I got a message a couple of weeks ago that one of my book ads had been suspended on Amazon due to “Images depicting excessive violence.”

While some of the content of Petty Crimes and Vindictive Criminals is hair-raisingly nasty, the cover is so tasteful by comparison, I sometimes feel it doesn’t adequately prepare readers for the stories inside. Ghoul: A Romance, for example, is one of my shorts I direct people to as a trial-by-fire. If they’re still willing to be seen with me in public after that, I know I don’t need to bite my tongue in their presence.

Clearly some poorly programmed image-interpretation software had tagged the cover, assuming it was something it was not. A response was in order.

As I wrote back to Amazon:

The cover is black and white and features a stock, staged photo of a 1940s detective standing over a bloodless murder victim in the style of classic film noir. It’s very tame.

I’ve seen more violent and/or gory children’s books. Is this the work of some overzealous algorithm, or has Amazon decided it will no longer accept ads for any crime novel or anthology?

The ad was reinstated immediately, once a human being had a look. It was still a disturbing interaction that illustrates why we shouldn’t be letting computers be the final arbitrator of content creators. Use them to flag potential issues, but let an actual person make the call. I don’t care how much content you’re trying to police, the impetus shouldn’t be on me to undo your software’s incorrect decrees.

Pretty Crimes and Vindictive Criminals remains for sale on all Amazon sites. At least until they develop a more censorious algorithm to read the contents, tag all the transgressions, and decide they no longer want to be associated with such deeply disturbed authors.