The Book Amazon Won't Sell

I have written 116 books. They have covers so innocent you could shelve them in a nursery, and contents so filthy that one of them got removed from the world's biggest bookshop. This is the story of that one.

The offending item

My Neighbours Cock is a book about a cockerel. A proud, magnificent cockerel who lives next door and makes his presence known at all hours. My neighbour is very fond of him. Everyone in the village has an opinion about him. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, a book about poultry.

What Amazon thought

Amazon sells most of my catalogue and behaves itself perfectly well. But this one it won't sell. Somewhere in the machinery, a decision was made that a picture book about a large and noisy bird crossed a line that Fisting, somehow, did not. I've stopped trying to understand the logic. I've started putting "Banned from Amazon" on the listing instead, because if a robot is going to hand you a marketing angle, you take it.

Why this keeps happening to my books

The entire formula is plausible deniability. The cover promises a farmyard tale. The story delivers a farmyard tale. Your brain does absolutely all of the work, and no two readers are ruined in quite the same way. Content filters, it turns out, have brains too, and theirs are filthier than yours.

Where the banned book lives now

Right here, £12.99, sold by the author with no algorithm in the middle. You can get My Neighbours Cock signed, which Amazon could never offer anyway, and it ships worldwide with free UK delivery over £25. It sits happily alongside the rest of the best sellers, most of which remain, for now, legal on all platforms.

Buy the book they wouldn't sell you. Gift it to someone who keeps chickens. Watch their face.