 25 titles, but I did have a lot of online friends who were authors.

So I had an idea...

What if we all got together to form a sort of "co-op" of writers to publish our work on the big ebook distributors? At the time, that was Fictionwise, Mobi, and a newcomer, All Romance Ebooks. That was how Excessica was born, and basically how my career as a real paid writer began.


Granted, at that time, I'd already been "epublished" by a start-up ebook publisher, Stardust Press, who had gone out of business almost as soon as my book hit the virtual shelves. And I'd sort of fallen into that, having entered a contest they sponsored, hoping for the money prize. I didn't win - but they offered me an epublishing contract.

I hesitated. I didn't know anything about epublishing at the time (it's amazing what you can learn in two years) and kind of turned my nose up at it. I didn't want to be "epublished." If I was going to be published at all, I wanted to be published "for real" - to feel the weight of my book in my hands, to see it on shelves in a brick and mortar store.

But as my husband pointed out - why not? A bird in the hand, as they say...

It was that brief foray into epublishing that whet my appetite for more, watching Stardust Press get our books to distributors like Fictionwise. I thought, if they can do it... why can't I?

Nevermind that Stardust had just winked out into nothing in the vast constellation that was epublishing at the time. I wasn't taking on any big time investment - just the cost of creating a domain name and putting in the work of setting up a site for our books. I'd already purchased a hosting package for my own author domain, so that wasn't an issue.

It didn't take long for the authors I knew to climb on board, and we were off and running, applying to Fictionwise, being accepted, and seeing our books find wide distribution. That was exciting, and proved to be lucrative for me personally. I started making enough money per quarter on my books to make it equal to a part time job, which was really my goal when I started: a supplemental income.

The ball rolled along nicely for about a year - and then one day in March 2009, all our titles (about a hundred and fifty of them by then) disappeared from Fictionwise. This was just after Barnes and Noble had acquired Fictionwise. Coincidence? I don't think so.

As I look back on it now, in light of what's happened since with self-publishing, it's almost amusing, but at the time it was devastating. I panicked, emailing the site. I received the response that Fictionwise did not support "author co-ops" and that they were terminating our contract and pulling our books.

Come to find out, after a little digging and back and forth with Fictionwise president, Scott Pendergrast, that a few "support tickets" had been submitted about our "extreme content." Excessica has always been about freedom of speech. We have some boundaries, but I try to let our authors push them as much as possible. We publish things like nonconsent and adult consensual incest - something other erotica publishers wouldn't touch.

Of course, when I inquired about those support tickets, I was told we couldn't get any details about them, even if stripped of identifying information. They wouldn't even tell us the number of support tickets submitted! Finally, we had to give them a list of "possibly offensive titles" after which they would restore our books to the site, minus "the list" - and would only restore those upon review.

Basically, they used our self-publishing status to try to censor our books. Mr. Pendergrast scoffed at the idea of an author having total creative control over their work, creating their own covers, arranging for their own editing, and decided we weren't "a publisher" because of our business model. So what if I was offering 100% payout to my authors? What business of it was his?

Luckily, the first amendment won out. After two months of lost sales, they finally restored the titles on "the list", adding a new "taboo" category to their site.

Then another revolutionary thing happened. Smashwords opened their doors. They looked like another distributor, on the surface of things. The difference was they offered a huge cut to authors (something I was all for - because I didn't take any percentage from Excessica authors' works and only profited from my own). We got to keep 85% of our profits with Smashwords (All Romance Ebooks gave us 60%, Fictionwise gave us 50%, and Mobi gave us a piddly 35%) so I signed up with them immediately. Who knew that they would change the face of self-publishing inside of a year?

Of course, they couldn't have done it without Amazon Kindle's success.

It was like the perfect storm. Smashwords started reaching out and becoming a true distributor, offering individual authors the opportunity to get into places like Fictionwise (and hence Barnes and Noble) where they couldn't tread before. More and more authors jumped on the bandwagon. Kindle themselves opened their own self-publishing platform (although we could, as a publisher, access them through Mobi before that). In places like Sony, and then much later, Apple, the doors were opened wide for individual authors.

Our little co-op had become unnecessary within six months. We didn't need each other to publish books anymore - any single author could go onto Smashwords and reach the same distribution level we had. And they did. Joe Konrath blogged extensively about his success. I watched it all unfold, seeing my own numbers on Amazon start to match his. I was making $10,000 a month on Amazon alone.

Our little venture had, for me, gone far beyond a "supplemental income."

Of course, I was still running Excessica. From the beginning, I'd done the lion's share of the work, formatting everyone's books, putting titles up at distributor sites, sending out royalties. It added a great deal of time to my schedule, but I figured, I was also receiving the lion's share of the profits (even if it was just for my own work) so it seemed, somehow, fair. And I did have some amazing volunteers (the woman who offered to take over the accounting aspect for me saved my life!) But as our roster of authors reached 100+ and our distribution schedule hit four books a week, even I got overwhelmed. And the business model I'd created wasn't quite as self-sustaining as I'd hoped.

I had come up with the idea of releasing quarterly anthologies with donated stories from Excessica authors to pay the basic costs of doing business (web site, postage, etc). But the anthologies weren't coming out fast enough to keep up with costs. Finally, I decided to take 10% of Excessica's proceeds - leaving Excessica authors with 90% profit. And I started "hiring" people to do the work I'd done previously, paying them, as a co-op might, with keeping their 10%, or with free advertising on our site.

So far, this system has worked quite well, and Excessica has kept on rolling. The only other thing I've done is close our doors to submissions from outside authors, except by referral or invitation. We will keep publishing our own authors' work, of course, if they want to stay with us. (Our contracts allow them to leave at any time.)

I knew this was the right decision when My Bookstore and More (Samhain's distribution site) stopped taking outside authors' works. For a while there, ebook publisher storefronts like Ellora's Cave, Samhain, and Bookstrand, opened their doors to not just their own published work, but to outside publishers as well. But as the success of Amazon/Kindle, Apple, Barnes and Noble and Kobo started to appear, they realized where the real money could be found and saw the futility in selling other publisher's books from their own storefronts.

So that's it. That's how I started my journey toward making $10,000 a month on Amazon writing erotic fiction. I don't know how long it will last, of course. This business has proven it can turn on a dime. It's a whole new world in e-publishing. In just a few years, a total shift has taken place. My revolutionary idea has become obsolete. Authors like Joe Konrath can publish their work on their own. He never had to jump through the hoops I did back in 2008.

Makes you wonder what 2012 is going to look like, doesn't it?

-Selena Kitt
(www.selenakitt.com)