Tempest in an Ego Pot

[howeird]

Continuing something I started when smallship1 posted a link to a link to author markprobst's rant about Amazon.com blasting the sales rankings off all the gay romance novels on their site. His book, The Filly was one of the victims. Amazon sent him the following note:

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

My main quibble with Probst is that with a Barnes & Noble sales ranking of lower than 300,000 his book would not be found by anyone searching for a popular book, and all we're talking about is bragging rights, not anything which would truly affect sales of his book. A minor quibble is I don't see how romance novels of any description are not Adult content. Amazon has been keeping adult fiction off general searches for a long time, adding non-traditional gender fiction to that ban seems to me like Amazon's way of accepting those novels into the mainstream of the romance genre, something to be welcomed.

On those rare occasions when I search for a novel by popularity, I usually stick with sales rankings 100 and better. Most lists aren't even that generous. Mostly I search by author or title or genre, and don't pay any attention to rankings.

I had no problem finding The Filly on amazon.com with a simple title search. Amazon's auto-completion kicked in to help me. Ditto with an author search. See it for yourself here. Only three copies in stock as of this writing, though.

I understand those folks who think Amazon belongs in hell and boycotted and picketed and banned for singling out non-traditional gender works. There are plenty of other sources for books, knock yourself out. Frankly, IMHO your best protest is to buy every copy of the victim books from Amazon, show that the lack of a sales ranking doesn't mean squat to an intelligent reader.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

You're missing a bunch of facts.

My main quibble with Probst is that with a Barnes & Noble sales ranking of lower than 300,000 his book would not be found by anyone searching for a popular book

The de-ranking is scattershot, not affecting all editions of a book.

If you search for "The Filly" at Amazon using an "all departments" search, you'll get the Kindle edition as the first hit. It's still ranked, and ranked in the mid 7k's in the Kindle store (nothing to sneeze about). One would expect that all editions of all books with an exact match, particularly an exact title match, to "The Filly" in an important keyword field would come up early in the search, but no. You will get no other editions of the book in the "all departments" search.

Now since the average user goes in to the "all departments" search and doesn't use specific area searches, that's a problem. Deranking also prevents a book from showing up in many of Amazon's targeted marketing features.

A minor quibble is I don't see how romance novels of any description are not Adult content.

It's not just romance. Nicola Griffith's SF novels have been deranked. Bishop Gene Robinson's memoir has been deranked. The Mayor of Castro Street, a biography of Harvey Milk has been deranked. The Front Runner and The Well of Loneliness have been deranked.

There's a rather extensive list of deranked books at metawriter.

[howeird]

I did my search in the "Books" category, which is where I usually look for books. Now that you point it out, I see the "all departments" search is whacked. But it's still only two clicks away from the Kidle version to the paperback (click on reviews).

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Check out The Gay & Lesbian Bestseller list.

It's gutted, populated almost exclusively by Kindle editions. It's missing a lot of actual bestsellers, because most of those have been de-ranked.

[howeird]

Maybe something changed overnight, but when I hit that link, right up there in the 2nd spot was False Colors the book - not the Kindle - complete with the "look inside" feature. This was one of the books Probst was whining about. It shows a ranking if you scroll down: Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,449 in Books