Getting Cocky:Trademarking Romance Titles:

chompers said:

I just found out today that "For beginners" is trademarked.

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Hey all.

I wanted to post a bit about the various Trade Mark stuff that is going on- mostly to address the trade dress TM that I filed, but also to talk a bit about my reputation and suspension.

Yesterday I received about 2,543 or so threatening PMs/emails about the trade dress TM. This is the one where I own the design of the cover.

At first, I replied to all of these with: "What is your problem? The TM application has all the specimens of my covers and fonts and such- I don't want my customers to be confused by other authors trying to copy my design titles, but it's not like I can sue every author in the world for having a dude on the cover with a weapon."

The response was "No, this is too broad. Also, I want you to die in a fire."

So I talked to my lawyer today. Ends up that he DID file it too broad. It isn't at all relegated to my specific fonts, etc... I asked him to pull that TM ASAP. Obviously, I don't want to go to war with the world- and authors should be able to have people with weapons on the cover. This thing would have never gone through the way it was. It was also an asshole move, I totally agree and it wasn't my intent. My intent was to protect my brand.

I am still filing TMs for my series names. These are profitable series that are part of my brand. I've heard the arguments of "these are common words, you can't TM them!" and "This is just a cash grab by a loser author!" Those arguments aren't very useful. My series make me money, and I'm TMing a SERIES NAME. Not a word. Not an individual book title. You might think it is unfair that I'd want to TM them, but do you also think it's unfair that Twilight Saga, Game of Thrones, and Hunger Games are Trade Marked? Why can't an independent author trademark their series names? I'm not saying you all should applaud me, but I kind of doubt a traditional publishing house would be getting the same avalanche of hate I am.

"But a certain other author has filed C&Ds to take books off Amazon with a certain word on it! You'll do the same!"

Again- I'm filing for a series name. NOT A WORD OR A NOVEL TITLE. Chris Fox has a Destroyer novel, so does Shannon Mayer. I can't use my SERIES TM to take down their books. That's not how this works. There is currently another series named "The Destroyer" written by Warren Murphy. My lawyer feels that I might not get that TM because of that older series, but even if I do, I can't take that series down (nor would I want to) because it's way older than mine and a completely different genre. From what my lawyer has told me, TMs can't really be used to take down existing stuff. They just block new imitations that could confuse customers.

"So if you own the TM, no one can ever write a Dragon Slayer series? That's horrible."

No one can write a Twilight Saga, Game of Thrones, or Hunger Games series either. Look, despite a certain website you might have seen with a landscape of cleverly photo shopped "Dragon Slayer" covers intended to outrage you, I don't know of a single SERIES of books named Dragon Slayer that has ever been written. There might have been one back in the day, but I couldn't find a SERIES named that.

My books almost always hit sub 50 in the store when they are released. I'm one of the most successful independent authors in the world, and if no one has written a "Dragon Slayer" series in the last 70+ years, why would they want to write one now? Is there a chance they might want to coattail on my success? Confuse my customers and get extra sales? Has something like that ever happened before in the history of business? Yeah, these are common words in the fantasy genre, but they aren't that common- or there would have been dozens of Dragon Slayer series out there.

"But you're account is suspended right now. You are a slime ball and have been cheating the system."

I can understand this mentality. When something bad happens to someone in the same peer group, people tend to look for reasons why that person was a villain and "not doing the right thing" so that they feel safer about their own position and can sleep at night.

Here is the thing:
- I wasn't stuffing. A good chunk of you have read my books, and you know I wasn't.
- I wasn't click farming. I have an organic NL of 20,000 people and a massive FB fan group. Someone could have pulled a hit out on me and hired one of these companies to do it, but I have never cared about fake rank. I want to build a real business providing great entertainment to my fans.
- I had spaces in my ebook formatting and space between paragraphs, but so do/did most major authors. Michael Anderle swore by putting the spaces in because his readers loved it. As far as a bunch of people have tested, extra spaces don't change page count.

So I got the letter from Amazon Monday saying I was "involved in the manipulation of our KDP services including Kindle Unlimited" Then my books were gone 5 minutes after.

I still have no idea why, and I was the 53rd best selling author in Amazon's entire store.

Maybe you think I'm an asshole (and I'll admit that I am pretty salty sometimes), but I got no phone call warning, I got no email saying "Hey, you are one of our top producers. We see something weird on your account. Let's work together to fix it", I got nothing but this and the possible end of my career. They haven't answered my emails, or my phone calls.

I have a fan that works in Amazon corporate, and he's asked around- apparently my latest book was flagged for copyright infringement, and they apparently have a new system that is scanning books and making all sorts of false positives. He thinks my account might be up in a week, but that might not be true, he might not be talking to the right people, and I'm trying not to get my hopes up.

I don't know what happened. If I did something wrong, I don't know what I did, and I wasn't given a chance to fix it. Could this happen to you? I don't know. It happened to me, and my career might be over because of it. You all can feel I did something to deserve this, but I don't think I did, and it would have been real nice to get a warning phone call from someone at Amazon before they decided to gut me.

A bunch of authors have gotten suspended/banned in the last few weeks. Were they all doing something wrong? I don't know, but the situation is terrible, and the whole "they all deserved it" mentality is not helping the community a lot of people have been accusing me of trying to destroy.

Anyway- share this in other groups if you want to. Thanks for reading.

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cmhbob said:

I do, at least as to the shuttering of his account. I've read no claims that he was stuffing, and he denies it as well.

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mrsmig said:

The article is definitely one-sided. But I'm glad the situation has been resolved, and I am hoping the US Patent and Trademark Office has learned its lesson, too.

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cmhbob said:

I do, at least as to the shuttering of his account. I've read no claims that he was stuffing, and he denies it as well.

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chompers said:

If this is in response to my post, I wasn't talking about stuffing. I was talking about their other tactics of manipulating sales.

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ElaineA said:

I have helpfully paraphrased it in case you don't want to read it.

"This is my official statement: I've written the best series to have ever been written and the entire world loves them and I am so popular and the best writer don't @ me. Also you can now copy my brilliance. I was attacked."

It's close. Don't @ me.

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BenPanced said:

She's gonna go eat some worms.

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