In Amazon We Trust - Not

I am really bummed about the whole Amazon debacle. In case you haven’t heard, Amazon first claimed an “adult” material policy and then a glitch to explain why they took the sales rankings and resultant search sales status away from every book in their list that contained gay material. This purported policy left explicit adult material still ranked as long as it was hetero. They are supposedly fixing it, but as of this writing my Raised By Wolves titles don’t have sales rankings, and Blood and Love & Benjamins (both het) do. Rest assured, the realization they had done this went viral on Easter, and Amazon was back peddling and claiming the glitch by last night. Thousands of people got in their face about it – thank the Gods.

I don’t think Amazon de-ranked every GBLT book in their database out of homophobia or caving to the right. As much as I thought that late last night, it really doesn’t make sense. Amazon is a liberal company, and the explanation from a former Amazon employee that I saw on one of the forums does make sense.

If this person was correct, the whole debacle was very likely caused by someone in Amazon’s dbase programming division making a booboo while trying to tweak their sales ranking logarithms – possibly for a new adult/explicit material policy - and screwing up by picking up everything tagged gay/lesbian/transgender/bi and equating it with “adult” – a category (not just porn) that is purportedly a problem area for Amazon’s system. (The e-mail sent round the world last night from Amazon customer service mentions a policy to deal with adult material. Perhaps this is a new policy they were looking at, and it was truly meant to apply across the board to all explicit material and someone goofed – as noted – and coded the tag pick up wrong.) Anyway, porn and material for mature audiences (“adult”) – whether it be romance novels, tell alls, graphic horror, former-addict bios, memoirs, Playboy, or nude-filled coffee table books, probably outsells everything – to the point that – according to the former employee – it takes over all the best seller lists and every search function if given a chance in Amazon’s system. I can see that. (It also means Amazon’s ranking system has some serious design flaws – but I can see how it could happen)

But this means Amazon is always screwing with the mature material numbers to deal with the problem. That really disturbs me. Ok, so it happens. So maybe they need to do that in order for the NYT best sellers promoted by the major houses to stay up in the rankings… lol Maybe they need to do that in order for anyone to locate anything literary… But it’s a lie, nonetheless.

Amazon is a boon to publishers because of their listing, ranking, and referral system. You sell well relative to other books in your genre, get good reviews, and a variety of tags, and your book is rewarded by being boosted in sales ranking and referred to more people. The system allows little-known books to get found, and popular books to snowball. But if they’re futzing with those numbers to suppress the true bestsellers, then that’s a problem even if the end result benefits a wider range of books.

It’s a lie. Maybe the world needs to know that nine out of ten people buy adult material. I definitely think the number of conservative, right-wing, religious zealots who now claim they will buy more from Amazon because it tried to censor the GBLT books need to know that they’re (the zealots) full of shit. IF this scenario is the case, I think the intolerant religious nuts should be told in no uncertain terms that Amazon is only trying to suppress adult material that MOST PEOPLE want, in order for them (the religious nuts) to be able to find their wholesome biblical stuff.

Whether or not that scenario is true, I don’t know what I think about Amazon right now. They responded to my query about my books (containing my threat to contact the ACLU) with a form announcement and apology about the “glitch”. They had a little response thing asking if their response solved my problem. I said “no” and sent them another e-mail saying how very disappointed I was, and that I wanted a public apology to all the effected authors and publishers, or I was going to take my business elsewhere and encourage others to do the same.

But the sad thing is, from my perspective, even if they say what really happened and apologize, there are still religious homophobes who will just think Amazon caved to liberal pressure. Meanwhile, there will still be liberal fanatics who will claim Amazon caved to conservative pressure and created the problem only to reverse their decision due to the power of liberals telling them homophobia wasn’t going to cut it. (I tell you: I really hate people… Both sides. All sides.)

I think that Amazon just shot themselves in the balls… With any luck, people will actually remember this in two days and Amazon will have damaged their credibility. If that’s the case, I think this bodes very well for independent bookstores - if they will just get their act together and capitalize on it. I don’t know what it will mean for me. Sadly, book stores are not the friend of the small publisher – they don’t have the shelf space or margins to experiment much. However, a good percentage of my books used to sell in GBLT stores – all of which have web storefronts. So I don’t know. I think I will be adding a page to the new site – still in progress – of alternative places to buy my titles – places other than Amazon.