Amazon's GBLT and Erotica “Glitch”

As you probably know by now, Mark Probst's post -- he is an Amazon Advantage publisher like us -- on a Live Journal blog about the disappearance of the Amazon sales ranking for two recently-released gay romance books, has created a virtual netstorm. Probst also posted the explanation, received from Amazon Advantage Member Services representative Ashlyn D: "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."

As word spread via blog postings and Twitter (where #amazonfail became the top "trending" topic), people asserted that sales rankings and other search-matching features had disappeared from what appeared to be many gay and lesbian books on Amazon, as well as erotica/erotic romance titles. (Without a sales rank, a title cannot appear on a category bestseller list, and it is said to inhibit other kinds of search matching and recommendations as well.)

However, such anti-Semitic texts as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion remain within the ranking system while much less offensive books like the ones named above, are considered too "adult." In other words, if you're a writer who has written openly about sex, gays, and gay sex, Amazon considers you worse than an anti-Semitic writer who helped initiate pogroms and concentration camps.

Yesterday evening Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener responded, "We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible...things will go back to how they were before."

Disbelievers nevertheless continued "tweeting" on Twitter (adding the hashtag #glitchmyass), while others have been looking closely at Amazon metadata for clues. Over at Dear Author they have deduced that "it appears that all the content that was filtered out had either 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'transgender,' 'erotic' or 'sex' metadata categories."

Raging, the culture war still is!