Trust me, I’m brave when I’m all alone! My latest smut story, Idle Hands, just got bailed out of the Amazon dungeon. You can imagine my surprise when my story immediately got thrown into the dungeon.

Normally, it takes a couple of days for a story to get ranked as “Adult” rather than “Safe.” While you’d think that erotica should be rated as Adult, that’s not the case. Adult means that the story does not show up in any Amazon searches and virtually disappears from the store shelves.

If you want to sell anything, it needs to be ranked as “Safe” otherwise the buyer needs a direct link to the story. I published on Saturday morning, and within a couple of hours, I checked, and it had gotten bounced into the Amazon dungeon.

Writing a pleading and begging letter, I got a response back that the story contained mature material. WTF does that mean and Amazon is known for not being forthcoming on why they rank a story as Adult.

I made a decision that I wasn’t going to roll over and wrote them another letter. Thinking that it was the cover from the almost instantaneous Adult rating, I sent examples of other covers with similar images that are for sale on Amazon.

Plus, I asked for some guidance on why it was ranked Adult. To my surprise, Amazon responded with the fact that they objected to the Title. At least I now had a clue to work with.

Parsing the words in the title, I came up with a list of possible words and ended up with four phrases that might be objectionable. Checking the words against Amazon titles, all the words were in tons of stories.

Looking at the list, I picked the phrase that would be the most objectionable and deleted “Glory Hole” from the Title and resubmitted. Luckily I picked the correct phrase, or the Amazon censors looked at all the evidence I had presented and ranked the story as Safe.

The lesson I took away from this is not to give up when your story is pitched into Amazon’s dungeon. Which is the one thing I tell others is to never give up if you believe in yourself. As my Dad always says, “Faint heart never sold a vacuum cleaner!”

Idle Hands is a story about two neighbors who are lonely, horny, and bored. They decide to try out the local glory hole and see what gets poked through the wall. That was so much fun, the quickly graduate to swinger’s parties.

For more on the story, click this link.