The Acceleration cover, featuring art done by the amazing Kerry Chin (aka Dragonreine) made it through to the second round of the Rainbow Awards. If you have a chance, hop on over at vote!
Edit: Oh! Inertia and Velocity made it, too! Feel free to vote for those as well!
Filed under Announcements
Good news! Acceleration made it through the first round of voting! YAY to Kerry Chin’s gorgeous artwork. Now Velocity is up! Let’s show Kerry some more love!
http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/2050429.html
Filed under Announcements, Contests, Velocity
Alas, Inertia didn’t make the cut from the November round, but there are still chances to recognize Kerry Chin’s gorgeous work on the Impulse trilogy. For the next two weeks, voting is open for covers released in December, of which Acceleration was one. Drop by and vote for your favorite covers and let’s get Kerry the recognition she deserves!
Filed under Acceleration, Announcements
Because the print version of Inertia was released in November of 2012, it’s in this year’s round of voting for the cover contest instead of last year’s, which is where the book itself was entered. At any rate, voting for the covers released in November is going on now, so let’s give the brilliant Kerry Chin’s artwork some recognition!
Filed under Announcements, Inertia, News for Released Titles
So, There’s one aspect of the GORGEOUS artwork Kerry did for Velocity that you can’t see very well on the ebook cover. The convention for the series until this point has been to feature a character portrait of the POV character and then a “couple” shot. Well, Velocity is told from both Derrick AND Gavin’s POV so the portrait feature became a bit trickier, as there’s only so much room on a book cover before thins begin to look crowded.
So, as you can see in the background here:
there IS a portrait of the two of them, but in order to see it fully, you need to see the back cover of the print edition. For those of you who won’t have the print edition, however, I’m including it here.
If you want to see the portrait of Derrick and Gavin without the text over it, you can check it out on Kerry’s DeviantArt page, here.
Have I mentioned how much I love my cover design team? Because, I mean, really!
Filed under Upcoming Releases, Velocity
My lovely cover artist, Kerry Chin, and layout designer, Michael Hart from Booknibbles have been hard at work to get the Velocity cover ready by the end of the month. But here it is and I’m absolutely IN LOVE with it!
REACHING OPTIMUM SPEED
For Detroit handyman Derrick Chance and his lover, Gavin Hayes, the holiday season is filled with the promise of new beginnings. Gavin’s officially moving in, and after the New Year, they’ll begin house hunting. But they both know all the talk of gift exchange, whose holiday ornaments go where, and what repairs and remodels will be needed to put Derrick’s house on the market is only a smoke screen.
Before the month is over, Gavin will have the final verdict on whether or not his dangerously delusional ex, Lukas, infected him with HIV. No matter how good Gavin’s chances appear with the three-month hurdle already passed, neither he nor Derrick knows what the future holds for them.
The holidays have always been a time of loss and mourning for Derrick, but now he has to stay strong as Gavin’s own fears and doubts assail him relentlessly. And when Lukas returns, unexpectedly penitent amid troubling revelations, Gavin has to ask himself whether he can offer Derrick the future he deserves, or whether these first few months of happiness are the best they will ever get.
COMING MARCH 2, 2013
Filed under Announcements
As Kerry slept Sunday night (it’s Monday morning for her already) PayPal, only a few hours of sending her a canned response telling her that her account hold was there to stay, sent her another email rescinding it.
I can only suppose that a little bit of public pressure, in the form of this article by Nate from The Digital Reader, who helped lead the charge back in February during the SmashWords debacle, helped sway PayPal to a more reasonable stance.
So I’m very glad for Kerry (and her sister also, whose account was likewise restored) that they don’t have to go through the inconvenience of finding another means by which to conduct their businesses.
I hope this was an isolated incident, and not an attack on erotic books by new means. So far no other cover artists have come forward, which is a good thing.
I do think we all have to be vigilant, those of us who publish independently and even the small presses who may rely on PayPal to conduct transactions with vendors or customers. If PayPal does decide to go on the censorship warpath again, it could be a mess. Hopefully we nipped this in the bud.
Thank you all for your support.
Filed under Activism
Yesterday, in an attempt to be jaunty, I made a big issue of the fact that one of the transactions targeted by my cover artist was of Loki. I did this because at the time, we weren’t sure specifically which other transactions were being targeted by PayPal because my cover artist was still going over her records comparing transaction IDs.
This gave some people who are discussing the matter elsewhere, the impression that the problem was actually copyright.
It’s not. That much is very clear by the email PayPal sent my cover artist, which reads as follows:
Dear KERRY CHIN,
We are hereby notifying you that, after a recent review of your account activity, it has been determined that you are in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy regarding your sales / offers of adult commisions of digital art on http://dragonreine.deviantart.com.
Transaction ID’s redacted.
Therefore, your account has been permanently limited.
Per the User Agreement, when PayPal permanently limits an account due to an Acceptable Use Policy violation, we may hold your funds up to 180 days. In addition, you will be liable to PayPal for the amount of PayPal’s damages for each violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.
To read more about your liability, the actions we may take and other
relevant information pertaining to the User Agreement, please refer to the
following URL: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/UserAgreement_full&locale.x=en_USYou will need to remove all references to PayPal from your website/s and/or auction/s. This includes not only removing PayPal as a payment option, but also the PayPal logo and/or shopping cart.
The PayPal User Agreement states that PayPal, at its sole discretion,
reserves the right to limit an account for any violation of the User
Agreement, including the Acceptable Use Policy.Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered obscene.
The complete Acceptable Use Policy can be found at the following URL:
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_full&locale.x=en_USTo learn more about the Acceptable Use Policy, please refer to our Help Center page here:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/helpweb?cmd=_helpWe thank you in advance for your cooperation. If you have any questions, please contact the PayPal Brand Risk Management Department at
[email protected].Sincerely,
Jared
PayPal, Brand Risk Management
Now. I’d say there is very little ambiguity in that message regarding the fact that the issue here is “obscene” images. Upon further research, it turns out one of those redacted transactions was my second payment for the
We still don’t know what the third transaction was, because in the process of freezing her account, PayPal is also cutting off Kerry’s ability to view her own transaction history, and she cannot find the email receipt for the third transaction yet.
ETA: one of those three redacted transactions was the down payment for the cover of Acceleration, and the other one is the second and final payment for the cover of Acceleration.
How the Loki art got mixed up in there, I can’t guess. Probably they’re trying to legitimize their targeting of the suggestive/homoerotic art by tacking on a little copyright intimidation.
Now, here’s the kicker, and this is why we are in absolutely no doubt that PayPal is on an anti-obscenity kick, even if it’s small-scale. I have been vague about naming names and details because I didn’t know how private the person was about this matter, but she’s being very open about it, so I’m going to share it here.
This is an email received by Kerry’s sister, who is a fetish model, when HER account was frozen, within minutes of Kerry’s account being frozen:
This is kath’s email. Note the vagueness of their accusations, and if you check the listed sites, she never asks people to pay for shoots with PayPal. She read aloud all her received payments to me, and they are all for sales of secondhand clothing, or contributions from friends to help her buy her higher-priced corsets.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: <**********>Date: Nov 8, 2012 11:12 PM
Subject: Your account has been limitedTo: <***********>
Dear Kathy Chin Chew Lee,
We are hereby notifying you that, after a recent review of your account activity, it has been determined that you are in violation of PayPal’s
Acceptable Use Policy regarding your sales / offers of fetish and pin up
photo shoots on
http://kathteakatastrophy.blogspot.com/?zx=e666d08f00168f92,
http://www.modelmayhem.com/2337096, and
http://kathtea-katastrophy.deviantart.com/.(transaction IDs redacted also)Therefore, your account has been permanently limited.Per the User Agreement, when PayPal permanently limits an account due to an Acceptable Use Policy violation, we may hold your funds up to 180 days. In addition, you will be liable to PayPal for the amount of PayPal’s damages for each violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.
To read more about your liability, the actions we may take and other
relevant information pertaining to the User Agreement, please refer to the
following URL: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/UserAgreement_full&locale.x=en_USYou will need to remove all references to PayPal from your website/s and/or auction/s. This includes not only removing PayPal as a payment option, but also the PayPal logo and/or shopping cart.
The PayPal User Agreement states that PayPal, at its sole discretion,
reserves the right to limit an account for any violation of the User
Agreement, including the Acceptable Use Policy.Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered obscene.
The complete Acceptable Use Policy can be found at the following URL:
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_full&locale.x=en_USTo learn more about the Acceptable Use Policy, please refer to our Help Center page here:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/helpweb?cmd=_helpWe thank you in advance for your cooperation. If you have any questions, please contact the PayPal Brand Risk Management Department at
[email protected].Sincerely,
Jared
PayPal, Brand Risk Management
Filed under Activism
So, apparently PayPal is incapable of learning their lesson.
I hadn’t entered this crazy genre last spring when PayPal attempted to strong-arm booksellers like SmashWords into censoring the content they sell or face losing their accounts. After a couple weeks of furor, PayPal rescinded that ban.
Kinda. Now they’re not going after big companies like SmashWords. They’re going after private, individual accounts.
How do I know this? Because my cover artist, the brilliant Kerry Chin, aka DragonReine, is one of the accounts they’ve frozen for distributing indecent material.
You’ve seen her beautiful work for the covers for Inertia and Acceleration, already. Do you want to see the image that got her banned, the commission transaction that was flagged for distributing indecent material?
It’s so outrageous I don’t even dare embed it in my blog. I have to link back to it.
Mmhm. Yep. That’s a portrait. Of Loki from The Avengers. Fully dressed and doing nothing but smirking. And while I am fully aware that Loki’s smirk inspires any number of obscene thoughts in the minds of the people who behold it, I’m unaware of it violating any actual decency statutes. Keep in mind, it’s posted on DeviantArt, which doesn’t even allow art featuring erect penises.
So I’m failing to see how it violates this, which is the terms of service PayPal put into use after the erotica-banning debacle last March (courtesy of The Digital Reader:
Update: Paypal has clarified the new policy on their blog. (Boy did they back down.) Their new policy only affects potentially illegal images, and the blog post specifically states that it doesn’t cover text only ebooks.
First and foremost, we are going to focus this policy only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text. The policy will prohibit use of PayPal for the sale of e-books that contain child pornography, or e-books with text and obscene images of rape, bestiality or incest (as defined by the U.S. legal standard for obscenity: material that appeals to the prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value).
In addition, the policy will be focused on individual books, not on entire “classes” of books. Instead of demanding that e-book publishers remove all books in a category, we will provide notice to the seller of the specific e-books, if any, that we believe violate our policy. We are working with e-book publishers on a process that will provide any affected site operator or author the opportunity to respond to and challenge a notice that an e-book violates the policy.
ETA: THIS IS NOT A COPYRIGHT/LIKENESS ISSUE. The notice she received targeted one of the transactions for my Acceleration cover as well as the Loki art, and specifically stated it was for explicit content.
Here is a snippet of the email PayPal sent her, with the transaction IDs redacted.
Dear KERRY CHIN,
We are hereby notifying you that, after a recent review of your account
activity, it has been determined that you are in violation of PayPal’s
Acceptable Use Policy regarding your sales / offers of adult commisions of
digital art on http://dragonreine.deviantart.com.Please refer to:
- Transaction *redacted*
- Transaction *redacted*
- Transaction *redacted*Therefore, your account has been permanently limited.
One of those redacted IDs is my second payment for the Acceleration cover. One is for the Loki art. Kerry is having a hard time tracking down the third because in the process of freezing her account, PayPal locked her out of seeing her own history and researching the transaction.
Furthermore, it’s not just Kerry. A acquaintance of Kerry’s also works in the field of erotic art, and her PayPal account has been suspended for the same reason, only hours before. I don’t know how many others have been affected, but it looks like there might be another indecency purge going on. A smaller, more insidious purge, because it targets the little guys who can’t fight back, instead of companies that are in the public eye like SmashWords and ARe.
ETA 2: please refer to https://ameliacgormley.com/2012/11/09/its-not-about-copyright-a-clarification-on-the-paypal-matter/ for updated information.
Where does it stop? Will my PayPal account be suspended for commissioning my book covers, or for selling books with those covers? After all, you can see a little bit of Derrick’s ass on the cover for Acceleration and not to mention also OMGZGAYLOVE.
Will other book cover designers also be affected? How is this going to impact our genre?
If my PayPal account is suspended, I will have to stop distributing my books on SmashWords, as I don’t make enough in quarterly royalties for them to cut me a check (or I didn’t last quarter, at least. Hopefully it will pick up after the release of Acceleration.) How many of the rest of us in this genre sell books with covers which could be deemed indecent?
So, a heads-up, folks. This could be happening again. Like last time, I think we need to raise a hue and a cry, before it gets out of hand.
Filed under Activism
So. Remember those new covers for Inertia I rolled out a couple weeks ago?
LOL, well, it turns out those aren’t going to be the final versions. While the high-contrast filters looked wonderfully bright and eye-catching on the computer screen, it just wasn’t going to work in print, especially on the Acceleration cover. So my wonderful cover artist Kerry put her head together with Michael from BookNibbles to come up with something that combined Michael’s eye-catching layout with Kerry’s brilliant art. The results are below.
Sorry things have been a mess while my lovely artists have worked this out, but I think it’s for the best. I’m waiting on the latest version of the print proof for Inertia, but assuming the proof goes well, I hope to have that available within another week or so. I had intended to have it available by now, but we faced two setbacks. One was that the cover simply didn’t work in print, and the other was that in the process of trying to remake the cover, a hurricane struck the east coast, which affected our ability to work with Michael to get things finalized. Of course, redoing the cover for the print version meant redoing the cover for the ebook version as well, so now I’m on my third release of this title with different cover art. the listing over at GoodReads is a mess, BUT I think it’s worth it to have the best possible cover.
Speaking of Hurricane Sandy, don’t forget that from now until Nov 7, I am donating a dollar for each copy of Inertia sold. If you’ve been thinking of checking it out, now is a great time to do so!
Another area the hurricane has affected has been the editing process of Acceleration. For a while it had looked like my editor might be able to get the edits back to me earlier than our contract had specified, but Sandy has set that back as well, and so now instead of the late November release I was considering, it might be pushed back into early December.
A lot of this can be chalked up to the fact that I’m such a neophyte at this self-publishing gig. I’m still learning the best and most efficient way to go about things. If I had to do it all again, I would have held off on the release of Inertia until Acceleration was closer to being ready for release, and I would have made any sort of public statement of intent for the release of Acceleration based upon mere estimates and guess work. I think things will be much more streamlined moving into Velocity as now I have a better idea of what all is involved of balancing a release with marketing. That wasn’t an issue I faced with Inertia.
One thing I will be working on more in the near future is adding more feature content to this blog. So far it’s been pretty exclusively dealing with details of my upcoming releases, etc. I actually feel quite self-conscious pimping myself so much, but so much of what I do now is focused on preparing for the print release of Book One and the release of Book Two that there isn’t much else for me to say. But as I build my back catalog and branch out into other realms, that’s going to change and hopefully the blog won’t be so much “oh, hey, look at my book! (that you’ve seen a hundred times before.)
Before I close this out, allow me to encourage all my readers in the U.S. to get out next Tuesday and vote. There is a lot riding on this election; don’t let your vote go to waste.
And while we’re speaking of voting, the M/M Romance group over at GoodReads has opened up nominations for their Readers’ Choice Awards. I’m not egotistical enough to nominate, or ask for nominations, for my own books, but I would really love to see Kerry and Michael’s hard work acknowledged by seeing one of these covers nominated for the Best Cover category.
Filed under Acceleration, Announcements, Inertia, News for Released Titles, Upcoming Releases
So, I bobbled this a bit. The wonderful folks at Top2Bottom Reviews were supposed to host my cover reveal for Book Two and a special Halloween-themed excerpt. Which they did! But while they posted what was a very fun interview and a lovely review by Gabbi (thank you Gabbi!) there was some last-minute confusion and changes to the cover art so the version they have posted there isn’t the final version, and also the excerpt I sent them apparently wasn’t formatted properly so it’s a bit hard to read.
SO! I am going to put the cover art and excerpt here as well, with TONS of love to T2B for hosting me yesterday!
Special Excerpt from Chapter Seven of Acceleration
(ARC-quality excerpt; this has not received a final proof-reading)
Filed under Acceleration, Upcoming Releases
Michael at BookNibbles has been hard at work making the cover and interior for the upcoming print edition of Inertia GORGEOUS! So I thought I would share a peek at them with you now!
We’re working on a few tweaks and awaiting the cover art for Book Two, and then I’ll be releasing the print version and revamped ebook!
As promised, Kerry Chin’s amazing cover art remains intact, and in fact gets a little more screen time!
Filed under Inertia, News for Released Titles
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The fiction of Amelia C. Gormley 