Amazon.com Strips Sales Rankings From GBLT Books

[Legend]

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system? Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

Yes, it is true. Amazon admits they are indeed stripping the sales ranking indicators for what they deem to be “adult” material. Of course they are being hypocritical because there is a multitude of “adult” literature out there that is still being ranked – Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, come on! They are using categories THEY set up (gay and lesbian) to now target these books as somehow offensive.

Now in fairness I should point out that Amazon has also stopped ranking many books in the "erotica" categories as well which includes straight erotica. But that's a whole other battle that I'll leave to the erotica writers to take on.

Now I could probably convince the automatons at Amazon that The Filly is YA and therefore not “adult” in the least, and I could probably even convince them to reinstate my ranking. But if they are excluding books just on the basis of being “gay” then by all means exclude mine too because I don’t want them just to reinstate just the “nice” gay books, they need to reinstate all the gay books and if they are really going to try and exclude so-called “adult” material, then how come this has an Amazon ranking?

http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html


What the hell was amazon thinking.

[marcelloNYC]

WOW. I am shocked at amazon :(

[GroobySteven]

It's their business - it's up to them how they choose to do it.
You have the choice whether to do business with them or not.

[Legend]

It's their business - it's up to them how they choose to do it.
You have the choice whether to do business with them or not.

Of course it's their buisness but i wouldn't say they can do whatever they want,that sort of attitude might work for small companies but for big places like amazon who is trying to attract all the customers they can in the first place it will probably make them lose customers.

[GroobySteven]

It's their business - it's up to them how they choose to do it.
You have the choice whether to do business with them or not.

Of course it's their buisness but i wouldn't say they can do whatever they want,that sort of attitude might work for small companies but for big places like amazon who is trying to attract all the customers they can in the first place it will probably make them lose customers.

... or attract more customers who don't want their children polluted by disgusting words like gay and lesbian.

[Legend]

It's their business - it's up to them how they choose to do it.
You have the choice whether to do business with them or not.

Of course it's their buisness but i wouldn't say they can do whatever they want,that sort of attitude might work for small companies but for big places like amazon who is trying to attract all the customers they can in the first place it will probably make them lose customers.

... or attract more customers who don't want their children polluted by disgusting words like gay and lesbian.

Disrespect and lose the customers you currently have for customers you think you'll attract,that isn't good buisness.

[SarahG]

It's back, but yahoo news/AP news isn't mentioning that they reclassified thousands of LGBT items as "adult only"- as LGBT items were the real target here, this wasn't a random glitch.



They're baaaack! Amazon restores sales rankings
AP

By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer Hillel Italie, Ap National Writer – 2 hrs 22 mins ago

NEW YORK – The missing sales numbers are coming back on Amazon.com.

Two days after Amazon said a "glitch" had caused the sales rank to be dropped from thousands of books, the numbers returned Tuesday for Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" and other notable titles.

Some authors whose rankings were dropped have posted messages from Amazon that said their books had been categorized as "Adult" and were being removed from some best-seller lists and search functions. Amazon's actions led to a furious stream of responses on Twitter and elsewhere online.

Amazon has yet to comment on the author messages, but on Monday called the deletions an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" and promised "to implement new measures" to prevent them in the future.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090414/ap_en_ot/amazon_s_glitch

Now, Amazon's system idiotically lets the people browsing their site flag stuff as "adult/inappropriate" so all it takes is a few fundies on red bull flagging stuff in the LGBT section and stuff gets banned (or at least, moved to adult sections).

But Amazon knows letting random people on the general public flag stuff will mean flagging stuff based on political agendas... Amazon has not re-classified Ann Coulter or Michael Moore's books as "adult only" and I am sure those items get far more red flagging attempts than say, "Transgressions"

So why did they allow the LGBT stuff to "disappear" when they're not allowing people to exploit flagging to remove political works like from Ann Coulter or Michael Moore?

[bte]

I read that a hacker is claiming responsibility for the sales ranking.

[tsmandy]

It's their business - it's up to them how they choose to do it.
You have the choice whether to do business with them or not.

That is true, but it doesn't mean that their actions don't have broader implications for society and the information people have access too. Right now Amazon is putting bookstores out of business left and right. From mom and pop stores to bigger chains like Borders etc...everyone in the bookselling industry has to deal with competition from Amazon. As more and more people get their books exclusively from Amazon, that gives Amazon a much more powerful control over the information people access and the books they read. In that sense, its actually pretty disturbing that they would target LGBT themed novels as ones that should be more difficult to locate than say the Left Behind Books by fundamentalist Christain wackos Tim and Bev Lahaye. In turn, that will probably make it harder for LGBT writers to convince already reticent publishing houses to take a chance on anything that won't have the same exposure and likely sales as "straight" themed content....

So the decision obviously merits a little more discussion than, just shop elsewhere. Maybe Amazon should just rescind that policy, and maybe if enough outraged people contacted them they wouldn't pander to the jackasses who make such demands.

[MacShreach]

It's their business - it's up to them how they choose to do it.
You have the choice whether to do business with them or not.

That is true, but it doesn't mean that their actions don't have broader implications for society and the information people have access too. Right now Amazon is putting bookstores out of business left and right. From mom and pop stores to bigger chains like Borders etc...everyone in the bookselling industry has to deal with competition from Amazon. As more and more people get their books exclusively from Amazon, that gives Amazon a much more powerful control over the information people access and the books they read. In that sense, its actually pretty disturbing that they would target LGBT themed novels as ones that should be more difficult to locate than say the Left Behind Books by fundamentalist Christain wackos Tim and Bev Lahaye. In turn, that will probably make it harder for LGBT writers to convince already reticent publishing houses to take a chance on anything that won't have the same exposure and likely sales as "straight" themed content....

So the decision obviously merits a little more discussion than, just shop elsewhere. Maybe Amazon should just rescind that policy, and maybe if enough outraged people contacted them they wouldn't pander to the jackasses who make such demands.

Everything you said. Amazon has made itself into a virtual monopoly, and freedom of speech issues are now relevant because of that. What next does Amazon make difficult to find-- The Origin of Species?

This goes way beyond the legitimate right of a business to make its own decisions.

[bte]

I don't understand how GLBT books can lose their sales ranking, when books like Mein Kampf and the Turner Diaries are being sold on Amazon.

[SarahG]

It's their business - it's up to them how they choose to do it.
You have the choice whether to do business with them or not.

That is true, but it doesn't mean that their actions don't have broader implications for society and the information people have access too. Right now Amazon is putting bookstores out of business left and right. From mom and pop stores to bigger chains like Borders etc...everyone in the bookselling industry has to deal with competition from Amazon. As more and more people get their books exclusively from Amazon, that gives Amazon a much more powerful control over the information people access and the books they read. In that sense, its actually pretty disturbing that they would target LGBT themed novels as ones that should be more difficult to locate than say the Left Behind Books by fundamentalist Christain wackos Tim and Bev Lahaye. In turn, that will probably make it harder for LGBT writers to convince already reticent publishing houses to take a chance on anything that won't have the same exposure and likely sales as "straight" themed content....

So the decision obviously merits a little more discussion than, just shop elsewhere. Maybe Amazon should just rescind that policy, and maybe if enough outraged people contacted them they wouldn't pander to the jackasses who make such demands.

To add to that, the whole publishing industry uses Amazon's ranking system. So pulling books off the ranks and thrown into adult categories does more than impact sales or how easy someone could find "heather has two mommies" on the site. There are all kinds of ramifications from titles loosing all their amazon rank statistics.

[muhmuh]

apparently nothing more than a fairly clever exploit (and no its not a hack)
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14854

[MacShreach]

apparently nothing more than a fairly clever exploit (and no its not a hack)
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14854

Thanks for that.

[Suckalot1]

that guy legend is a fool.