Over the past week or so, Paypal started enforcing (and modifying) certain policies. These policies have to do with "adult content". To make the story short, they will not allow their service to be used for the purposes of selling certain types of it. It has nothing to do with censorship, and everything to do with business, as their business dealings with banking institutions and credit card companies have forced them to do so for financial reasons. For more info, read this blog article from DA.
All of this has brought forth the fact that several ebookstores/epublishers had to get rid of certain type of content. The content involves scenarios like rape, incest, barely-legal, bestiality, and what not. This content in many cases (not to say all) was uploaded by self-published writers (I can't use the word "author" in this context, sorry). What irked and surprised me was that that content apparently was uploaded to categories belonging to "romance" and even young adult. Frankly, I could barely believe that any ebookstore or romance epublisher would allow for such a thing. However, it was prevalent from all the comments left in the blogs discussing this. I think that blogger Karen Scott says it best (and bluntly enough) in her commentary article in her own blog. I posted a rather long winded comment to her article. I couldn't agree more with her.
I believe this sort of "adult" stories have a market, however, that market most definitely has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with romance and much less, young adult. These are several definitions of romance, as it pertains to romance as a literary genre:
Romance Writers of America: http://www.rwa.org/cs/the_romance_genre
For Wikipedia lovers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_novel
Definition I am including because I liked it: http://www.findmeanauthor.com/romantic_fiction_genre.htm
Taboo scenarios are not part of "romance". They can be classified as fetish, porn, smut, etc. but not in a million years would any bona fide romance reader touch one of those with a ten foot pole... at least not with the mindset of "let me find a warm fuzzy romantic incest story". They are a "niche", but not within the romance genre. Furthermore, those stories uploaded as part of the romance or YA categories, are nothing more than smut, and not the well written kind at that. They are on the short side of the spectrum (not that there is anything wrong with that) but they lack the basic elements of a properly written short story (little things such as character development, plot, etc.). They are written with the sole purpose of titillation/arousal, hence, graphic sex and nothing else.
It does boggle my mind that sites like All Romance Ebooks (ARE), which is purportedly an ebookseller of ROMANCE, actually had the site plagued with stories involving the sort of scenario I mention above. Honestly, I did think that they would keep a close look at what was being uploaded to their site. Sadly, I do think that if it hadn't been for the Paypal brouhaha, they would have not done a thing about it (or caught up on that unless they had started receiving a lot of complaints, me thinks), and that's a pity.
On a slightly different note, as I was reading comments, I was amazed to see that some people continue to mix up erotica with erotic romance and powrn, pretty much using the terms interchangeably. "Oh there is no way to define the difference, yadda yadda" Authors like Shiloh Walker continue going in circles trying to explain the difference, to no avail (thanks for continuing to try Shiloh). Oh well...
Mireya
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