The latest bad news in the fight against moral prudery has reared its ugly head in the erotica writing community.

Here’s a short timeline of what happened:

1. Smaller independent ebook vendors like Bookstrand and All Romance eBooks allow self-published authors to sell their books in their online stores.

2. Ebook sales explode. Opportunists with varying degrees of writing skill churn out pseudo-ince$t and b@rely legal erotica, and they upload it to these sites.

3. The bestseller lists of places like Bookstrand and ARe fill up with kinky titles and badly PhotoShopped Man-Titty and well, All Types of Titty covers.

4. Customers complain. Word somehow gets out to PayPal.

5. PayPal does a keyword search, records titles it finds “obscene” according to eBay policies (because eBay owns PayPal), and threatens to freeze Bookstrand’s entire PayPal account.

6. Bookstrand removes its self-published authors page, changes its Terms of Service page for authors, and threatens to remove authors altogether if they don’t comply with the takedown requests.

7. Authors are seriously pissed off. Bookstrand starts removing titles spontaneously before the window for authors to do so is up.

8. Even though erotica is not legally pr0n, Selina Kitt points out that PayPal considers anything BDSM to be rape. She learns this when her own ebook store, eXcessica, receives similar takedown demands.

9. ARe receives the same threat from PayPal and emails its authors, but warns them in a more friendly manner.

10. Bookstrand orders its authors to re-categorize their erotic as either romantic erotica or just erotica. Suspicions abound as to whether this is simply a tactic to weed out the stories without romance in them so as to ban them entirely in the future.

Which brings us to the present, when many independent authors, both the good and the bad, are abandoning Bookstrand in droves, they and other authors are pulling their titles from ARe, and eXcessica is in limbo as Ms. Kitt tries to find another payment processor.

The Problem with PayPal

No matter how lousy PayPal’s customer service is, no matter how many accounts they freeze and bridges they burn, there’s no avoiding the fact that it’s basically the only affordable game in town for small businesses. Other merchant card services charge hefty fees and take large percentages on top of those from each transaction.

Joe Konrath suggested forming an online store in the comments to one of Selina’s posts, seemingly ignoring the main point that Kitt makes: she already has her own store, partly because of pr0n police incidents like these on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It won’t do her or anyone else ANY GOOD unless they can process payments. Customers don’t want to write checks for ebooks. That kind of misses the whole point of instant gratification.

In order to run an online store, you have to be able to process payments from credit cards.

While I will credit Konrath with simply trying to be helpful, not only is this idea useless to Kitt, it belies the very reasoning that Konrath uses to justify agents as e-distributors: Time Is Money. The reason I started a publishing cooperative with a couple of other people is because we don’t have time to do all of the work ourselves and have to contract some of it out. If I didn’t want to write, I would gladly become a small press and pay royalties and blah blah blah…well, no I wouldn’t, because my privacy measures would be shot, but  would definitely find a way to work in that capacity somehow. However, I want to write books.

It All Goes Back to the Credit Card Companies

I can already hear the next suggestion coming: someone else will form their own payment processing company with no qualms about adult entertainment! Hurray! The free market wins again! …Except there already are other payment processors out there who work for the adult entertainment industry, and their service fees are prohibitively exorbitant:

So I started to search for alternatives to Paypal. Not an easy task, I might add. Like Amazon, they are a veritable monopoly in their field. At least they graciously (ha) gave us thirty days to comply, after which the account would be frozen or cancelled. So I had some time. What I discovered was that most merchant-services (i.e. companies that allow you to use Visa and MasterCard on their site) which allow adult products charge a $5000 up-front fee to use their service. Then, they take exorbitant percentages from each transaction. Some 5%, some 14%, some as high as 25%.

Now it was starting to make more sense. The credit card companies charge higher fees for these “high-risk” accounts because there is a higher rate of what they call “chargebacks.” You know that protection on your credit card, where if you dispute the charge, you don’t have to pay for it? Well they’ve determined that happens more with porn and gambling and other “high-risk” sites than others, so they’re justified in charging more money to process payment for those sites.

The problem with this thinking is literature is not pr0n. Pr0n, as I am calling it on this site to avoiding Google spam, is sexually titillating material in visual form, i.e. pictures and/or video. We haven’t had an obscenity in literature case hit the Supreme Court since 1973 because that ruling basically said erotic literature is not pr0n. Despite what Mary Beth Buchanan thinks or how personally revolting any given person may find paedo-bear or Rape and Dismember The Kids! fiction, that 1973 ruling in favor of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer has drawn a clear line between visual and written adult entertainment. Doing horrible things to people fictionally is not the same as doing those things to real people, nor is there any decisive link between reading those types of stories and acting on them in meatspace (IRL).

Unlike actual pr0n-producing film or picture production companies, your average low-budget e-publisher does not start out with and may never have enough money to justify shelling out 5 grand a month just to receive payments, let alone the profit margins to justify cutting a 25 percent slice out of every sale.

The risk of chargebacks and fraud is probably far less on erotica than it is on other forms of adult entertainment, but apparently no one has explained that to Visa and MasterCard.

No Good Solutions

Even if erotica authors were to band together and somehow form their own payment processor AND convince the cc companies they aren’t a high-risk pool (this is presumably an insurance problem), that’s one service provider, one group that can dictate the terms it wants and is subject to the whims of the cc companies, who can decide at any point that catering to erotica is a waste of time and raise their rates.

Moreover, the categories of excluded content now permitted at currently operated vendors are so broad as to include almost anything remotely sexual beyond the missionary position could potentially be reported if someone is offended.

I agree that the allegations of unconstitutionality are stupid and wrong, but that doesn’t mean that it’s ethical for a small group of service providers to price erotica out of business.

Regardless of how infrequently I update (this past month has been finalizing my business structure and ensuring the privacy controls are in place), I am still alive, and I do still care. I oppose these bills as vigorously as I did the last time I blogged about them, and I encourage anyone who stumbles across this blog tomorrow and who cares about the freedom, innovation, and openness of the Internet that make creativity possible to write or call your representatives and tell them to kill these bills.

I remember 2005 to 2007 as The Lost Years. On paper, I was extremely busy. I worked as a freelance copywriter and as a copy editor for an online magazine. I interned for Broadway directors. I landed principal roles in voice acting and auditioned for film roles, nearly winning a part in a video contest for a major film studio. I studied affiliate marketing religiously once I quit my copyediting job. I wrote short stories and poems and submitted them to dozens of magazines and writing contests each. During this time, I also designed my own clothing and improved my sewing skills through costuming, even applying to be on Project Runway (dumb idea). Oh, and I was also selling stuff regularly on eBay.

In reality, I was slowly falling into a pattern of frustration and despair in each field as I realized that the only vocations that I would be content with pursuing to the exclusion of all others were the ones in which I was unable to make a decent living (acting and fiction writing).

I was determined to build an SEO Empire to give myself several streams of income while I pursued my real dreams of acting and writing. Sure, it was ambitious, but I never do anything by half measures. What’s more, I’m fairly certain that if I had acquired some startup money and had dropped my sense of ethics, I could have learned enough coding to take advantage of the SEO boom of 2006. That didn’t happen, and I eventually gave up on gray hat stuff back in 2008 when Google changed a lot of its algorithms. The traditional writing path might or might not have worked out if the depression from being rejected hadn’t discouraged me enough to stop querying short stories. I wasn’t about to stop writing, but the constant flow of rejection letters, even the personalized ones, were extremely disheartening.

Unfortunately, with the traditional publishing system the way it was back then, new writers were taught that the only way to have their books published was to find an agent, and agents told us they only considered authors with previous publishing experience, meaning stories published in magazines and anthologies.

Meanwhile, I was writing copy and other non-fiction articles, sometimes venturing into journalism, and I HATED it. It was either boring or nerve-wracking, the hours were unsuitable to my health problems, or at least the steady work with the magazine was, and I was going to give myself a coronary if I had to write one more stupid 500-word advertisement for the Tickle-Me Elmo of the Year, especially since I was doing the work for someone else’s websites.

The voice acting was unlikely to earn me enough money unless I moved to Hollywood, because the networks hiring for good voice-overs for fiction wanted actors to actually record on site. I didn’t have the money to move. My sewing improved every year, but the logistics of managing my own production company were way too complex for my liking, and the alternative was to do the work myself, meaning even less time to actually design.

The only real alternative to freelance writing I had at the time was the eBay business. I was always good at mimicking what other successful sellers did; the issue was inventory. In order to rank in the search results for certain categories, I had to have a large enough stock of items for sale, and that meant buying and storing large amounts of merchandise without a guarantee of selling any of it. My personal collections notwithstanding, unless I owned a small bookstore or the equivalent, I was never going to be able to compete in any of the book categories, and selling on consignment presented its own problems. If you don’t believe me, look up the My eBay stores of that era and see how many are still in operation today.

Back to writing. As an experiment, I wrote up a query for a novel I had plotted but hadn’t written yet and submitted it to a query workshop. The people who responded with critiques were well-meaning but incredibly ignorant as to the conventions of the genre of the book. I wasn’t about to change my title because people couldn’t read and mistook one word for another when they were spelled similarly; if an agent was that stupid, she wasn’t going to be the right person to represent my book, anyway.

While I learned several tips for simplifying my pitch, the entire process felt like a complete waste of time to me. The amount of rewriting for that query lone could have produced a short story. Who was the moron who invented this ridiculous convention of spending so much time on a pointless method of pitching to someone who couldn’t even buy my book, and how could I find him and throttle him?

I think that experience was in 2008, and it was the first time I had an inkling that things weren’t… as they should have been.

Simultaneously, I was observing all of the changes on the Internet and the rise of social networking and social media.

Then I went back to school, miracle of miracles, so the little spare time I had was devoted to keeping up with blogs that covered the publishing industry. Then I found the early adopters, and through them, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and when I read Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing, the rest was history.

Those years were The Lost Years because I had trouble finding the one true path for me, not because I wasted my time in honing my skills, although it took me up until recently to understand that. Some people need more time than others to find their vocation. It might have been a different story, however, if I had spent the interim between then and now querying agents. That would have been an American tragedy.

I was going to write this comment in a comment on the post in response to the flyby comment by K.W. Jeter about how everyone opposing SOPA is paranoid but it’s too long, so I’ll just put it here.

@ K. W. Jeter: It’s more than a little naive to assume that proponents of a bill are going to explain the legalese in a way that highlights the various legal maneuvers available for exploitation by government entities. When a publisher presents a contract with a non-compete clause in it, you question its inclusion, and they reply that the phrase is not meant to be read like that and why, they would never dream of killing your career in that way, is it wise to “trust them?”

The bottom line is that SOPA eliminates the Safe Harbor provisions currently in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

This is not about the intent of the legislators, although I or anyone else could present several recent instances when it would be reasonable to question whether our representatives and other around the world were really acting in good faith as opposed to bowing to corporations when they promoted such gems as COICA, the Orphan Works Bill, ACTA, the Patriot Act, CAPPS II, the Digital Economy Act, the HADOPI Law, etc. ad nauseam. This is about the actual legal limits that the government *could* exercise at the behest of industry groups or because of an administration’s ideological agenda.

Congresspeople are notorious for supporting bills encouraged by lobbyists for the industries that bankroll them. I prefer to review analysis from outside group with reliable track records like the ones EFF and EPIC have, or at least to consider news coverage from longstanding media outlets who, while often guilty of sensationalism, do have eyes for detail and attempt to follow a journalistic code of ethics.

The fact is that congressional memos can contain as many lies and dissembling as the people writing them want them to have.

Apparently, many journalists and bloggers have the same concerns as Lyn above (although the comment seems a bit of the drive-by sort), as well as a few semi-competent business like, oh, Google, which is considering ditching its membership in the Chamber of Commerce, it feels so strongly about this, Yahoo, which has already ditched its CoC membership over PROTECT IP, Facebook, AOL, Twitter, the Electronic Information Privacy Center…

The fact that Facebook and Google are agreeing about anything is news enough and indicative of  how seriously they take PROTECT IP and SOPA as serious threats to their livelihoods. Isn’t it funny how the Chamber of Commerce is only on one’s side when one is the Luddite or the arch-conservative?

Here’s a relevant quote from EFF:

Of course the word “blacklist” does not appear in the bill’s text—the folks who wrote it know Americans don’t approve of blatant censorship. The early versions of PROTECT-IP, the Senate’s counterpart to SOPA, did include an explicit Blacklist Provision, but this transparent attempt at extrajudicial censorship was so offensive that the Senate had to re-write that part of the bill. However, provisions that encourage unofficial blacklisting remained, and they are still alive and well in SOPA.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/stop-online-piracy-act-blacklist-any-other-name-still-blacklist

Ars Technica is spot on and debunks the so-called “myth-debunking fact sheet” that the bill’s supporters have released:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/the-stop-online-piracy-act-big-contents-full-on-assault-against-the-safe-harbor.ars

In conclusion, don’t let overly broad language even have the potential to be harmful if it should someday go into effect. Kill it at the roots, and kill it dead! Or something like that.

I’d suggest that one should be open-eyed about the facts that the categories with which we think and write and read, are not innocent, and that we should do our best not to use them to replicate the worst aspects of the cultural bumf that put them in our heads in the first place. Does that mean being politically correct? If that is deemed to mean being conscious of and careful about the political ramifications of our writing, then surely that’s the only decent way to proceed.

~ China Mieville, on RaceFail ’09

A few days ago, a couple of professionals in my field used really inflammatory and incorrect analogies to point out the willful ignorance in which some of the more intransigent people mired in the traditional publishing industry engage.

Barry Eisler made a guest post on J. A. Konrath’s blog, in which he made passing reference to how traditionally published authors have faith in publishers (and agents? I forget) that is comparable to Stockholm Syndrome or, as Michael Stackpole put it, a “house slave mentality.” The real backlash came after Eisler referred back to Stackpole’s post and The Passive Guy’s post in response to it.

My initial reaction was pretty much what the estimable Tobias Buckell said on Twitter. Courtney Milan responded in a blog post and voiced the problems many of us had with the language employed, not the crux of Eisler’s and Stackpole’s arguments. Milan used a less-than convincing political comparison in what was otherwise both an eloquent and a rational deconstruction of the motives behind the defensiveness and non-apologies for the use of extremely politically and culturally loaded terminology. She bolstered her argument by bringing up the use of the ‘rape or be raped’ monkey and frog cartoon upon which Korath and Eisler’s book about publishing is based.

Imperfect though her attempt to evoke a similar sense of hurt in Eisler was, the logic and ethics of her argument were spot-on.

Konrath and Eisler responded in a fashion that was both an utterly predictable and textbook case of derailing.

In short…

MILAN: The reason that people are upset is because you used a racially and historically loaded term to talk about business practices. This was unnecessary and will probably turn off many of the authors you are trying to reach. If you wanted to be inflammatory, all you had to do was use “indentured servants.”

KONRATH: I have the right to be an @$$hole on my blog.

EISLER: Why isn’t anyone arguing about the merits of my hypothesis? All of these haters have their heads stuck in the sand and don’t want to face reality, so they’re focusing on this language issue to avoid having to argue with my premise that traditionally published authors are like indentured servants.

MILAN and OTHERS: Actually, many of us think your premise makes sense. We’re saying you’re alienating people and distracting from your own message.

I thought the controversy had died down. Then I opened up my RSS reader today to find out that not only is Stackpole digging in deeper on this misguided slavery analogy, but he has at least two prominent defenders who I just added to my follow list because of their otherwise useful advice about publishing.

Being well-versed in exactly how painful the reaction and response to these heated diatribes go from my own experiences in studying social justice issues online and offline, and having lots and lots of work to finish before the holidays, I decided it wasn’t worth my time to appeal to the better side of human nature in random readers or to argue with privileged white men who write for a living about why words have power. What a silly concept, right?

After all, I expected to encounter a lot more conservative and libertarian views when I started reading about the business side of publishing. To presume other bloggers and business people would come from the same educational approach as I am accustomed to in the parts of online genre fandom would be the height of naivete.

For my part, I sympathize with some libertarian views on privacy and other Bill of Rights issues, and I oppose legislation that makes it harder to maintain privacy while running a business, even if it means there’s a chance some zealot will open a bank account somewhere. Modern society in general, and piracy and DRM in particular, should teach us that the harder we try to restrict choices, the more loopholes people will find and jump through. Security theater is a waste of taxpayer money.

What I cannot and will not agree to is the idea that the blogosphere is some kind of locker room bubble, in which people with great influence and followers can perpetuate the language of bigotry and other cultural biases and not expect their words to have some subtle impact on our world just like every other instance of those problems has had. Comparing self-publishers to Negro League Baseball Players is seriously Not Cool.

[ETA: This next paragraph originally misrepresented David Gaughan's post, as well as incorrectly linking STackpole and Jeter's opinions to his, so I have altered it and split it into two paragraphs to make the context clearer. Mea culpa, Mr. Gaughran.]

When David Gaughran went online and excused away Eisler and Konrath’s casual use of offensive analogies linked to Eisler’s post, saying “A lot of people got hot and bothered and seemed to miss the fact that [Stackpole] was referring to Roman times,” I was concerned that again, in my opinion, people were assuming that the criticism of the language used was merely a cover for an inability to rebut Eisler’s and Stackpole’s arguments, which is patently untrue.

Gaughran also provided links to two more blog posts. These made my head hurt: Michael Stackpole digging in on his house slave analogy with a  tl;dr post explaining how it’s all about economics and we should all completely ignore the social subtext, and followed that link with a link to When I saw K. W. Jeter defending Stackpole’s post (Oh, K. W. Jeter, no!), I had had enough.

Guys? I USUALLY AGREE WITH YOU. I AM A SELF-PUBLISHER. YOU’RE STILL WRONG.

I recommended your blogs to authors offline because I think you’re basically right about self-publishing and teaching writers to respect themselves as professionals and to approach writing with their best interests in the forefront every day.

But when someone as circumspect as Courtney Milan is calling you out for being unreasonably lazy in your uses of bad analogies, you can bet there are at least a thousand more who are just as angry as she is.

The reaction you saw had little to do with your arguments. It was about the poor choice of words you used to express them.

I don’t believe in the reclamation of words. Hatred and violence have made that task near impossible. It seems pointless to have women use the word “b*tch” against each other and for black people to use the word “n*gger” in casual conversation and try to convince men and white people that they simultaneously cannot say those things.

When I see a swastika, I do not immediately differentiate between the rotated one that hate groups use and the square one that has been an Indo-European symbol of good luck for hundreds of years. The revulsion comes first, the deconstruction second.

Mr. Stackpole, I am well-versed in early Greek and Roman history, and despite knowing what you were trying to do, my reaction was still to think of whites in the “New World” enslaving people of color and using skin color as a means to divide their loyalties and as a deciding factor in who was to be breeding stock.

All of you obviously haven’t considered that some of us don’t want to have to wade through hostile language to read about the publishing industry. If you had, you’d be trying to attract more readers, not continuing to alienate them by defending what could have been simple mistakes.

Perhaps we don’t have the luxury of extra emotional and physical energy needed in order to process information mixed with toxic words and continue our day unaffected. Maybe we’ve learned firsthand why insulting metaphors perpetuate rape culture and lead to piles of abusive comments, death threats, and lost hours spent just trying to type another word.

Words do have power. They do have meaning. They can heal or harm at will, and they unconsciously stay with us and shape how we perceive the world. Mr. Eisler, you can bet people in the Occupy Movement believe know this as well as I do. It does no good to propose social justice and tolerance through legislation if the people supposedly on your side don’t understand what social justice and tolerance actually mean in daily life. You can’t fix the personal bigotry unless you also try to fix the institutional bigotry at the same time, and vice-versa. Words have power. Words matter.

I want to repeat what China Mieville said in whole on the subject of “writing the other” and RaceFail here, not only because what he says about writing fiction can just as easily apply to non-fiction and our lives in general, but also because he highlights the way the term is so often misused as opposed to what it ought to mean.

GoodReads: In January 2009, the blogosphere erupted into a heated discussion about race, racism, and cultural appropriation in science fiction and fantasy (a flame war so vast it is now dubbed RaceFail ’09). Inevitably, a writer must create characters with identities and experiences different from his or her own. If writing within a fantasy world, should the writer maintain politically correct standards established by our real world? How do you address race (in relation to human or nonhuman sets of characters) in your work?

Yes, I heard about RaceFail ’09 some time after the event, and rather regret not having been there while it was going on. The category of Political Correctness is so nebulous that it’s rarely very helpful, particularly because it is often used disgracefully as a stick with which to beat anti-racists or progressives. In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously “meaning” them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn’t mean we’ll always succeed in political perspicacity—which doesn’t mean the same thing as tiptoeing —but we should try. So for example: If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don’t know how that maps onto the question of “political correctness.” However, the point is not that you’re misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that’s how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are “defined” by an abstract supposedly essential element called “race,” whatever else you were doing or intended. And that’s not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men’s strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you’re kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women’s sexuality in our very real world. These things are not reducible to our “intent”—we all inherit all kinds of bits and pieces of cultural bumf, plenty of them racist and sexist and homophobic, because that’s how our world works, so how could you avoid it?

So I’d suggest that one should be open-eyed about the facts that the categories with which we think and write and read, are not innocent, and that we should do our best not to use them to replicate the worst aspects of the cultural bumf that put them in our heads in the first place. Does that mean being politically correct? If that is deemed to mean being conscious of and careful about the political ramifications of our writing, then surely that’s the only decent way to proceed.

All actions are inherently educational. Only a few are entertaining.

You have the right to say what you want. We have the right not to listen.