Lulu changes content ratings system
Lulu, in a moment of madness, has decided to change its content ratings system so that mature books cannot be seen by *anyone* browsing Lulu. To quote Lulu: "This means that content rated Direct Access is restricted to customers you select. You will receive a web URL at the end of the publishing process. You can then send this link to the people you want to see and purchase your work. Direct Access content is not searchable on Lulu." The silver lining in this dark cloud is that (unless I'm getting this wrong) it appears Lulu is now defining "mature" books, not by the full content of the book (as it does presently), but simply by the parts of it that are publicly accessible, such as the cover and description and preview. So - if I'm reading this right - if you have a teen-friendly cover and a teen-friendly description and a teen-friendly preview, then you can let your characters roll in the hay all they want within the rest of the book, and the book will be accessible to readers browsing Lulu. But if you have a sexy cover, you're out of luck. Personally, I think a few pro-*test*-('") posts by erotic fiction readers and writers are in order.

"And that might end up with teen readers getting books they shouldn't." Indeed. My Rebirth novel - which I'd classify as an R-rated novel - will have a teen-friendly cover and a teen-friendly description and guess what? Its first four chapters are teen-friendly. That's intentional, because it not intended to be only for the erotic fiction market, but I'd hate for some unwary thirteen-year-old to buy it. The old system was awful too. It skipped straight from PG-rated books (Teen) to NC-17-rated books (Mature). Everything in between had to be rated as Mature. As far as I could tell, the Bible would have had to have been stuck under the Mature rating, because it had more than "mild violence."

I put all mine rated general access, since the covers and descriptions fell in that category, but I did give a content warning on my storefront. I don't think I'll bother with book by book warnings, since most of the blurbs suggest possible mm content anyhow.

sigh.

Yeah, I was really irritated the day I had to do all that. It took over two hours, because settings were frigged that shouldn't have been frigged, settings which I had set right more than three times already, things like keywords, genre, excerpts. Very irritating to have to do it again.

I wrote to Lulu and asked them to clarify what their policy was about mature books that fit the General Access guidelines - specifically, I asked whether using keywords and descriptions like "sex" and "erotica" would get me in trouble with them. Their response was that it was perfectly okay to use keywords and descriptions that indicate mature content - "Mature" and "18+" were the examples they used - and that in fact this was exactly what they wanted in such situations. They said that they simply wanted to provide a "browsing experience" at their site that a general audience would find acceptable, and that they encouraged authors to use keywords and descriptions to warn anyone who wasn't interested in purchasing mature content. I wish they'd said this in their original post, or I wouldn't have gone off on the tirade above. :)