#amazonfail: Something Stinks with Amazon Rank

It pays to keep an eye on your enemies on holidays. War is no respecter of traditions or diversity. So much simpler for your enemy to slip in while you're asleep and cut your throat.

But it helps to know who your enemies are.

Today while gay and lesbian writers were sleeping -or probably hiding eggs for their children and nieces (and smoothing the edge of a chocolate bunny ear so Junior won't realize Mommy nibbled it) or enjoying a chocolate-free Passover seder - little did they know that Amazon.com was staging a secret war on glbt books, authors and publishers.

I fell into the amazonfail brouhaha this morning with a surprising number of twitter grumbles. It just so happens my twitter-posse is mostly writers, agents and editors. Gender-pioneering author Kate Bornstein calls her cluster "Twibe."

Every night she signs off with a "goodnight Twibe" and we all sleep better for it.

If you've never heard of Bornstein I would usually recommend you zip over to Amazon and check out her books... BUT... (Yes, there is a big but. Thanks to the asses at Amazon.) The book ranking search feature at Amazon was sabotaged - not by hackers but by Amazon itself.

Guard your neck. Apparently select books have been being stripped of rank since early Feb. Craig Seymour, author of All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. (Atria/Simon & Schuster), blogged his frustrating correspondence with Amazon.

Seymour, currently Associate Professor of Journalism at Northern Illinois University, said today "Like many authors, I frequently check my sales status on Amazon, so imagine my shock, back in early February when the "Amazon.com Sales Rank" completely disappeared from the Product Details of my book. The book also disappeared from the search listings, so that if a customer looked up All I Could Bare by Craig Seymour on the Amazon home page, nothing came up."

After much persistence on Seymour's part and evasion on Amazon's, "February 25, 2009: I get the first email telling me that my book has been branded as an adult product, as if it's a sex toy or something."

Research proved the new "adult policy" was unevenly applied. Heterosexual stripper memoirs remained general fare while only other gay memoirs disappeared. It was difficult for Seymour to excite the press about the marginalization of queer stripper books.

All that changed on April 12^th, when Amazon's new policy launched its Easter morning assault on indecent literature. Dozens of authors saw their amazon rank disappear. While the books had been silenced, the authors had not. TWITTER to the rescue again.

Quickly, links littered the twittersphere. Widely circulated was Mark R Probst's blog on the disappearance of his YA gay novel The Filly. Since Probst had a publisher's account with Amazon, he was able to receive a quicker explanation than lowly authors.

Amazon's 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.

No explanation who or how it was decided what qualified as adult material. Nor will we ever get one. After more than 20,000 twitters and articles by Seattle Examiner, LA Times, and Associated Press (in that order); Amazon has declared their sneak attack a "glitch".

A very selective glitch which selected out bestselling books including National Book Award winner Friendly Fire: How the gay ban undermines the military and weakens America in spite of no sexual content. Also children's books such as Leslea Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies. Autobiographies of celebrities such as John Barrowman and Stephen Fry. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Alice Walker's The Color Purple. In a few cases, only select editions were de-ranked (Baldwin, Foucault) which suggests smaller presses may have been tagged as gay or lesbian presses. One publisher said while they had only a few gay titles, 60 of their 62 books were delisted. Mostly detective novels with no adult content.

Kenaz Filan posted: "My book, Vodou Love Magic has been de-ranked -- presumably because it includes a "Coming Out of the Closet" spell and information on polyamory. My other two books have not."

Comments following news articles and blogs indicate Amazon has alienated a number of customers. One reader comments "It's really shocking to read the list of what's had its sales rank removed- a college guide for LGBT students? Non-fiction and self-help books? What's "adult" about any of that?"

All the effects of the de-ranking are hard to determine. Craig Seymor (above) was introduced to audiences as the author of an upcoming memoir, even though his book had been out for over a year.

Leaving India author Minal Hajratwala posted "My book about my family and the Indian diaspora was de-ranked, even though it -like many others tagged "Gay & Lesbian"- has zero explicit sexual content. It's not just the rankings but the loss of categories, which means that you can no longer get to my book from another, similar book. If you're looking at, say, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and you click on > History > Asia > India to find similar books, you won't find mine... it's been disappeared. Gayness, it seems, trumps all other categories. I've listed things people can do to protest here: http://www.minalhajratwala.com/blog "

RITA winning novelist, Barbara Caridad Ferrer posted: "The fact that this seems to have been enacted in large scale over a holiday weekend strikes me as... interesting. Just goes to prove, the internet never really sleeps and as for "lowly bloggers," lately, they've been the more reliable, not to mention, rapid sources for news than actual news outlets. End result is, this is a big fail on amazon's part. As an author, I'm going to be asking my web host to take down the purchase buttons from my site and as a reader/consumer, they don't get a cent from me until this is resolved."

When you search Amazon for removed books you may be surprised by what you DO find.

Author of Drag Queen of Elfland, Lawrence Schimel, noted: "Because the titles don't show up in the search engines, now if you type "homosexuality" into the Amazon.com search engine, the first book that comes up is A PARENT'S GUIDE TO PREVENTING HOMOSEXUALITY."

The lists of disappeared books will fill the blogs and newspapers in the days to come. The fast and furious responses are as fascinating and varied as the electronic medium which allows us to research, report and respond.

Someone has been web-graffiti-ing at Amazon. When I looked at the aforementioned and offensive book above, concerned readers had added dozens of categories for "A Parent's Guide..blah blah blah." Here is how the listing appeared to me.

A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality (Paperback) by Joseph Nicolosi (Author), Linda Ames Nicolosi (Author) (146 customer reviews) homophobic (107) bigotry (104) hate (104) delusional (103) nonsense (99) hateful (74) keeping america stupid (70) ghastly (67) disgusting (65) breathtaking inanity (62) gay porn (55) fail (47) parenting (6) gay erotica (4) homosexuality (3) psychology (3) stupid (3) child abuse (2) discrimination (2) gender (2) harmful (2) idiocy (2) ignorant (2) masculinity (2) porn (2) pseudo-science (2) a load of dingos kidneys (1) abortion (1) adolescence (1) adult (1) anti-gay (1) backwards (1) bdsm (1) biased (1) big homo propaganda (1) bird vomit (1) book (1) bre (1) cheney and lesbians (1) christdionity (1) christian living (1) christianity (1) comedy (1) complete stupidity (1) courageous (1) culture (1) devastatingly bad (1) emotional abusive (1) epic fail (1) falsehood (1) fiction (1) gay (1) gay fantasy (1) gay romance (1) gay sex (1) gay studies (1) hateful divisive political rhetoric (1) hatred (1) homeschooling (1) homosexual erotica (1) homosexual porn (1) horrific (1) http search twitter com search q 23amazo... (1) hurting american families (1) ignorance (1) inappropriate (1) it doesn t work (1) lesbian (1) lgbt (1) lgbt porn (1) lies (1) more right-wing nonsense (1) moronic (1) philosophy (1) politics (1) predjudice (1) psychiatry (1) raising children (1) religion (1) repulsive (1) science (1) sex (1) sexism (1) sexist (1) sexuality (1) social studies (1) society (1) spiteful (1) stupidity (1) teen (1) the cancer that is killing america (1) trash (1) vile (1) waste of a good tree (1) wingnut (1) wingnuts (1) wingnuttery (1) wrong (1)

My favorite is "a load of dingos kidneys". While this is unlikely to deter any buyer actually searching for the above book, it no doubt gives the Nicolosi's poor kids a chuckle. It also illustrates the rage-inspiring uselessness of "hiding" the books actually searched for.

Another clever and effective, ploy is google-bombing - which I'd never heard of before. Fighting search engines with search engines. See http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com for an explanation and the new definition of "Amazon Rank".

In addition to a catchy new phrase, I gained a new list of books to read. Nothing like a virtual book burning to inspire a reading marathon.

Smashwords Founder Mark Coker took initiative, posting: "I would like to welcome all indie Amazon ebook authors and publishers affected by this perplexing policy to list with Smashwords instead. We don't discriminate against any content and we pay 2X Amazon. We allow the author/publisher to voluntarily tag their content as adult content, and if a reader is under 18, we warn them. And IMHO, a book with GLBT characters but lacking explicit sexual content SHOULD NOT be listed as adult content. Silly silly. What century do we live in, anyway? I'd also speculate that such homophobic censorship already happens to a great degree in commercial publishing, but it's made under the guise of a book's limited "commercial appeal."

There will be some definite winners and losers in this PR debacle. Wanna guess which list Amazon ranks?