The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Amazon Fail!

Search “Amazon Fail” on that other Corporate Satan, Google, and you’ll get a flurry of entries deriving from that clever catchphrase. WTF is going on, you might ask? The short version is that social networking, Twitter included, is doing what it’s supposed to do: Keeping corporate pigfuckers honest, or at least humiliating them. We hope.

The story, in short form, is related by women’s blog Jezebel, the LA Times, Violet Blue, and dozens of other sources. A few days ago Amazon started “de-ranking” some high-profile gay romances. Jezebel quotes Mark R. Probst, author of gay young-adult romance The Filly, who searched for his own book and found it de-ranked.

Look, let’s get one thing straight. I don’t approve of this kind of material. Romance of any orientation should be kept in back alleys, porn theaters and the men’s room at Penn Station, where it can’t hurt the children. But that’s hardly the point.

What does de-ranking mean? Well, on Amazon, sales rankings are used to generate the appearance of books in the Amazon search engine. A book that has no sales ranking, essentially, won’t show up in most searches. Probably more importantly, it also won’t show up on best-seller lists. Best-seller lists are probably the single most important factor for authors and publishing generating book sales on Amazon. Anecdotally, I’d say appearing on best-seller lists is more important than appearing in a search, since anybody searching for your book might find it through other means. Without searches and best-seller lists, a book’s momentum is virtually impossible to generate; each book has to be essentially “hand-sold,” a term in the writing and publishing industry for when a bookstore clerk grabs a book and shoves it in a customer’s face in response to a query like “I’d like to explore my homosexual urges, do you know any good books to help me do so?” or “Got any porno?” To be banned from best-seller lists guarantees, frankly, that your book won’t become a best-seller. Funny, huh?

According to Probst, Amazon’s response was typically helpful — I’m reminded of similar customer-service responses by Google and Flickr over the years:

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

Objectionable, but not exactly gibberish at first glance — except that this answer is gibberish, and appears to have been pulled out of somebody’s ass. Probst’s book is a young-adult romance, not in any way an adult book. Does a gay-themed book automatically equal an adult book? Read on.

Apparently the day after Probst noticed his book’s exclusion, hundreds of other queer-themed and sex-themed books disappeared, while books featuring extreme violence and, somewhat randomly, explicit sex, remained ranked. People began to notice that explicit erotica got the same treatment as gay material, whereas, say, Naked Lunch or American Psycho did not. Probst cheerfully points out that while his book was languishing in Limbo, The Complete Playboy Centerfolds from Chronicle Books still had a sales rank. While we’re at it, Craig Seymour, an Associate Professor of Journalism at Northern Illinois University, observed that his memoir All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. was de-ranked, while Juno author Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper was still on best-seller lists.

Oh, and the Jezzies at Jezebel also point out that while gay books were busy being disappeared, Amazon still had sales rankings for anal plugs. Writer of steamy future fantasies Lilith Saintcrow noted that while queer-and-adult books were de-ranked, A Parent’s Guide To Preventing Homosexuality still had a sales ranking and was showing up in searches.

But it gets even better! Apparently Amazon is operating with Byzantine efficiency, here. Jezebel, in an update to their post, tells us that Amazon left Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer on the lists, but removed Delta of Venus — by Anais Nin, a female author. Is this some sort of conspiracy against queers and female authors? Who knows — certainly not Amazon, who doesn’t seem to know what the fuck is going on. Do you believe their explanation, reported in Publishers Weekly, that a “glitch” is responsible? I don’t think they believe it themselves.

Is there something conspiratorial about Amazon’s de-ranking of gay books and adult books, and their nuking of Nin but not Miller? I tend to take the classic anti-conspiracy-theory view that any bureaucracy as big as the government — and Amazon is as big as some governments — can’t keep a conspiracy secret for long. I believe that’s what happened, and I’m going to speculate here: Under pressure from somebody — internal or external — Amazon’s resident rocket surgeons decided to censor adult books, and some brain scientist figured that gay equals adult. So some mid-level manager yelped “Jones! You take care of it!” and Jones, a minor functionary, started shooting. This speculative censor disappeared books on adult topics — including books on gays and lesbians serving in the military, guides on coming out, sexual health books, etc. etc. Sound plausible? Dude, whatever.

The short version is that within a matter of days — hours, really — the “controversy” had hit social-networking site Twitter, and hilarity ensued. This led to the Amazon statement about a “glitch.” Did Amazon really screw up their technology that royally — or is it possible, just possible — I’m speculating here — that they kowtowed to some weird idea of public perception, and got bitch-slapped by the real public perception, among people who are really buying and reading the books, rather than those who spend their time threatening not to?

As of press time, most books seem to be re-ranked; the whole thing appears to have blown over. As they say in politics, now it’s all over but the screaming. And the screaming, my friend, will be loud.

Whatever angle you choose for it, this thing looks completely inexplicable. It seems like incompetence, sure, but weird, random incompetence that takes on an unmistakable political tone. Does Amazon really want to play this game? To censor books based on their content is not illegal. The First Amendment protects us only against government censorship. The only tool in the toolbox here, for consumers who love books, is business-related. Let’s not let Amazon off the hook here. Amazon hopes you will. Amazon hopes you’ll believe in their “glitch.” But ultimately they don’t give a damn; they just want you to STFU.

Whether you plan to defend to the death my right to say “pigfucker” in a blog post, it is de facto political censorship for Amazon to decide that gay equals adult, and that books, whether supposedly adult in theme, or gay-themed, or written by women, should not show up in “certain” searches based on anything other than an end-user’s specific request.

Author blogs and just about every book-related site in the universe spends most of its time performing analingus on Amazon.com. In my opinion it’s time for that marriage of convenience to end, or at least for us smart kids to start withholding the one thing Amazon needs most of all for its book business: readers. If you run an author blog, I’m sure you don’t feel like opening every post and removing your Amazon links. It’d be much easier to just humiliate the bastards as cheerfully as possible — and oh, so much more fun.

That’s why Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is my new favorite blog; they have started a movement to “Google Bomb” the term Amazon Rank as the following:

1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies).

2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.

As in, say the Smart Bitches:

“My girlfriend wanted to preserve her virginity, and I was happy to respect that, then she amazon ranked and decided anal sex was okay.”

And as of press time . . . it’s working. Try it yourself — search Google, and click on the result, please. That’ll help establish the permanence of “Amazon Rank” in the lexicon . . . with what it really means, apparently.

There’s more further reading available on this issue than I could even begin to list, let alone summarize. There’s a garden of links on the Meta Writer Live Journal Community, to start with. But like I said . . . it’s all over but the screaming. And the screaming, my friend, she is loud.

Thomas Roche blogs about zombies and black powder firearms at Thomasroche.com

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 15 April 2009 at 10:54 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.