Castalia House’s goon book The Corroding Empire keeps trying to come back from the dead, like a Universal Pictures monster. Amazon took the book down on its release day, March 20, because its title, author and cover were deemed misleading – each of those attributes having been made intentionally similar to John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire.
Castalia House publisher Vox Day promptly announced that the book would be back on Amazon with a new cover, title (Corrosion) and author name (Harry Seldon).
Instead, Vox Day got Amazon to restore The Corroding Empire page under the original pseudonym, but it’s not clear whether sales ever resumed and they are currently disabled (see screencap).
Day has been updating his “Back With A Vengeance” post at Vox Popoli after each go-round with Amazon.
Mr. Amazon SJW just blocked it again. Unsigned, of course. SJWs always double down.
We’re writing to let you know that readers have reported a problem in your book. The error significantly impacts the readability of your book. We have temporarily removed it from sale so that more readers don’t experience the same problem in your book
Error Category: Wrong_Content; Comments: The content of your book is a different edition than what the detail page indicates. Because this could be a serious issue for many customers, we have had to temporarily block your book from sale. Please correct the image so that we can make it available for sale again.
UPDATE: Another phone call and we’re back up again.
UPDATE: And blocked again, albeit this time UNDER REVIEW, not memory-holed.
UPDATE: Finally got to speak to a supervisor. She’s not only escalated the matter to legal, but has assured me that the book will be unblocked, stay unblocked, and that the matter will be fully investigated. It’s not just the three blocks, the culprit(s) also put the book on the Excluded list for Amazon Associates, which prevents others from being paid when someone buys the book.
Vox Day has also raised the spectre of “tortious interference”:
UPDATE: Since some people seem to want to go on the warpath, let me be perfectly clear here: Amazon is not to blame. I even suspect that it is entirely possible that Tor Books is not to blame either, based on a) when the book was pulled and b) the fact that the book has shown as Live for nearly 24 hours but still does not have a page on any Amazon site. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is a rogue low-level SJW employee, possibly two, in a specific department.
I have already spoken to the manager of one department and they have begun to investigate why Corrosion is Live but not available. They’ve done everything we asked and we have no problem with the way we have been treated.
While he has been arguing for scenarios involving misbehaving Amazon employees or interference by someone at Tor Books, it may be that customers using Amazon’s feedback system are having an impact – they may not have confined themselves to complaining about the one-star reviews left on Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire on its first day in release.
Former Amazon employee Greg Hullender also offered some insights in a comment on Camestros Felapton’s blog:
Having worked at Amazon and dealt with “bad merchants” I can tell you that Amazon keeps a list of “problem children.” After his previous two stunts (the Rape book and the Goodreads hack), I suspect Castalia House is on such a list. That would mean that it would require far fewer customer complaints to get a human involved that would normally be the case.
In this particular case, it almost looks as though VD had hoped to bamboozle a few Scalzi readers into buying his book by mistake. Given the way purchasing on Amazon works, I can’t see how that would happen in real life, but the appearance is bad. The company is extremely allergic to anything that looks like an attempt (however maladroit) to defraud its customers. (In other words, if it looks like you’re trying to rip people off, the fact that you’re using a method that could never work won’t cut any ice.) That could also explain the speed of Amazon’s reaction. (I’ll add that I personally think VD only wanted attention–I doubt he thought this would look like fraud.)….
However, a source disputes my description of Vox Day in yesterday’s Scroll as being “on thin ice” with Amazon. At this time the rest of Castalia House’s books are available for sale.
Update: Two hours after this post was published, Amazon had the book available for sale. I was able to order the sample sent to my Kindle. However, the page still displays the “item under review” box. // Further update: Now the review box is gone, too.
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I’m pretty sure that’s just a house in-joke–the Bealeness of the prose practically oozes off the page, like in that horribly awkward description of the single female character in the prologue, which is clearly meant to titillate but instead baffles and confuses. And who can forget the founding of the Founder’s League in the infoblurb that opens the prologue? I can’t. God help me, I can’t.
@BravoLimaPoppa3
That would be a terrible, terrible thing to do to James.
I’m in.
Eh. Hate-reading is bad for the soul 🙁
Re Hate-reading
I can and do watch terrible movies for Skiffy and Fanty’s Torture Cinema…but to do the same for reading? No not so much. Not for me.
Lol, ya’all are ridiculous. Have fun with sci-fi. Enjoy it. This book is pretty good, and had some amusement coming down on top of it from the parody cover. You should be disconcerted that there are some folk at amazon who seem to be taking down a book for political purposes though. Hasn’t science fiction taught us not to point and sneer and go “it can’t happen to me because I don’t wrongthink!”
Just one out of line thought, and you are next with the thought police.
What I don’t get about this situation is how it brings any benefit to the author. If people buy this book in error and return it, the author gets nothing and has the potential of developing anti-fans, the people who make sure never to buy any future work. Marketed honestly, the author might develop more fans. Doesn’t this stunt just hurt the author and book, especially since it isn’t actually a parody of Scalzi’s work?
I don’t understand how any author would be so desperate that they would agree to this. Any thoughts that shed light on this angle?
@Jon Del Arroz: Political? Hahaha, uh, no. It’s weird, it’s like you’re having your own conversation….
Jon Del Arroz on March 23, 2017 at 7:58 am said:
Someone who writes “ya’all” should not complain.
rochrist
If you do hear from him you should forward that to Amazon, attempts to track down commenters or reviewers outside of the system that Amazon has set up for that is a policy violation.
When I saw the new title I was SOOO hoping for a novelization of the Sisters of Mercy video. Pity it isn’t.
This Corrosion
(I keep getting semi ear-wormed by the post’s title. Time to share the love 😛 )
@Jon del Arroz : What “political reasons” might that be? You can buy “Mein Kampf” on Amazon. You can buy Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk or Trumps Autobigraphy. Why on Earth would Corroding Empires be yanked by its content? Do you think amazon em,ployees actually read all the books on offer and judge if they fit their mindset?
Do you think they care about puppies or VDs feud with Scalzi? Or even know about it?
So I REALLY like to know: What _political_ reasons does Amazon have to block this book?
@Stoic Cynic:
Funfact: The Album by Sisters of Mercy was the second CD I ever bought (Im too embaressed to disclose the first).
FunFact 2: Andrew Eldritch was a frequent visitor of the club I frequently went. So Ive met him (but never spoken with him).
Here we go with the political victimisation schtick. This has had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with Vox Day being a massive bell-end with a creepy obsession with Scalzi.
First, they came for the small publishers trying to create marketplace confusion to exact a grudge against more successful authors and falsely claiming their books were parodies, and I did not speak out, because what they were doing was stupid.
@ Jon Del Arroz
Just curious here–you say that you are wrongthink, which means that those who disagree with you are rightthink. But in-between the lines, aren’t you implying that you and VD are rightthink and the disagreers actually wrongthink? Jeez, alll this thinking is making me tired!
rocrist –
Specifically it’s a prohibited seller activity https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200414320
I don’t know that he’d be dumb enough to actively engage in prohibited seller actions as a seller, but he’d be in direct violation of Amazon policies about that.
Also–it’s a bad book. Just a bad book, people. It’s bad. Choosing this as your hill to die on is stepping on an anthill in the middle of Death Valley, thrusting out your chest, and shouting insults at the vultures that circle overhead.
Really, Matt? Because after you posted this, I went to Amazon and looked for that policy. It’s not in the product review guidelines. I did a google search and it returned nothing, although there were several discussion threads on whether it was possible. We know that it is.
Why would Amazon even care what happens outside its network anyway?
This book is pretty good, and had some amusement coming down on top of it from the parody cover.
Do you guys work from a script? Every assessment I’ve seen from one of you minions is a hand-waving empty pronouncement that the book is “pretty good”. What makes it good? We’ve seen excerpts from the book, and they are truly atrociously bad. What part of the book is good? What makes it good?
You should be disconcerted that there are some folk at amazon who seem to be taking down a book for political purposes though.
There is no evidence that this is the case. Beale has made that claim, but there’s no substance to it at all. You said the cover is a parody. What is it a parody of? It can’t be a parody of the book, because the contents of the book are, as you also claimed, not a parody. It could be a parody of the cover or the art work on the cover, but that seems like a pretty weak claim, given that all it really does is copy those. If the cover is a parody, but the contents are an entirely different non-parody book, then all you have left is an intention to create commercial confusion, and to come to that conclusion requires no political purpose at all. This is one of those times that Beale’s constant shifting of rationales has bitten him in the ass.
Hasn’t science fiction taught us not to point and sneer and go “it can’t happen to me because I don’t wrongthink!”
You guys are adorable when you throw around words like “wrongthink” while screaming about how writers like Scalzi are ruining science fiction.
And time to dust off the good old “Assumes facts not in evidence”. Which is pretty much par for the course with you, so I’m not exactly shocked.
Professional victimhood is no way to go through life, son.
Nitpick: Nicoll’s ‘Tears’ reviews are about works he loved as a teenager.
Beale shared his approval of the call being made on his blog, calling the person who did it a “dedicated, albeit self-appointed, customer service representative” of Castalia House.
Castalia House seems like a good test of whether Amazon cares at all about its reviewers being called up and harassed. Beale is openly egging it on.
When the history of Castalia House gets written–in some ‘This Actually Happened’ webzine article, most likely–one wonders if this going to wind up the designated beginning of the death spiral, or just another bit of oddness before the plug was pulled…
rcade –
Wow, I mean it’s dumb enough to engage in it, there’s just another level of stupidity in openly encouraging and approving it.
@rcade: I believe the “dedicated, albeit self-appointed” call would be the one made to me, as I hung up shortly after the caller threatened to doxx me. (Imagine that – threaten to publish someone’s phone number and home address, and suddenly they lose interest in continuing the conversation!)
@rochrist: I called Amazon to report the unsolicited contact, resulting in their agent passing a detailed report to Amazon’s internal security team. I was explicit in differentiating between the caller’s claim that they’d received my contact info from Amazon and my first-hand knowledge that Amazon in fact provides no such data to its sellers… let alone about people who merely open the preview and do not then purchase the book.
@Matt Y: Unfortunately, you’ve misinterpreted a key provision in the quoted text. Specifically, and bolded for emphasis:
By framing the harassment call as “customer service,” the minions are theoretically not in violation of that clause. The one who called me began the call by explicitly setting it up as an “I’m so sorry you were dissatisfied with your purchase” contact. However, claiming that reviewing the preview text makes one a customer, thus enabling such unsolicited contact, is at best very thin ice.
The Tears Reviews are specifically for books I loved as a teenager. I am happy to say VD’s career is way too recent for the series.
But I have many review serieses.
James is off the hook for reading Corrosion – Camestros has taken one for the team.
Aren’t you overthinking this? You got a call and felt harassed and intimidated. It’s up to Castalia House, which either made the call or supports such calls being made by its fans, to convince Amazon the call was appropriate.
@rcade
Yup. Even if Amazon want to keep to their policies as written (a reasonable aim for a large organisation) that doesn’t mean that have to accept blatant rules lawyering.
—
The IO9 article linked earlier was amusing. The comments are…robust. The next time anyone complains that we were too harsh on various puppies I’m just going to point them at the difference.
You know…..
I’d really like to support the right to create, publish, and distribute works that are parodies. (Outside of wanting to read some of Tom Kratman’s work, I really don’t care about what Castilia House publishes. It’s not my speed.)
But then there are the symptoms of full blown cranialrectomitis, coupled with cry-bullying, and more than a whiff of just plain old bullying. I’ll give myself some good advice and pick a different hill to die on.
Erg.
@PJ Evans
What do y’all have against inclusive language? ;D
@Mark
My most recent experience was with Christmas movies. While many of those subjects are outside of copyright, the more recent incarnations (i.e. Rankin/Bass) were being ripped off. The images implied that they were Rankin/Bass productions, but they were not. There were other properties that were being similarly doppled.
Regards,
Dann
@rcade: I wasn’t so much overthinking it as looking at the posted rule and saying, “see, THIS is the loophole they’re trying to (ab)use.” I’m sure the proactive caller also thought “I’m not an employee, so I can’t get CH in trouble,” just as Beale undoubtedly did when posting his approval of the “self-appointed rep’s” actions.
I’m kind of curious about whether Beale’s retroactive stamp of approval will backfire, though. Amazon could look at him referring to the offender as a rep as bringing the offense under CH’s umbrella, thereby destroying the distance critical to the “it wasn’t us, it was one of our fans” defense.
This post would be overthinking it. 🙂
Rev. Bob –
They’d still be in violation of that clause. Not only did the person calling you misrepresent Amazon in suggesting Amazon gave them that info, from VDs post they’re an individual who doesn’t work for the seller however the seller is encouraging individuals to call on behalf of the seller. Not to mention even if it was in relation to the product intimidation on behalf of a seller against a reviewer is against policy.
Amazon provides a buyer-seller messaging service to protect anonymity of the reviewer and company for those very reasons and going outside of that is considered prohibited.
I mean they can use that excuse but it falls outside of several seller communication prohibitions.
Im tempted to leave a one-star-review to see if they call me as well. Not only would they have to make an international call, but recording phone conversations without consent is quite a serious crime here.
@Matt Y: Hence why I said “theoretically.” 😉
At any rate, Amazon’s aware of the situation. I am curious to see what, if anything, will come of it.
Beale shared his approval of the call being made on his blog, calling the person who did it a “dedicated, albeit self-appointed, customer service representative” of Castalia House.
Castalia House seems like a good test of whether Amazon cares at all about its reviewers being called up and harassed. Beale is openly egging it on.
It’s interesting that my comment HERE about being confronted THERE was quoted by VD himself. It got that far in less than 12 hours. His minions work fast.
Claiming to as part of barfing out attempts at intimidating bullshit on the phone, however…
@rochrist: You ought to call Amazon and report too. Now that Teddy’s publicly laid claim to the doxxing minion(s), it’s just as actionable as Rev. Bob’s. Which is to say, violating Amazon’s seller ToS. Be sure to point out where you were specifically mentioned on his blog. Wonder how many
suckersauthors Teddy Boy can keep if he can’t sell on Amazon.Rev Bob –
lol true. I mean likely nothing but man what a dumb book to go full derp on.
Parody, homage, and derivative work is interesting. There’s a newish YouTube fan-made video of Marvel’s superhero “Deadpool” singing Gaston’s song from Disney’s _Beauty and the Beast_
https://youtu.be/ptKgRecPi1I
Worth watching for the sheer fun of it.
But we’re watching a parody of copyrighted and valuable intellectual property that potentially degrades the worth the original for the intended audience. Deadpool is a “R” adult bloody violent property, while Disney’s Gaston is intended as a kid-level villain. The credits indicate no effort by the production team — not a lone individual fan, but a whole professional-grade movie team — to secure permissions or credit the originators.
Deadpool (Wade Wilson) , by the way, is a Marvel parody of the DC-Comics original character Deathstroke (SLADE Wilson). Quite arguably Deadpool’s greater popularity has deprived DC of actual sales — I personally am aware of young fans of the CW TV show “Arrow” who thought the causality and stealing ran the other way, and told me, vehemently, that Manu Bennett’s “Deathstroke” was “ripping off” Marvel and Deadpool. Ah, the follies of ignorant youth …
The point is that playful parody and competitive use of intellectual property is very VERY far from the sole province of trolls. And any rules or recommendations of mild etiquette for critique of such playfulness are as likely to backfire as they are to wound the playful parodist.
Camestros, thanks for reviewing it for us. (I’m reminded of “Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap”*, where they podcast themselves eating truly horrible pre-packaged food and the tagline is “We Eat It So You Don’t Have To.”)
*http://kuec.libsyn.com/ — it’s very very funny. But then, the Ursula in the podcast is Oor Wombat, so that shouldn’t surprise anyone…
@ pouncer
But the question at hand is “Has Beale produced a real parody that is actually funny, or is it a cheap, poorly written ripoff?” I’d say that opinions radically diverge at that point.
Oh, no. If you read it, it’s clear that it is neither a parody–though Beale seems to have indulged in some rather flat in-jokes–nor, a ripoff. It’s just a bad Asimov-pastiche, which Beale has indulged in because he’s convinced Scalzi’s work is likewise an Asimov-pastiche.
rcade: First, they came for the small publishers trying to create marketplace confusion to exact a grudge against more successful authors and falsely claiming their books were parodies, and I did not speak out, because what they were doing was stupid.
Please accept this shiny rocket-shaped internet.
@pouncer
DC and Marvel’s history of ripping each other off starts long before then. X-Men was a thinly modified version of Doom Patrol, and in turn the revamped Legion of Super-Heroes drew heavily on the post-Giant Sized X-Men, who then flat out ripped off the Legion to create the Imperial Guard. They even flip-flopped artist Dave Cockrum between the books during that period.
It does — let’s look at Aquaman, for instance — but I don’t think Deadpool is a parody of Deathstroke. He started out as a way to put a Spider-Man like character into the X-books, and the name “Wade Wilson” was a gag due to Deadpool’s resemblance to Deathstroke (which they both borrowed from Spider-Man).
But…
…this isn’t true. X-Men came out too soon after Doom Patrol to have been influenced by it. But Doom Patrol is a Fantastic Four knockoff — a squabbling quartet of coverall-clad body-horror super-freaks led by a scientist, featuring a cranky strongman (an orange one, yet), a flying hero with a crackling flame effect and the inevitable girl.
People tend to believe the charge that X-Men was based on Doom Patrol because Arnold Drake was famously cranky about it (but had no evidence), both teams had a wheelchair-bound leader and fans remember the Doom Patrol as wearing similar costumes to the X-Men, but the DP didn’t get those costumes until 1964, when the X-Men already had them.
The Doom Patrol was an attempt to replicate the success of the FF. The X-Men was (to Stan and Martin Goodman) an attempt at the same thing, but it was rooted in the pulp SF Kirby loved, in works like Kuttner’s MUTANT and Shiras’s CHILDREN OF THE ATOM and van Vogt’s SLAN, not the Doom Patrol.
While I’m not sure which revamps you’re thinking of, the various revamps made to the Legion started before the new X-Men existed, and what stylistic similarities they have are largely the result of having the same artist.
While the Imperial Guard is definitely and openly based on the Legion, that was intended to be a “non-crossover crossover,” like the time the Avengers met the Squadron Supreme the same month the JLA met the Heroes of Angor, or when the Invaders fought a team of “Crusaders” based on the Freedom Fighters the same months the Freedom Fighters fought a team of “Crusaders” based on the Invaders. But there were schedule problems on the Legion at the time, and the DC half of the gag didn’t happen. DC chose not to bother with it because the delays would have made it look like payback rather than amicable fun. But some of the characters intended for it turned up later in the Legion of Super-Assassins (Lazon was intended as the Cyclops stand-in, Blok was Colossus, the Silver Slasher was Wolverine, Neutral was Professor X, etc.).
If you mean by that that Dave Cockrum quit DC in 1974 over a dispute, got a staff job at Marvel and wound up being assigned the new X-Men book, then yes, but he didn’t exactly shuttle back and forth, he just quit working for one company and got a job at another. He brought along with him ideas he had hoped to use in LEGION, but they were his ideas.
In any case, Marvel and DC have been competing for decades, and it’s not unusual that one company would try to do their own version of whatever was working for the other (the Fantastic Four was created due to strong sales of JLA, for instance). But most of the X-Men-related stuff you describe here isn’t quite what happened.
@Kurt: That was a comprehensive and really interesting answer! Thanks for going into all that detail 🙂
It’s hard to stop it all, sometimes.
I could have added that maybe Dex was thinking of the revamped Doom Patrol of the later 1970s, who were pretty clearly a response to the new X-Men (with a little Rog-2000 on the side), or even the New Teen Titans, rather than the Legion.
But that seemed like too deep a dive, even for me.
@lurkertype
It’s a weirdly high yet confusing level of detail for a very simple action!
@World Weary
Castalia mainly sells books via outrage. Convincing people that buying a book will somehow stick it to the SJWs is pretty much their entire marketing strategy (at least when There Will Be War isn’t involved, I don’t recall any particular shenanigans surrounding that release, but of course Pournelle sells).
@Stoic Cynic
Well, there are worse songs to be ear-wormed by. 🙂 I spent several days with the Bad Lip Reading Star Wars parody song Bushes of Love stuck in my head after indulging my partner by listening to it and its companions.
@Dann
I love parodies, and as someone who is historically more likely to be found in Transformative Works Fandom than Worldcon Fandom, I’m pretty darn enthusiastic about other fair use rights, too. But… This seems less like a parody than an unrelated book with a trollish and deceptive cover, and as you say a big chaser of being an ass.
Part of the reason stuff like this annoys me is because people abusing parody and fair use rights might lead to them getting restricted for everyone else. Those rights are too important to lose because of idiocy and meanness.
@CassyB: I listened to Kevin and Ursula’s “Crunchy” episode (with bonus dogs and teenager) and thought Oor Wombat’s voice seemed familiar but I couldn’t tell why… till I realized she sounds a lot like me! Or, how I sound recorded, which is of course different from in my head. Presumably she sounds like me in her head too, or vice versa, which is probably frightening for either of us to contemplate.
@Meredith: I started in fanfic/zines back when we were still typing on paper and printing on offset press, so I like fair use myself. Friends and I wrote, illustrated, printed and bound a whole parody zine over one weekend. This ain’t the same. Full derp indeed, as @Matt Y said, and not the hill to die on as spake @Dann.
@Kurt: I learn so much from you!
For anyone not reading the 3/22 Pixel Scroll, you might want to tune in; VD has decided to weigh in. “Full derp,” indeed. Bring your popcorn!