Rankings removed from Amazon
by LauraBaumbach on Apr.12, 2009, under Announcements, Author Posts
You may have noticed that rankings and bestseller info has been removed from all a lot of gay romance and gay fiction books in the last few days. It appears that Amazon has decided we are to be hidden from the mainstream readerships. Obviously they don’t understand that a lot of our readers ARE mainstream.
When Amazon was asked about the missing rankings they responded to one author with:
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
Plainly, we are being discriminated against by Amazon, shoved into the backroom–again.
Not all authors of adult fiction are being targeted but it is widespread and rampant. So if you are looking for rankings and bestseller lists of adult or gay fiction, it looks like you’ll need to buy directly from the publisher or hit up B&N.
Hopefully next month MLR Press will have the ability in place to buy ebooks directly from the site (with paypal and credit cards through paypal to begin with) and print books soon after that. We getting everything in place for direct sales. We value our readers and now we REALLY like Barnes and Noble.
From Twitter posts:
If you want to protest to Amazon direct, this is their email addy: connect-help@amazon.com
Other ways to get in touch with them: http://clicheideas.com/amazon.htm
Or write to their CEO:
Jeffrey Bezos. The address is 1200 12th Avenue South, Seattle, Washington 98144-2734, United States Phone: 206-266-1000 Fax: 206-622-2405
There is a petition in circulation, see link below:

April 12th, 2009 on 1:00 pm
It’s very welcome news, Laura, that books can soon be purchased from MLR direct. I’m appalled at this arrogant, arbitrary and probably discriminatory behaviour by them. The monopoly should be challenged somehow.
April 12th, 2009 on 4:29 pm
Amid the gloom that the Amazon thing ingenders (have signed/written), the news about purchases direct from MLR is just wonderful – especially the print versions as they are not readily available here.
Cheers
April 12th, 2009 on 4:58 pm
[...] http://www.mlrpressauthors.com/2009/04/rankings-removed-from-amazon/ [...]
April 12th, 2009 on 6:27 pm
did somebody say stupid people??? hey borders has romance and erotic and all that good stuff too … don’t forget half.com as well. I prefer half.com to amazon any day or mybookstoreandmore.com
:winks: