Easter weekend was a big one for me. Not only was I not going to have to do any cooking (my sister threw the Easter bash this year), but my new gay paranormal novel Angels of the Deep was being released by MLR Press. I had been keeping close tabs on my Amazon sales rankings and category bestseller listings for the past few months, and I knew that my previous novels were doing pretty well in sales. Their ranks were finally dipping regularly into the eight and nine thousand marks (which with 7 million+ titles on Amazon, is pretty darn good, they tell me), and Angels of the Deep was on bookshelf lists, wish lists, blogs, and recommended reading lists for a month before it came out.
I checked my stats on Friday night and noticed something odd: the sales rankings for two of my print books had vanished. I didn’t give it much thought at the time. Or if I did it was like: “Oi, where are they?” I never once thought that something as unfair and unashamedly discriminatory as removing my sales ranks and stripping my various place ranks in the (gay and lesbian) category bestsellers had happened. I put it down to temporary database issues.
By Sunday afternoon, when I attempted to show off my book links on Amazon to friends and family and my stats had failed to return, I started to feel a little uneasy. This wasn’t right. Again – the same as two years ago when Amazon abruptly wiped every digital ebook title from their shelves prior to implementing their proprietary Kindle format – Amazon had done something.
Early Sunday night, a quick check of my blogroll informed me that Amazon.com was removing gay and lesbian- themed books from bestselling lists and erasing sales rankings. All of my print novels on Amazon had been delisted. A search of my name on Amazon now only returned my novels that were available in Kindle format. To find my print novels, you had to click on my name to specifically request to see what else I had written. This was definitely not normal.
At that time, a glitch was not being blamed. Amazon was sending out form letters explaining that delisting and stripping sales ranks was the new policy for “adult” material. In other words: “gay = adult, now leave us alone, thanks.”
It went like this:
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
I was pretty dismayed. No, scratch that: I was downright upset and mad. I’d been waiting and working on this novel for a long time, so you can imagine how I felt when I found out that – as far as Amazon.com was concerned- no matter how well it sold, neither its author nor its readership were ever going to be correctly represented by Amazon. The results would be fudged and hidden. I felt cheated, and certain words like blacklist began to circulate the ‘net.
And now, even though Amazon has sent out a press release claiming a “database glitch” is responsible for the delisting of gay and lesbian titles, I note that they’re only apologizing to the big name authors and the powerful publishing houses. Not a word has been said about whether or not small and independent presses are going to be including in this sweeping “glitch reversal”, and as yet I’ve seen no reversals on my Amazon pages. When it comes to backing down, I believe it all boils down to who a corporation thinks they can and cannot bully, and since bullies tend to pick on the smaller guys, I’m feeling pretty cynical at the moment.
It really is possible to find the category best seller lists for Gay & Lesbian fiction, but it takes some manual search and a lot of clicking to get there: Gay & Lesbian, Literature and Fiction, Fiction, Romance
When it comes to internet sales, the last thing you want is for your customers to get frustrated before they get to where they want to be on your site. More clicks = less sales. Amazon was the first major bookseller who touted one-click sales. It was the home of one-click sales. I have to wonder just how much prejudice went into this decision to make themselves the home of jumping through hoops to get to the homosexual fiction.
Image credit: Bill T
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