Amazon removes book for containing too many hyphens

How many hyphens are too many? Author Graeme Reynolds's professionally-edited book was removed from the Kindle Store for excessive punctuation

Graeme Reynolds's book was removed from the Amazon website
Graeme Reynolds's book was removed from the Amazon website Credit: Photo: PA

A British author who spent £1000 getting his book professionally edited saw it rejected from Amazon's Kindle Store because it contained too many hyphens.

Graeme Reynolds's book High Moor 2: Moonstruck had been on sale since March 2013, and had received more than a hundred positive reviews.

Reynolds was surprised to receive an email on December 14 saying that his book had been removed from sale due to poor punctuation.

In a blog post, Reynolds wrote that Amazon contacted him following a complaint about the number of hyphens in the 90,000 word novel.

He wrote that the email said such usage “significantly impacts the readability of [his] book” and that they had "suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers".

In a reply to Amazon, Reynolds pointed out that hyphenated words are an accepted part of the English language, and attached a link to a definition of its usage, but Amazon did not appear to enjoy his sense of humour.

He received a reply saying that his book had been removed from sale, and he had 40 days to remove the hyphens from his novel before it was removed permanently.

Reynolds wrote on his blog: "It would be comedic, really, if the situation was not costing me money and resulted in one of my best-selling books being unavailable in the run up to the busiest time of the year."

He added: "What’s next? Will we start getting penalised 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?"

The book returned to sale on December 15, apparently following the viral success of his blog post.

He joked on Twitter: "Oh, we sorted that out. 180,000 hits on the blog post may have helped."

Amazon could not be reached for comment.