Bob Wingate's Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I was hoping to have some good news for you regarding the ebook publication of the first collection of my favorite Bound & Gagged stories. That will have to wait for the New Year, but I’m hoping now that it won’t be long in coming. By “it” I mean the ebook, not the New Year, which is already upon us.

 

It’s true that Amazon rejected us without telling us why, and that what we’d been led to believe was the most liberal platform, Smashwords, insists in its guidelines that all sexual writing must be classified as “erotic fiction,” though our stories are not fiction and not always even what I would call “erotica.” Smashwords guidelines also put it in no uncertain terms that “In erotic literature, children or underage minors cannot be engaged in sexual acts or situations, bear witness to such situations, be shown considering sexual acts, or be shown thinking about sexual acts,” and that “Underage erotica is strictly forbidden, and the upload of such will lead to immediate account termination.” None of which is good for us, since so many of the best B&G bondage memoirs start with writers’ memories of awarenesses, thoughts and activities that began when they were underage.

 

But suddenly just this past night, in the middle of the night, I was startled out of sleep by a eureka moment, which I’ll hold off on telling you about until I check it out more thoroughly. But I think it may go a long way to solving our problems. 

 

More to come. Stay tuned.

Awakening of Rip Van Wingate?

This is the first blog posting I’ve made since Thanksgiving, 2016. I’d hoped the occasion would be a happy one, to announce the publication of the first of a series of ebooks containing the best stories of true bondage experiences that we published in Bound & Gagged and, in the conceivable future, the best stories we never got around to publishing. As soon as the book went up on line, I sent messages to the majority of my followers (or favorites) on Recon, announcing the Kindle e-publication of “Spreadeagle Tales and Other True Adventures in Male Bondage”, and a number of B&G fans went on line to buy it.

 

And then Amazon Kindle blocked the book. It didn’t meet their content and cover guidelines, despite the fact that Lee, Matthew and I had done our due diligence, looking over a lot of Kindle ebooks, and had found books with covers and content at least as explicit as ours, some far more. We contacted Kindle, tried to reach a human being who could tell us where we’d gone wrong. Was our cover too outrageous for them? Look at it. It shows one of B&G’s most beloved, attractive and boy-next-door models, fully dressed, and as innocently tied up and bandanna-gagged as a Hardy Boy. Other accepted and acceptable Kindle ebooks have bound individuals on their covers, so what was the problem with ours?

Had we failed to categorize the book correctly? We could easily fix that, if someone would tell us precisely which categories we had wrong. Had Kindle’s own computers—since it’s very unlikely a human being at Amazon actually read the book—identified specific words or phrases in the stories that it found unacceptable? Words like fuck? Or cock? Or tied up? You can find those words in ebooks everywhere. We knew we had one chancy story title, The Considerate Rapist. Well, we could easily change that if we were told that was the problem. Should we retitle the story and try again? Unfortunately, when Amazon blocked “Spreadeage Tales” it also warned us that if we attempted to correct the problem(s) and did so in a way that still didn’t satisfy their guidelines, we risked being blocked by Kindle forever.

 

Ultimately we did get through to a customer service person, who was very sympathetic but who also told us our problem was for another department. He would, nevertheless, write up our concerns and send them to the right department, and he suggested we write to that department ourselves, telling them, among other things, that the magazine those stories came from, Bound & Gagged, is in the general collection of The New York Public Library, available to all who come looking for it, on the shelf next to such publications as Cosmopolitan and House & Garden. We did that, then sat back and waited.

 

Only to receive the following email late last night:

We’ve confirmed that your book contains content that is in violation of our content guidelines and we will not be offering this title for sale on Amazon. As stated in our guidelines, we reserve the right to determine what we consider to be appropriate, which includes cover images and content within the book.

 

So much for Kindle, unless someone reading this knows someone in the right department at Kindle whom we could actually speak to. Right now, we’re looking for other ebook platforms. If any of you out there have ideas, we’re open to all suggestions. Either send me a comment here, or write me at my same old email address, [email protected]. I’ll keep you informed about all new developments.

 

By the way, I’d love to keep this blog alive, but for that I need you readers to help. Write me your thoughts about bondage, the current bondage scene, your own true bondage experiences. If you want to send pictures of yourselves tied up and gagged, write me for a model release, which I'll send right back to you and need back from you with your pics. I’ll post your thoughts, stories and photos here, always anonymously, unless you specifically ask to be identified.