Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

I'm not planning on presenting exhaustive lists of Black Friday sales — far too many other sites are doing that — but I am going to point out the ones I actually buy from, such as Amazon's. They put a lot of their stuff on sale plus they've matched many other stores' sales, so now is an excellent time to pick up some DVDs.

Example: Best Buy has seasons 1-10 of The Simpsons on sale for $10.99 – $12.99, but I have all those. Instead I just ordered season 12 from Amazon for $14.99.

Seasons of House for $12.99. Dr. Who for $41.99, half the regular price. Black Adder Remastered: The Ultimate Edition for just $41.99, half off the price and worth every penny.

Plus movie DVDs like Coraline for $8.99 and Star Trek (Single-Disc Edition) for 9 bucks.

If you were interested in getting them anyway (as I was), now's the time to nab 'em.

Showtime may have figured out how to advertise a TV show on the Kindle.

Give everybody the first script for free.

Right now, and until August 31, you can download the script to the pilot episode of their new show "Nurse Jackie," starring former "Sopranos" star Edie Falco, to your Kindle e-book reader. You'll also get (free!) schedule information and nags to watch the show when it premieres on Monday, June 8th.

It's not a bad way to build some buzz, and I'd love to get scripts for other shows the same way (Dr. Horrible? The Guild? Are you listening?) Look for more Kindle-based promotions to come along, as long as its still the latest sexy thing.

Updated, see the end for Amazon's response

So, last week two historical books — "Transgressions" by Erastes and "False Colors" by Alex Beecroft — quietly dropped off Amazon's bestseller lists.

Not because they stopped selling, mind you, because Amazon apparently instituted a new policy of removing the sales rankings from books with "adult" content. De-ranking a book doesn't remove it from Amazon, but it does keep it from showing up in Amazon's bestseller lists (cutting way down on sales derived from browsing) and there are reports that de-ranked books aren't showing up in regular searches with any consistency.

More newly stripped books followed, lots of them. When asked about this by various puzzled authors, Amazon's rep said this: "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."

Defensible. Annoying, but defensible. Only… there's still an awful lot of adult material on Amazon with sales rankings. Most of their adult material is still ranked. Nude photography books, explicit romances, everything by Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, judging by what has been deranked, it seems that someone at Amazon is defining "adult" as "gay."

Read the rest of this entry »

And now that I have your attention…

On April 10, for some reason, the Amazon sales rankings for two highly-promoted books disappeared. Those books were False Colors by Alex Beecroft and Transgressions by Erastes. They're both historical romances: One is about high seas adventure in the 1700s and the other is a sprawling epic occurring during the English Civil War.

Oh, and they're both homosexual romances. Which, apparently, freaked out someone at Amazon. Or possibly someone Amazon is listening to.

Over the next few days many more authors found themselves stripped of their rankings. Mark Probst, author of The Filly, asked about this and received this response:

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.

Well, huzzah for Amazon and their excellent protection of the children, even for those of us who want no such protection and are actively angered that it exists.  Because we are not being protected from adult content, you see, all the usual sex-soaked bestsellers and romance novels are fully ranked. (So are vibrators.)

Amazon is protecting us from adult gay content. All of the books being unranked (MetaWriter is keeping an updated list here) are  written for and by the GLBT community, even those books with absolutely no explicit sex involved. James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, all stripped.

The Well of Loneliness, written in the 1920s, is considered the first openly lesbian-themed book in the English language. The disgusting, anti-children, filthy sex part? Exactly one line: ""And that night they were not divided." My god, how did the country survive?

Award winners. Books on health and lifestyle. Books on homophobia and lesbian parenting and the military gay ban. Books on Harvey Milk. Young Adult books on coping and understanding. All of them being blocked from Amazon's bestseller lists because there weren't enough pairs of in and out plugs involved.

Well, Amazon, I'm not going to join the rapidly growing wave of outraged people complaining about this apparently homophobic filtering. No, no, no! I applaud your new moral code! I only ask that you be even handed in its application. Clearly all "adult" works should be removed from your bestseller lists.

I demand you remove the Twilight series from your top ten bestseller list.

Hey, that's five of your top ten books cleared out right there, leaving room for more wholesome fare. But how can you filter tender, non-explicit books of male romance but condone brutal necrophiliac sex that leaves the girl bruised, battered and ultimately dead? (That's in Book #4, Breaking Dawn, by the way, currently #2 in total sales ranking.)

Sure, you could just create an opt-in filter, the way Google does for image searches, so children can search uninfected by reality and Amazon's formerly excellent service can continue unimpeded for the grownups. But no, I demand that you remove the sales ranking for any book that includes the slightest hint of interpersonal relationships no matter what the context or writing quality, leaving the bestseller lists for safer things, like cookbooks.

Anyone agreeing with my "Block Twilight" idea should write connect-help@amazon.com or Jeffrey Bezos at 1200 12th Avenue South, Seattle, Washington 98144-2734, 206-266-1000.  Let's get this bestselling necrophiliac smut out of our faces!

Oh, and Harry Potter, too. Rowling has said that Dumbledore was gay, so let's get those highly profitable books tagged properly so Amazon can do the right thing.