Special Announcement: Update to Our Rules

Hello folks,

Today was supposed to be a joyous day for us. We were going to announce the release date for Volume 2 of the PoArtMo Anthology—September 27, 2021.

Unfortunately, something happened that forced us to postpone the release for now. We wanted to tell you about it, so you know what is going on.

We love giving inspirational people an opportunity to be seen. In fact, this is the main purpose of our platform.

When you submit to us, you are automatically bound by rules and guidelines that are in place to ensure a smooth publication process. Unfortunately, for the last 18 months, we have had to deal with abuse of our guidelines, time, and efforts.

The two rules that get abused almost constantly are:

• Content previously published elsewhere
• Simultaneous submissions

We have explained those rules so many times that we could write a book on the topic. Still, most people choose not to follow them. This is getting very tiring to say the least.

What Happened

When we submitted the volume for publication to our distributor, we received the following notification in our inbox.

This problem happened before, so we were quite surprised. We emailed Draft2Digital right away to figure out who the culprit(s) was/were. As always, D2D was very responsive:

Hello, 

There are portions of your book found on the web. Once such location was this, [link]

Please keep in mind that this may not be the only place portions of your book can be found online as our system may return different results each time, and with our Amazon distribution, we cannot send anything that has been posted online for free. We must strictly enforce this rule with Amazon and will not be able to submit books which have portions of it posted on the internet. 

D2D was even more specific when we asked for additional information:

Hello, 

After several rescans of the book that appears to be the only link that continues to come up.  That said, if our scans are finding a few, Amazon’s scans will find ALL. They have much more robust scans than we do. As such, you must make it very clear to every person who wishes to include content in this anthology that they need to scrub any and all content that is posted freely available online from either the online source, or from within the book. Once our scans no longer detect any portion as being freely available online, we can submit it Amazon, however, if Amazon’s scans find any portion freely available online, they will not only flag the book and block it, but they’ll flag our account as well. As such, we’d ultimately remove your Amazon access entirely and prevent any future listings from being submitted to Amazon through our service, as well as delist any past titles live on Amazon due to non-compliance. Amazon takes a very harsh stance on this, and has it written into our contracts that we are not permitted to submit content that is freely available online, and that doing so risks our entire Amazon account.

If you are uncertain about the availability of the content, we recommend you submit through a direct KDP account because Amazon allows up to 5% to be freely available online as part of their marketing and promotional efforts when posting on a direct KDP account. Through an aggregate service, it’s 0%.

What Happened Next?

We emailed the culprit right away to let them know what was going on and how this situation inconvenienced everyone involved in the anthology, including other contributors. Instead of a simple apology, the person chose the confrontational approach. They said that we did not do our jobs as editors and that we were spreading false information about Amazon. They admitted to lying about submitting to other publications and also asked us to remove their piece.

Now What?

Removing the piece implies that all our formatting and layout are now off and that we have to redo everything—hence throwing dozens of hours of work out of the window. Another option is to include a selected piece from Volume 3 into Volume 2. But overall, this means that we cannot publish Volume 2 just yet. To be honest, the whole thing could take weeks. We are both extremely busy and Auroras & Blossoms is volunteer work.

(Another issue that may arise is the potential flagging of our account with our distributor, resulting in us not being able to publish the anthology at all…)

No matter how everything ends, we find this situation absolutely unacceptable. It also saddens us a great deal. As a result, we have made two decisions:

• The culprit is forever banned from submitting to us; and
• From now on, we will only consider original content. You can no longer submit content that has been previously published, no matter where it appears—blogs, websites, forums, Instagram, Facebook (public / private pages, profiles, groups), Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Wattpad, etc.

We know this is a harsh decision. Unfortunately, we do not have a choice anymore.

Auroras & Blossoms is dedicated to promoting quality content and rewarding contributors for their hard work. We can no longer condone behaviors that jeopardize our reputation. We care about your work too much to let that happen.

Thank you for reading us. Have a great weekend!

Cendrine & David