The Blogosphere and Twittershphere is abuzz with Amazon’s censorship of m/m, f/f and erotica (though curiously, not all m/f erotica seems to have been censored) through stripping the ranks off all those books. For example, if I go to the Amazon main page (UK or US) and type in Marquesate in the search box, it returns as “not found” if I put it into books, it returns Her Majesty’s Men and the I Do anthology. As you will see with both, there are no rankings. Now, I thought at first that I didn’t know if I had a ranking, because I don’t check such things, and then realised that I used to do an automatic tracking on a beta site. Lo and behold, the tracking for both I Do and HMM don’t work any more, because they track via the sales ranks.
The facts:
Mark Probst received an answer from Amazon regarding the stripping of the ranking:
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
It is very BAD for any author to sell through Amazon anyway, we hardly get anything. Seriously, I get a ridiculous pittance if a book is sold through Amazon, in comparison with direct sales, and that’s true for everyone. Yet every publisher has to go through them, really, because they are a giant corporation and because they are “it” on the internet. Actually, as an aside, if you live in the UK, and look for music and/or DVDs, don’t bother with Amazon, go to Play.com, much better prices, and even if not, always free shipping on everything.
Things you can do as a reader:
1. Sign the petition
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy
2. If you are on Twitter, tweet about it! The hashtag is #amazonfail
3. Write to the CEO of Amazon
Jeffrey Bezos.
1200 12th Avenue South,
Seattle,
Washington 98144-2734,
United States
Phone: 206-266-1000
Fax: 206-622-2405
4. Contact info for Amazon for calls, emails, faxes letters
[...] never got the email, don’t know what happened”. A glitch cannot be a glitch if a customer rep stated clearly that it was Amazon Policy to remove such [...]