Amazon censorship -- my books too!

[purplerabbit]

For those who have (or haven't) been following the Amazon Fail about their blatant censorship not only of "erotic" titles but all LGBT ones, I am chiming in to add that all three of my in print LGBT non-fiction titles are among those stripped of their rankings.

Fail.

More information: Who moved my rank? Sales rank purged from Amazon

For those who don't understand why this matters. This will drastically hurt sales of the books that are marked this way. It means they will not come up in some of the searches, etc. Many sales on Amazon are from people buying books "like" the other ones they ordered. For more information see: Why do Amazon Ranks matter.

Comments

[elf]

Amazon is required to follow those laws.

Says who? Amazon may be forced out of business in those countries, but they're not guilty of crimes for not following laws there. Especially since Amazon has domains in different countries--no reason that .uk and .de rankings should be affected by .com sorting issues. Or vice versa.

They're saying very clearly, "we care about the concerns of bigots over LGBT speech in the US."

Amazon paid a huge price for this mistake, even if it was actually a glitch in corporate policy.

Good. And I hope they pay more.

I'm sick of companies catering to bigots, getting caught, and saying "oops, we didn't think you'd notice will fix that right away!" and trying to pretend they didn't do anything sleazy.

Companies whose business is online need to be aware of PR issues, and that they have, at most 48 hours to release a press report that clearly addresses customer concerns--80's style brush-offs that say "we are sorry for the inconvenience, and are working to correct the problem" will not work.

(Repost to fix html tag.)