This One Word Got My Book Ad Rejected. You Won’t Believe Why.

The chilling reality of being an author in the age of algorithmic overlords.

Yesterday, I was cleaning out and organizing my e-mails and ran across one of my dealings with Dear Leader. I was compelled to share it with you because not everyone believed me when I mentioned this issue in a previous post.

Seriously folks, you can’t make this stuff up. And why would you want to? What you can do, is warn people about the idiocracy.

I do not bill myself as some sort of ad-copy guru—not by any measure of the imagination—but this is not about the ad-copy itself, it’s really not.

It’s about the inadequacies of a system that tries to whittle everything down to an algorithm, one that is ultimately administered by people who don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it, whose go-to is “I’m just following orders.” It’s about turning employees either into mindless drones or box-checkers. This is all in preparation for replacing said drones/box-checkers with “AI,” something that I’m pretty sure has actually happened since this incident.

And yes, it makes me mad, and not just as a writer whose time is wasted again and again with endless hours consumed in this manner, but also as someone who actually loves to write and got into this to write.

It all began with this e-mail:

Trust me, the last thing you want is one of these e-mails when you’re about to release or promote a new book. I had girded my loins to tackle the shenanigans of ads for the nth time after getting kicked in the proverbial nuts more than once already. So, I mustered up the courage only to be kicked yet again.

Fortunately it only took one day to get an answer with more information:

Yes, you read that right. The error they objected to was the capitalization of House in the sentence: An irrevocable decision that could throw his House into another galactic war.

This is where I had to get up so I wouldn’t bang my head into my keyboard. Then I walked around the house a few times. It’s infuriating because I did nothing wrong, but I keep getting punished for doing things correctly by people who wouldn’t know correct if it sat on their faces. It’s a double whammy.

When I finally calmed down, I responded with the following:

In this case capitalization is entirely appropriate. For example, in the novel Dune, Frank Herbert has the House Atreites. It is capitalized because it’s a proper noun. In my novel, it’s House Dobromil, shortened to House. To analogize further, what you are saying is that since the word “hunter” is a noun, I can’t use it as a proper noun (name) so that I can’t use the name Hunter as in Hunter Jones unless I use both the first and last name. I would also point out that this is not the first ad text in which I used a capitalized “House” and it was approved without issue. Context is important and should not be ignored. To use the lower case “house” would imply the general use of the term, as in a residential house, one like we all live in, and it would be nonsensical, implying the story has a residence that would be thrown into a galactic war. While that might make an amusing story, it is inaccurate for this story and might give a reader the wrong impression about what this novel is about.

The verbiage of this screenshot was also provided as text for audio narration and screen readers.

In retrospect I realize I could have been clearer, but honestly, given that this was so utterly stupid, this was the best I could do at the time. I also wish I had used the example of He Who Must Not Be Named and asked them if they’d have applied the same rule to Rowling’s books.

Since I’d seen others violate the so-called rules by using words with all caps and had indeed seen it done repeatedly, I knew that their so-called sentence case ad rule was not being enforced, except perhaps selectively.

Now, you may be saying, it’s incompetence, not malice, but does it really matter? Because any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

To be clear, Dear Leader’s objection is actually to capitalizing words that might grab the attention of readers in a non-approved way. Because all caps mean shouting, they don’t want all caps. But they also don’t want other words capitalized because they might catch a readers’ attention.

For example, they don’t want “Buy Now!” in the text of your ads. Or “FREE.” Was I doing any of these things? Was I? No, I wasn’t.

This was their response, FIVE days later (so much for that release or promo blitz you had planned, right?):

Ah, the irony of their name being in all caps, but you know, rules for thee.

Even Big Brother’s “AI” understands the difference (albeit, four years later):

I want to note that it took me the better part of the day to go through all of my old ads as well as looking up different books on Amazon’s website in the hopes that the ads I’d been seeing would pop up. I also want to note that it was entirely possible for Dear Leader’s box-checkers to run a search of their own ad database to look for words that are not in “sentence case.” Any programmer worth his salt could do such a search pretty easily. But no, instead they send me to do that work.

After all, my time is worth nothing, amirite? In fact, I bet they were counting on me not bothering.

So basically, this entire e-mail thread is now dead. And frankly, so was the issue. If I recall correctly, I just gave up on it.

“An irrevocable decision that would throw House Dobromil into another galactic war” turned out to be too long for the allotted character-count total since this one sentence was not the whole ad, but part of one, and I would have had to cut something elsewhere. Frankly, after complying with their requests and making no progress, I just didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with this idiocracy any longer.

Furthermore, I have no doubt that “House Dobromil” would have still tripped their algos because the word “house” is mostly used as a noun instead of a proper noun. Algos (and LLMs) are all about statistical probability and the probability that it is not capitalized is higher, so that is what is deemed as “correct” and never mind context or nuance. Those don’t matter.

Yes, four years later, I’m still angry about it, although not like I was while I was dealing with it. It was a huge tax on my time and creativity, an anxiety-inducing mess because Dear Leader has so much power over all of us.

To be clear, I wasn’t bending the rules or doing anything ambiguous. It was clear from context that this “rule” should never have been applied to my ad. I wasn’t going “Buy Now” or doing something shifty like “In this Star Wars kind of story …” in order to fool people into thinking they were buying a Star Wars IP.

The only upside of resurrecting this issue was that by going through these old e-mails I also found the following from a gentleman that had subscribed to my newsletter. In response to the question about why he signed up, he said: Mostly because after six months, I still find my mind returning to the world of Ravages of Honor. It is a powerful book, and I want to stay on top of whatever else you are doing.

Ultimately, these are the readers who make or break your success, not ad-copy and not kissing Dear Leader’s ring or his assets.

Had someone wanted to write these words as a review for my book, said words would also have had to be blessed by the box-checkers. I try not to obsess over reviews or review-counts, but here too, I have noticed all sorts of shenanigans, and over several titles, both trad and indie. My review-counts tick up, and then they tick down, and then they tick up again, and then back down. It’s kind of hard not to notice when you approach alleged milestones. You notice because it’s an upcoming milestone, so when the count goes down, you notice that too.

It would probably be an exercise in self-flaggelation to do screenshots and track these review metrics religiously, so I don’t necessarily recommend doing that. I mean, unless you’re into that kind of thing.

I noticed when an Amazon Vine Voice review disappeared after being up for years. Yes, years. I went looking for it because I wanted to screenshot it to document a pull quote. But poof, it was gone. I have no idea how long it’s been gone either, but it does sadden me that this is how this idiotic game is played.

I have a dream that one day, writers will sit at their desks not to chase algorithms or appease trends, but to write—freely, fiercely, and without fear—that their words alone will be enough. I truly do.

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