Amazon.com targetting GLBT and erotica titles

[catherineldf]

If you have any titles that Amazon can conceivably classify as "adult," they may well have lost their sales rankings, any listings on bestseller lists and/or any listings on search functions as of this weekend. "Adult" apparently includes everything from nonfiction books on sex to books on queer film theory to literary fiction to erotica and erotic romance. At the moment, this seems to apply primarily to print titles; for example, my nonerotic anthology Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades lost its print sales ranking but still has a Kindle one. Go figure. :-((((
For more information on the titles people have identified so far and to add your own as needed, as well as where to call and write to protest, check out
http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html
and here - http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html


And for the spiffy new definition of what "Amazon.com sales ranking" now means -
Amazon Rank

Comments

[lee-martindale.livejournal.com]

And yet it seems that the "Anita Blake" and "Merry Gentry" series by Laurell K. Hamilton still enjoy rankings. And "adult" is the mildest thing that can be said to describe them.

How very..ahem...curious.

[catherineldf.livejournal.com]

Yep. Mysteriously, most sexually related items geared toward a heterosexual audience have not been "modified." Except pure "filth" like "Lady Chatterley's Lover," that well known destroyer of morals in our modern age.
Here on the homefront we're pondering between attributing it to staggering stupidity ("Hey, let's just put in some tags and let the servers pick!") and seeing what they can get away with ("They'll never notice this." Maniacal cackling follows).

[sacchig.livejournal.com]

It looks suspiciously like an attempt to drive all erotica books into Kindle, and nothing but Kindle. On the other hand, maybe they just haven't got around to purging the Kindle list yet.

[catherineldf.livejournal.com]

Well, they've never put sales rankings on lesbian erotica on Kindle. We're not important enough, apparently. And they're not doing it to most het books (there are exceptions - see above) so I'm more inclined to attribute it to some other things.