Weekly Whine: Profanity

One thing that irritates me both as a writer and reader is that Amazon does not have a good way to denote how much profanity there is in a book. There ought to be a clear rating for every book saying how much profanity or sex there is.

Personally, the profanity does not bother me. But I have had many people give my books a bad rating with no other explanation other than "there was cursing." Obviously, it doesn't take much profanity to upset people. If you read my books, you'd recognize that I hardly swear like a sailor. Any profanity is few and far between.

And as a reader, I've noticed that there are certain books that may have lower ratings and I have to read through all the readings to realize that the books just got dinged for having profanity. I don't get it. Do people just go around giving bad reviews to books that have any profanity in them? This upsets me both as a reader and a writer. I use the ratings on Amazon to decide whether to buy a book, so a bad review that has nothing to do with the quality of the book misleads other people.

And I guess it sucks for the people who hate profanity too. If they are still bothered by a few curse words and have no way to tell if a book is going to offend them until they are immersed in it.