The hurricane surrounding the self-published erotica overreaction in the media continues. Several authors on KBoards are reporting that all their titles (erotica or otherwise) that have been uploaded to Kobo via Draft2Digital have been removed.
Here’s the draft of a letter received from Draft2Digital by one of the KBoards authors:
“We have discovered that over the weekend Kobo removed all books published through our account. While we have received no official word concerning this issue, we believe this is related to recent articles in the media concerning erotica titles available at WHSmith and Kobo’s storefronts.
However, Kobo’s response to this situation seems to have been removal of all books for any publishers (including distributors) that have offending titles until they find a solution.
I deeply regret that authors who have released books that are not erotica have been affected by this situation as well.
We are working aggressively to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we will keep you updated as we learn more information.”
Other authors are reporting that titles uploaded directly to Kobo have been removed.
As with any breaking story, I encourage people to do some basic fact checking before jumping to conclusions. For example, there is a Facebook page reporting that various fantasy authors have been removed and blocked from Kobo. When I search for those authors’ books, I found at least some of them. One of the authors whose entire profile was reported “removed” still books had on sale.
Obviously the WHSmith story has repercussions, and I suspect we’ll be seeing more of them throughout the coming weeks, but there’s a lot of information flying, and some of it will be misinformation.
By the way, one of the rumors flying around is that Amazon is removing books in the targeted categories from Kindles. I highly doubt that to be the case, but if any readers have information one way or the other, I’d appreciate you sharing it.
This may be affecting all Smashwords books on Kobo, also. My own titles (YA sci-fi) appear to be ‘not available’ at the moment.
@Steph B, that’s disappointing. It had looked like Smashwords books might not be affected. Keep us posted? And if you get anything official, if you don’t mind, please share here.
Some authors on KDP are being asked to resubmit their books with a different cover or title. It seems to be mainly erotica authors but I am not sure how many and what category of erotica.
I have four books in print, three on Kindle and wanted to get started on Kobo. My book Goalden Girl is a harmless book for 9-12 year olds about a girls’ football team. I used D2D because I found the Writing Life platform too complicated and D2D took the work out of the conversion. My title was available for only a few days and now it’s gone.
I’ve told Kobo to jog on. Won’t be using them again.
As it stands now, Amazon does a spelling check of my self-published book (implying every word of the book is scanned, compared it to a dictionary, etc.) every time a change is made. The technical solution may simply be to add an algorithm identifying adult language. One use of a objectionable word wouldn’t cause a book to be rejected, but quite a few adjectives are rarely seen outside of steamy novels.
I’d also love to know how many Big 5 (Big 4?) books were taken down along the way. Harlequin books remains pretty steamy, and I hear that 50 Shades of Gray book makes sailors blush. Why is this *much larger* group of literature ignored for a small subset of books less connected to big bucks?
It seems the issue isn’t really about the content of certain books, but rather that WHSmith’s website (UK) couldn’t filter adult titles from others, so searches for children’s books also showed ‘adult’ books with similar titles. WHSmith decided to shut down their website, leading their partner Kobo to suspend all self-published books from their UK store. Smashwords ebooks do have ‘adult’ markers where appropriate (I don’t know about Draft2Digital), so I’m guessing the fault lies with Kobo/WHSmith’s systems. I’ve heard nothing from Smashwords as yet, but I know there’s a fair few of us Smashwords authors who have had books taken down.