What's the Difference between Trigger Warnings and Content Warnings?

The first thing I’m going to say is that sometimes people are going to have different definitions for these terms - so that being said, here’s my take on the situation.

Trigger warnings are content warnings, but not all content warnings are trigger warnings.

So the difference.

Trigger warnings would be for content that could be psychologically damaging for a reader to read them. Things like unaliving yourself or other people, unaliving babies, sexual assault, rape, things of that nature.

And so then a content warning would be, well, these are for people's preferences. Some people don't like to read about sex.

So content warning, there's sex in all my books.

Graphic, graphic, detailed sex.

One of the problems of trying to provide warnings is that, especially on Amazon, using certain words can actually harm your book with the algorithms. For kinky books, you’ll sometimes see a content warning of: “this book contains elements of power exchange.”

You can also put in just kind of a generalized this book may contain content that could be upsetting to some readers to try and avoid messing up with the retailer algorithms and having your book suppressed. And that's not very specific, but it's at least giving them a heads up that, hey, there's something in here. And if they're really worried or they have specific triggers that could damage them, they can reach out to the author.

An easier way of doing that would be putting a letter to the readers inside of your book, letting them know what the triggers in your book are. You can also put them up on your website.

There's a lot of debate on whether or not to actually put them in the blurb. And that is because some of the things can trigger Amazon's metadata bots to then shove your book into what we call the dungeon. And the dungeon does not just mean being put in erotica.

For the most part, books in erotica are still searchable (for now). If you go to the search bar, you type in the book, it will still come up.

If you get dungeoned, then you're like my book, The Sassy Submissive, where if you search for it, the ebook doesn't show up. The only way to get to the ebook is with a direct link or going to the series page. But you can't just search it because it got dungeoned probably for something in the metadata.

But we don't always know why.

And so that's why it can be good to be careful about what you're putting in the blurbs when it comes to trigger and content warnings.

My best advice - put them on your website or inside your book, just in case. And, of course, you can also use them when promoting your book so people know way ahead of time, but that’s a tip for another day.