I’ve been up most of the night crying: Amazon yesterday blocked ELEVEN of my books.

No warning given, and no explanation provided. Just the usual “in violation of content guidelines” and those guidelines are literally “pretty much what you’d expect.”

I’ve had a book or two blocked before, but never like this. It’s not the actual fact of blocking my works, or Amazon choosing what kind of stuff they want on their platform; it’s the cruel, cruelly random nature of the way they do it.

All my books were approved and published, and all of them were already selling. Apple is very strict about content; but they block it BEFORE they publish it.

There was no warning. There are no guidelines about what is unacceptable. (Obviously there is a LOT of stuff available on Amazon that is far, far more offensive than my stuff. And why did some of my books remain? It seems to have been a crack down on the term “dark erotica.”)

There is no appeal process (although you can contact them to talk about it, though it rarely helps.) I might be able to re-publish some of them, but they’ll have lost their rankings, which were doing very well.

Just, suddenly, 70 percent of my income has disappeared. Poof.

I’ve re-activated a few things. Here’s the sad remains of my Amazon author page.

Some of my friends envy the money I make from my writing; I would point out this as an example of how heartbreaking it can be.