On Amazon Fail
Apr. 17th, 2009 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumThere has been a great deal of discussion about the delisting of a slew of books on Amazon over the weekend. The gist of it seemed to be that some glitch had caused a whole lotta books to lose sales rankings, and all sorts of indexing features which made it more likely for them to be sold.
I was prone to thinking it was just that, a glitch of some sort.
Then I saw this: Amazon’s "Glitch" Myth Debunked
The writer spent a year being frustrated that her book wasn't indexing properly. She was told various things about the inability of the system to manualy add the data.
Keeping in mind now that writers and other creative types can sometimes be tragically conceited and self-fixated, my view of the "big picture" was still clouded by the firm belief that I was, for some reason, being singled out by Amazon. Realize, too, that at no point did they ever fess up to me that they had an anti-queer agenda. Thus, it did not occur to Team Saint Marie to "refine" our routine and random searches of their browse tree until the very last quarter of 2008, at which point we had such an epiphany and began feverishly cross-referencing popular gay and lesbian paperback titles with their alternate Kindle editions, discovering that those, too, had no sales rankings in the Kindle store.
In the first quarter of 2009, we undertook to publicize these startling findings on Amazon, both in the Kindle publishers’ forum and in various customer discussion threads, such as the one in the gay/lesbian forum titled "lesbian fiction on kindle" and the new discussion we attempted to initiate called "kindle’s queer bias." But, to our amazement, aside from a troll wandering in on that latter thread and obfuscating things quite a bit with weird greetings, overwhelming apathy was the only response that we got. And plenty of it.
So we shrugged and walked away, and pondered in silence a different strategy.
In the first week of March 2009, it suddenly all became crystal clear to us. We pulled every single Saint Marie LGBT title from the Kindle store, deleted all gay/lesbian categories and tags from them, republished them as plain, old, ordinary romances, and then sat back to see what would happen. If we were right, if our theory correct, we reasoned, then we should have sales rankings in approximately twenty-four hours…
Twenty-four little hours later, I couldn’t help but whoop with joy. There were sales rankings on all of my titles in the Kindle store, and some were even on the bestselling lists! A week or two later, we began gingerly adding the gay/lesbian categories once again. This time, however, without the search tags — and without consequence.
Which implies this "glitch" isn't so accidental.
It happens I've only bought a few things from Amazon, but until this gets cleared up, that's probably how it's going to stay.
I was prone to thinking it was just that, a glitch of some sort.
Then I saw this: Amazon’s "Glitch" Myth Debunked
The writer spent a year being frustrated that her book wasn't indexing properly. She was told various things about the inability of the system to manualy add the data.
Keeping in mind now that writers and other creative types can sometimes be tragically conceited and self-fixated, my view of the "big picture" was still clouded by the firm belief that I was, for some reason, being singled out by Amazon. Realize, too, that at no point did they ever fess up to me that they had an anti-queer agenda. Thus, it did not occur to Team Saint Marie to "refine" our routine and random searches of their browse tree until the very last quarter of 2008, at which point we had such an epiphany and began feverishly cross-referencing popular gay and lesbian paperback titles with their alternate Kindle editions, discovering that those, too, had no sales rankings in the Kindle store.
In the first quarter of 2009, we undertook to publicize these startling findings on Amazon, both in the Kindle publishers’ forum and in various customer discussion threads, such as the one in the gay/lesbian forum titled "lesbian fiction on kindle" and the new discussion we attempted to initiate called "kindle’s queer bias." But, to our amazement, aside from a troll wandering in on that latter thread and obfuscating things quite a bit with weird greetings, overwhelming apathy was the only response that we got. And plenty of it.
So we shrugged and walked away, and pondered in silence a different strategy.
In the first week of March 2009, it suddenly all became crystal clear to us. We pulled every single Saint Marie LGBT title from the Kindle store, deleted all gay/lesbian categories and tags from them, republished them as plain, old, ordinary romances, and then sat back to see what would happen. If we were right, if our theory correct, we reasoned, then we should have sales rankings in approximately twenty-four hours…
Twenty-four little hours later, I couldn’t help but whoop with joy. There were sales rankings on all of my titles in the Kindle store, and some were even on the bestselling lists! A week or two later, we began gingerly adding the gay/lesbian categories once again. This time, however, without the search tags — and without consequence.
Which implies this "glitch" isn't so accidental.
It happens I've only bought a few things from Amazon, but until this gets cleared up, that's probably how it's going to stay.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 04:20 am (UTC)Hey, thanks for being so snotty! I appreciate it. I'm some asshole on the Web who believes shit like that. It came from somebody I trusted.