The Prop Master: Cindy Stripped Bare

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Riverbeast: The Saloon

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Amazon Censorship At Work: What Fun It is!

There's more to this cover than meets the eye!
When it was first released, my new book Prop Master: Cindy's Student was declared "adult" by Amazon. This meant the book would not show up on general searches, which meant it wouldn't sell nearly as well as it might sell otherwise. This sounds like a minor thing and on the larger scale of things it probably is, but it's been a major thorn in my side. Being "adult-dungeoned" as erotica authors called it pretty much tanked the sales of the book.

That's because when a book is newly released it gets placed higher in the ranks of Amazon's search terms for a short time, boosting its potential sales. Being adult-dungeoned destroys that sales potential So sales of "The Prop Master: Cindy's Student" have tanked hard, whereas they should be leading the charge and picking up sales of my other books.

I looked at the book hard to figure out why it had been so designated. I finally decided it was probably the cover, made a few very small changes to it, and resubmitted it with a request that they reconsider the adult designation. After about a day I got a nice letter back saying they had decided to remove the adult designation from the book. A day later, it was out of the adult dugneon. So now it's generally available in searches.

Now what did I do that was so horrible to get me adult-dungeoned? And what did I have to do to get out of it? Let me show you:

Left: the relevant portion of the original art that got me adult-dungeoned. Right: the corrected art that got me out. Not a word of the book's content was changed.
All I had to do was draw a pair of bikini bottoms on the woman. I guess Amazon's censor didn't think the thick ribbon of fabric running from her collar to the back of her belt did an adequate job of covering up her womanly parts, except of course they DID, no such parts were visible. All I can figure is that the censor thought there was too much vagina-proximate flesh showing on the left side of Cindy on the cover?

Now here's where I'm going to be amazing by being entirely too reasonable for a man who hates censorship as much as I do. I understand Amazon's concern re: covers and blurbs. Their problem is that they don't want to be accused of peddling smut, and they have a whole lot of erotica writers whose covers would look like THIS if Amazon allowed it:


Ok, and I might be one of the writers who might use such covers. Cover art courtesy of the fine folks at Sex and Submission. The type was my idea!
I may be exaggerating for effect a WEE BIT here, but I don't really think I'm exaggerating much if any. Erotica readers and writers are not an inhibited bunch, and as far as I am concerned, ought to be able to enjoy such covers in the privacy of their own Kindles, but of COURSE the bluenoses would be all over that stuff in a flash if Amazon covers like the one above were allowed. So there have to be rules and standards for what shows on covers and what does not.

And that's how you get into the absurdity of drawing bikinis on images of women whose naughty bits are safely covered by a vertical strip of fabric. Censorship breeds absurdity, always.

Adding to the absurdity of the situation is this tasty bit of absurdity: erotica authors, not just me, have learned from repeated painful experiences that the Amazon censors who work on the weekend are a LOT more censorious than the ones who work on the weekdays. I have had two books censored, one blocked and one adult-dungeoned, since I started making a serious push to publish on Amazon, both of them were submitted on a Friday and got picked up by the weekend censors. So I submit books to Amazon on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays now, no later. Stupid, but there it is.

But the key thing, the important thing is, Amazon does not make a lot of effort to censor the actual content of a book. They concern themselves primarily with the covers and blurbs, the things that will show up when people (specifically, bluenoses) do a search. I think this is a reasonable compromise. Censor the incidentals, not the main event. So I guess I will put up with it. Not that I have a choice. Amazon commands a huge portion of the book buying marketplace.

Now, as to the story in the book itself, the main event, as it were, uncensored in all its semi-pristeen glory:

In The Prop Master: Cindy's Student, Cindy asks Jack to help B-grade movie start Julia Strange learn the ropes, the chains and the gags, so she can cope with the submissive feelings that being tied up in her various movie roles arouse in her. Of course he obliges … anything for art! But how will it affect their relationship? Meanwhile, a group of old-line prudes and feminists are trying to throw legal and technical monkey wrenches into DID's new series. Can the Prop Master keep the gremlins at bay and keep two insatiable women very, very happy as they writhe in the intense bondage pleasures wrought by Jack's naughty, knotty skills? Only one way to find out!

This book is a little over 12,000 words long and is part of the morality laws/basic income world.

The Prop Master Soars Into The Desert Air

Cover of The Propmaster. Cindy should be braless and Jack should be pantsless here, but Amazon is having NONE of that! Click on the pic to go to the Amazon links for the book.
First of all, I want to start by saying that I wrote a huge, all-in, bang-up, balls to the walls and tits to the floor sexual bondage scene between the protagonists of my new book The Prop Master. (You can find a link to Amazon for your country here). My goal was to write a sexual bondage scene so compelling that anyone reading the book who was vanilla would finish it, throw the book to the floor and yell, "I have GOT to try that!"

Not that I care if anyone gets "converted" from vanilla to kinky by the scene, I just wanted to write a scene that shows how very, very good maledom/femsub sexual bondage between two lovers can be. I don't know if I nailed it -- that'll be for my readers to say -- but by damn I sure tried. Now, as to the story:

Jack Davis and his girlfriend and love slave Cindy Sturges are an up-and-coming couple in the movie industry a few decades from now. Jack is a prop master for movies, a job that sometimes entails tying people up for scenes. Cindy is a stunt woman/actress who's trying to move into acting full time. Jack's bondage and dominance sexuality with Cindy pays off on the job because it has made him a strong advocate for safety in bondage scenes, even if that means objecting strongly enough to stop production at times, and also because Jack knows how to use bondage to ramp up the drama and sexiness of any bondage or damsel in distress scene to whatever degree the director desires.

This makes Jack appealing to both smart, ambitious actresses who want their scenes to work well, and insurers who want to minimize costs associated with injuries on the set and the resulting lawsuits.

Cindy is in demand because she has an instinct for getting the most out of any scene involving bondage or a power exchange, most especially scenes involving male dominance and female submission, because in their private life, Jack and Cindy play out these scenes in the bedroom and enjoy them immensely, within the context of their thoroughly egalitarian relationship outside the bedroom.

Jack and Cindy's skills lead them to sign with Desert Industry Dreams Incorporated,(DiD Inc.), a well-financed movie production company that plans to create movies that, when properly cut, can easily earn an R or even a PG rating and be shown in theaters and on cable television, a dying market in the future, but whose full versions will entertain viewers on the adult websites who are major backers of the company.

Can Jack and Cindy's relationship survive the attempts of hot female movie stars who, almost by reflex, attempt to seduce Jack, and the attempts of some men to use Cindy's sexual submissiveness to make her their sex slave? Will the dark forces that oppose DiD Inc. succeed in shutting down production? There's an easy way to find out .. read the book!


Scene inexplicably not used for the cover of The Prop Master.

Riverbeast Games Is Now Available On Amazon

Riverbeast Book 4, now available on Amazon at this link.

Riverbeast Games is now available on Amazon. Constance Harlee, princess of the river town of Euharlee, Missouri, has been reduced to a human pet, lower than a slave, by keelboat captain Bart Fink, who had a grudge against her father. As they travel down the mighty Mississippi, the riverboatmen find all sorts of fun, sexy games to play with their pet. She learns her role in the games, and how to play them well. She intends to seduce the men, to fool them, to trick them into making them treat her better. She poses prettily as she begs for table scraps, she But she will slowly learn, to her chagrin, that sometimes you play the game, and sometimes, the game plays you.

There are a lot of nice bits in Riverbeast Games: Constance has her face secured to the cock of a riverboatman named Big Jack Folsom by means of straps attached to her head harness and his belt, and then Belle the whore joins in on the action and suddenly Constance is the bound third party in a three-way between Jack and Belle, literally unable to keep her face out of their crotches. There's also a scene where the riverboatmen and the whores conspire to bring a helplessly bound Constance to the point of orgasm, and then denying. Finally there's a scene that's a bit of a nod to steampunk in which Belle brings out a brass device, a steampunk style "spreader" that Constance finds herself wearing, helplessly displayed to the men as Belle manipulates her body.

Along the way, a bound and naked Constance experiences the river in a way she never has before, not as background scenery while she plays her social games on a riverboat, but as a dangerous and unpredictable place where the only thing between disaster and safe arrival is the skill of the riverboat pilots.

I say, buy it and read it, dammit!

Riverbeast: Beneath Slavery Now Available Free

You can obtain Riverbeast Book 3 in mobi form for free or read it in HTML format by clicking on the pic above.

Riverbeast: Awakening is now available for free to anyone who wants to buy it. Amazon has "blocked" the book, their term for banning. I could in theory make changes and ask them to reconsider publishing it, but what I have learned from other Amazon erotica authors is that this would be a bad mistake. You might say, "This book is not at all different from the other three books in the series that you've already approved for publication" and the likely result would be that Amazon would ban all your other books. For example, one Amazon author in a situation similar to mine got a book banned. In an effort to be cooperative, she changed the book, as well as all the OTHER books in the series, and resubmitted them all (even though all of them but the one had already been approved. Result is ... you guess it ... all the books got banned.

In any event, the letter that Amazon sent me was incredibly vague and useless and told me nothing about why my book got banned. On re-reading the story it has content that could be interpreted as scat, having to do with the difficulties of wearing a buttplug tail that you can't remove yourself. I wrote what was intended to be a raunchy humor piece about one of the whores on the boat removing Contance's tail so she could relieve herself. Neither Constance nor the whore responded sexually to the result of the buttplug being removed, because it's not my kink and I don't care to explore it (it's not so much that is squicks me, but that human waste products are just gross to me, no sexual interest whatsoever and a certain amount of "ugh" there) but I can see how someone who enjoys scat might enjoy that scene.

The general conclusions of Amazon erotica authors is that if a book is banned the safest and smartest move is to forget about publishing it on Amazon, just move on to another book and publish it elsewhere, perhaps for free as a promotional piece. And I am publishing it for free, mostly so that readers of the series won't have a missing chapter. I'm not going to use it as a promotional piece too much, because the scat content is atypical of my stories. However, the "scat-related" scene is hardly the only scene in the story, and there's some pretty good (IMHO) writing to be found contrasting Constance's predicament with her life as a Boston socialite. So read it if you're curious. And enjoy!

Riverbeast: Awakening Is Up And Running

Here, the Riverbeast gets a ride ... but mostly, she IS a ride!
Riverbeast: Awakening, the second in the "Riverbeast" series is now available on Amazon.

If you want to know the general background of the story, read the promo for "Riverbeast: Fink's Revenge" below.

"Awakening" deals with Constance's further reduction to riverbeasthood by Fink and his men and the whores Kind and Belle. Having a buttplug tail in her rear end makes life a lot harder for Constance, especially about an hour after mealtimes, and ESPECIALLY because she must beg the ruffians to remove it for her, her wrists being tied to her ankles. There's also a cleverly developed o-ring gag with a built-in plug to keep her mouth nice and available for whatever hi-jinks they have in mind for her mouth. She'll also get a well-deserved whipping after finding herself face to fanny with one of the whores on board the raft.

As the rivermen use her, making a game of it as they gamble to see who uses her next, Constance discovers long-repressed feelings surging forth, feelings of a distinctly sexual nature. Will the refined young woman of Boston society be transformed into a cock-guzzling, shameless bondage slut so low that she makes whores blush? Can Constance somehow maintain some semblance of self respect while tied up naked with a butt plug in her ass and a rowdy riverman's cock in her mouth? We'll never tell ... or rather, we will only tell in the pages of ... The Riverbeast!

Mizore tied