Amazon Pulls Werewolf Novel Sequel for having too many hyphenated words. Something to do with a semblance of quality control: There are links to the author's blog in the article.
When I looked on Amazon the book was still listed, although I didn't click on the buy button. Also, it looks like this was published by a small press, so why would Amazon contact the author instead of the publisher? And whether trade or self-published, why would Amazon think they have a right to remove a book based on editing choices? Other than the fact that Amazon thinks they can do whatever, whenever, why-ever.
I don't think it was exactly Amazon being an editing bully. Rather, I think it was Amazon developing an algorithm based on some key indicators to flag nonsensical texts. It makes sense that nut-jobs and other jokers would have 'free published' all sorts of not-really-any-semblance-of-a-book stuff. That kind of clutter clogs the system. Has anyone seen any purely nonsensical stuff on any of the e-platforms?
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation. (warning, some f-bombs on the blog) He claims Amazon claims the check was based on a consumer complaint: Competitor? Reader without a life? I hate reply-bots. As for the book still being for sale, apparently sanity prevailed: Hmmmm, marketing ploy? Just kidding.
Reminds me of The Insurrectionist. (Context for those unfamiliar with the story: the author is a teacher. A school shooting takes place in the novel. The author was suspended from his teaching job and given a mental health examination, largely for reasons unrelated to the novel, but when the public put two and two together, it became a sensationalist story of the death of free speech. A bunch of people started buying the novel to support the author and even rated it 5 stars on Amazon. And it is not even written well. When I read the news, the thought crossed my mind that he would be a genius if that was an elaborate marketing ploy.)
I just read Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and thought I would do a quick count of hyphens. It's not a long book at there must be a couple hundred. The book is 1999 Booker winner and the author won a Nobel. I would suggest hyphen count may not be the most accurate system for evaluating copy.
This happens a lot using Adobe InDesign software to create your original books. Many people, as well as publishers (Myself included) create the original format in InDesign. Because you can then (In theory) create formats for all other platforms. Many people create the paperback format first. (6"X9") All's good. But then when you convert to .ePub or .mobi it goes wonky. The second step a lot of people don't do, is import into a .ePub editor and take out all the hypens that are automatically inserted by InDesign when the page size changes. Chances are, this is the problem he is having. If he has a publisher, the publisher should have done it. If he is self-pubbed, he should have used the (Amazon) previewer and caught the mistakes prior to publishing. I have to go through my books page by page, Previewer open one side of my screen, .ePub editor on the other, and manually fix them. There are a lot of them. (one or two a page) I consider it "final editing." But if you have 300 page book, I can see where it would twist Amazon's computer panties. I don't know of course if this is what happened to the author you're speaking of, but it is a problem I face with every book.
