What is your favourite form of punctuation? Mine is the semicolon. It wouldn’t be my desert island choice – that’d have to be something more boringly prosaic, such as the full stop. But a nice semicolon, properly used, is delicious.
I ask because I am almost too tickled to type at the discovery that an author, one Graeme Reynolds, found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of his excessive use of the hyphen. Reynolds has written about his inexplicable experience on his blog, but in summary: he released his werewolf novel, High Moor 2: Moonstruck, last March, after paying over £1,000 for professional editing. It’s had over 100 almost entirely positive reviews on Amazon.
Then, on 12 December, Reynolds got an email from the internet retailer, which had apparently received a complaint from a reader “about the fact that some of the words in the book were hyphenated” (let’s not even wonder about who on earth would go to the trouble of emailing Amazon about this).
“When they ran an automated spell check against the manuscript they found that over 100 words in the 90,000-word novel contained that dreaded little line,” he says. “This, apparently ‘significantly impacts the readability of your book’ and, as a result, ‘We have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.’”
Reynolds complained, pointing out “that the use of a hyphen to join two words together was perfectly valid in the English language”, and says he was told by Amazon: “As quality issues with your book negatively affect the reading experience, we have removed your title from sale until these issues are corrected ... Once you correct hyphenated words, please republish your book and make it available for sale.”
As Reynolds writes, less acronymically, WTAF.
He gives Amazon credit for “at least trying to address ... the quality of the ebooks on their device”, but suggests the team’s time “would be better spent looking at the 10-page automatically generated ‘books’ that are flooding the Kindle store to game the Kindle Unlimited algorithms, or the impending tidal wave of NaNoWriMo first drafts that are about to hit us, than waging war on a professionally edited novel that had the gall to use hyphens to join words together.”
Fortunately – perhaps because of his blog and the number of hits it got (350,000-odd, apparently) – Amazon has now allowed the novel to return to sale, hyphens and all. Ever-intrepid, I waded in to take a look, and do you know what? I couldn’t even find many hyphens in the first few pages (although someone’s eyes were, terrifyingly, “glazed black orbs”).
I’d say that perhaps Reynolds should have plumped for smaller hyphens, as when they do appear (“razor-filled muzzle”, “brown-furred monster”), they look a little like em dashes. I could be wrong, though, and I’m not sure I’ll bother contacting Amazon about it.
The best thing about all of this? The latest review for the novel on Amazon.com, from one Duke Leffler, says: “I love this book but I hope this is the edition without the hyphens. I read the hyphenated edition a couple of weeks ago and had to spend a week in ICU. My livers [sic] and kidney shut down and the doctors said I would need to absorb as many non hyphenated publications as possible if I were to have a chance to survive.”
“I ran into a rogue hyphen once out on a moor, ironically enough, and it beat me up so badly I had blood in my urine for months,” adds another poster. The internet, ladies and gentlemen: sometimes it’s just, well, brilliant.
