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 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?
Here is a screencap of the case log from Amazon. Keep clicking on the image to make it bigger
************For everyone who has commented on my blog - Thank you very much. and everyone who has asked if they can use my name and link back to me. YES please do. Spread the word. Amazon will be beside itself in the face of all this fury!
*******UPDATE**************
Publisher's Weekly now has a story here, that an Amazon spokesperson claims this is all a glitch and they have no such new policy. My caselog is still active in my Advantage account with the response from customer service rep Ashlyn D. Also I'd like to point you to this blog of an author who received this same response from Amazon back in February. Amazon has some 'splainin' to do!
***********UPDATE #2******************
As of 8 AM this morning (April 13th) The Filly has had its ranking reinstated by Amazon. I also noticed Alex Beecroft's False Colors was reinstated as well. Many others are not, so they haven't fixed the "so-called" glitch as of yet.
*******FINAL UPDATE******************
Amazon has released a statement of apology stating that it was an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" that pertained to 57,310 listings. They also say that It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles. So it's over. Amazon admits they goofed, and I, for one, shall give them the benefit of the doubt and say I do not believe that there was any malicious intent. Case closed.
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markprobst- Mark R. Probst
- Cheyenne Publishing
Comments
And that's a huge problem. They would never in a million years put het romance on the back shelf; that would mean protecting children from Snow White and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and all the rest of the Disney empire and Grimm's Fairy Tales.</i> Nonsexual romance, when it's heterosexual, is by definition deemed absolutely fine for children by everyone in the whole world. Nonsexual romance, when it's gay, suddenly isn't. And I absolutely believe Amazon's actions indicate an intentional acceptance of that distinction. And I strongly object to that.
Your argument would stand if they were doing the same for all explicit material, but they're not. There are very much more explicit hetero books still with their sales rankings, giving the impression that they think that gay sex is somehow 'more sexual' than non-gay sex. That is homophobia.
Congratulations, Amazon. You're officially just as right as the MPAA.
And a lot of books are being flagged as 'adult' when they are self-help books, contain no mention of sex (only gay characters) and so on.
here is a list of books that are being subjected to such censorship: http://community.livejournal.com/meta_w
And I don't know what it's like in the bookstores near you, but my local bookstores assume that people are grown up and mature enough to do their own browsing and make their own judgments about what to buy. They're not putting "Tipping the Velvet" or gay erotica in the kids section. This is in adult fiction and adult non-fiction, and on the end-tables and the new release tables for adults.
So no, I don't buy your argument that this is just like taking the books out of the window. It's not.
That deserves a cookie.
And in any case, I bet there are thousands of books that Amazon don't sell at all, based on their content, so this isn't exactly a new thing. They're just a business trying to make money, and to do so they have to keep the most people happy. The simple facts are they probably have more minors looking at the site than homosexuals.
Tell me again how this isn't censorship? Seriously, I hate to hijack this discussion, but I'm fascinated that some people think it's perfectly acceptable for physical and online booksellers to HIDE certain books due to subject matter.
That doesn't make it OK, or even remotely acceptable. My husband
The thing is though, they are barely hiding the books. All you have to do is a book-specific search (as opposed to all departments) to find them.
This IS censorship. This is gay people being made invisible and pushed behind the curtain by a massive international retailer. It is NOT OK in any sense.
Amazon are a business - they need to satisfy the most people who spend the most money with them as much as they can. They're not the government, they don't have any obligation to give all products the same level of promotion. And it's not like they've removed it all, they've just taken it out of the focus of those who might take offence at it. I'm sure if 90% of the population was gay and 10% was straight, it would be an entirely different story, but the fact is that homosexuals are in the minority.
Also, I've never heard of that legislation, but I suspect it about discrimination of people, not discrimination of subject matter.