Authors generally live hard lives. Driven by artistic necessity, we sacrifice comfort, security, risking everything—sometimes even staking life itself—for the books we create.  Our creations are our reward.  To us authors, they are our lives.  We believe they should be respected no less than ourselves or any other human being.  Today, when the bookstores are gone, in the English-speaking world an author cannot live without Amazon.  Amazon is the new literary superpower and our sole literary patron.  But how is Amazon treating our books?  How is Amazon treating Culture, Art, and the Author?

This is a petition to limit Amazon’s power over the artist and win back for the author the pride and respect our books deserve.  This is a petition to end Amazon's internal classification authority.

In March of this year, the Kindle edition of my Literary-Fiction novel “The Wanderess” was censored by Amazon, banned from their general search engine, on the grounds that the cover contains nudity. While my novel was catalogued in their "Erotica" section, I lost money, time, and most importantly; I lost reputation, as I was refused publicity by noteworthy promotion services on the grounds that they "do not promote Erotica."  (Note: I have written proof of these refusals.)

After my story came out in major French newspapers, Amazon reconsidered and stated that my cover was in fact “Art” after all, and not pornography.  Amazon asked my publisher to republish the book (which was at this point withdrawn from the Kindle library altogether), and offered “compensation” in the form of “five days free promotion” on their website.  I refused to accept Amazon's offer.  Any “compensation” they could have offered would have been too small.  Amazon’s censorship of my novel opened my eyes to the way they treat all novels, and all novelists.

My book and my career have suffered due to Amazon's auto-classification system and their censorship.  I ask other authors: is Amazon finally apt to classify the books using their current system?  How many authors are being hurt by this?  How is Literature and Culture as a whole suffering when they are the supreme distributors of literature in the English-speaking world?  Shouldn’t the classification of books belong to those who wrote them?

“The Author’s Write” campaign aims to end Amazon’s right to auto-classify books and will give this freedom back to the author, thus ending their ability to censor unjustly, thus giving back the honor and respect that authors and their books deserve.

I ask you to sign this petition on behalf of authors everywhere and on behalf of Literature, Freedom, Culture, and Art.