purplerabbit: Dany at Pcon (Default)
purplerabbit ([personal profile] purplerabbit) wrote2009-04-13 08:33 pm
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Amazon censorship -- my books too!

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.

[identity profile] damiana-swan.livejournal.com 2009-04-14 03:45 am (UTC)(link)
Don't worry, it's being fixed. And from what I'm told by a friend at Amazon who actually saw the issue report, it really WAS a stupid mistake ... by someone who wasn't even in the US, and who was trying to do something locally and mistakenly doing it globally instead. (Some nations DO censor certain things, and Amazon is required to comply with those laws ... no matter how stupid we think they are here in the US.)

Amazon is working to put safeguards in place to make sure it doesn't happen again--that is, to make sure we are not subject to the censorship other nations impose on their citizens, which is the root of the problem.