So a few folks have sent me notes about this. Basically, Amazon changed the way it “ranks” sales recently, and decided not to rank products that are “Adult”. So what, you might ask, is “adult”? The answer, it turns out, is anything gay. You can check out a list of de-ranked books here; they include the works of James Baldwin, Edmund White, EM Forster, Annie Proulx, Jeanette Winterson, etc. This has been happening for months. But rather than own up to it, Amazon is lamely suggesting that it’s a new “glitch”. A great critique of this is available in two great images. I guess according to Amazon, anything gay is pornography; anything straight, well, that’s just the way things are.
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7 Comments
The Normal Accidents explanation from Patrick Nielsen Hayden; the Bantown explanation from tehdely.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light has a good post about how it may have happened, with links to other explanations. Tehdely suggests it could have been malicious intent from outside Amazon.
Oops, spent too much time reading links before hitting post. :)
It seems likely to me that there was malicious intent from outside Amazon (in fact, I’m almost sure they were responding to some sort of anti-gay campaign to tag these books), but Amazon’s response has also been really pathetic. They still haven’t undone a lot of the delisting!
As of just now it seems that Lady Chatterley’s Lover has its rank, though many have said had been stripped. If it was stripped, it looks like Amazon replaced it. It is listed under “erotica” though, which I would argue with, especially when such well crafted literature as the Harlequin Romance Series is not.
The bantown explanation does sound plausible, but I agree with Elizabeth, the response from Amazon has been terrible.
Now, how am I ever going to find out if my book beats its all-time best rank of #97,368?
Well, I cant speak for James Baldwin, but my rank is back. Shout out to #498,609!!