Amazon removes book for excessive use of hyphens

On Sunday, things were looking up for British author Graeme Reynolds. His recent novel High Moor 2: Moonstruck was getting good reviews and selling well on Amazon since it was published last March. Needless to say, he had no warning of the editorial storm that was about to erupt.

Reynolds was enjoying himself at a friend's book launch party when he received an e-mail from Amazon stating that there was a "quality control" notice regarding his book and that it had been suspended from the site. 

The "quality control" issue? Too many hyphens. According to Reynolds, he used roughly a 100 of them in a 90-thousand word novel.  

"Once I stopped laughing, I sent them a letter back, pointing out that hyphens were a perfectly valid means within the English language of joining two words together," he tells As it Happens host Carol Off. With his response, Reynolds included a link to the Oxford English Dictionary on the usage of hyphens. 

"I though that would be the end of it."

It wasn't. The next day, he received a response instructing him to remove all hyphenated words within 40 days, or High Moor 2 would be removed from Amazon for good. 

Apoplectic, Reynolds turned to his blog to vent his frustration: "What's next? Will we start getting penalized for using words of more than two syllables? Is the semi-colon also headed for extinction? Is JK Rowling going to have to take down Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince until she sorts out the blatant hyphenation in the title? Is Cormac McCarthy going to have to go and put in punctuation to The Road?"

By Monday, the his blog post and been viewed thousands of times. And the editorial war apparently concluded. Without explanation, High Moor 2: Moonstruck reappeared for sale on the Amazon website.

"It would be nice if the 350-thousand people who looked at the blog had all clicked the 'buy book', but that hasn't happened yet."