When digging through Amazon’s book listings this weekend, Washington state author Mark Probst found that his gay romance novel, The Filly, had its “sales rank” data removed just days ago, meaning it would no longer show up on things like Amazon’s best-seller lists. A little sleuthing on his part revealed that many other gay-themed books had suffered the same recent editing, and in an effort to figure out if this was a mere glitch, Probst reached out to Amazon for a response. He got one:

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

Turns out the Gay & Lesbian bestseller list has become a wasteland as a result, listing only Kindle editions of books because every print edition has had its ranking stripped. Readers have taken to Twitter to raise a ruckus via the #amazonfail tag; there, I dug up a particularly interesting—and lonnnng—list of de-ranked books with gay themes. Hope you’re not curious which lesbian pregnancy book is the best-seller at Amazon right now, for example.

Probst is quick to point out in his initial report that heterosexual erotica has been similarly de-ranked, and assuming Amazon doesn’t disclose exactly which titles in their system were affected, there’s no telling how niche this edit was. But de-ranking non-erotica, gay-themed books (yep, even Heather Has Two Mommies), so that they no longer aggregate in legitimate best-seller lists, while allowing this book to top Amazon’s sitewide search for the term “homosexuality,” is telling enough.

UPDATE: As a commenter pointed out, some of Dan‘s books are no longer ranked, either. Interestingly, he artfully dodges a de-ranking with one release, so gay authors and experts, if you could make America more comfortable by using the “Civil Rights & Liberties” topic instead, we’d appreciate it.

89 replies on “Amazon Stripping Rank Data from Books for “Adult” Reasons, Customers and Authors Accuse Store of Anti-Gay Bias”

  2. @ “Loveschild”: I’m going to have great sex with my wife tonight, and there are lots of other lesbians just like me, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re a dinosaur, and your kind is dying off. And you know what? If it were possible to make a choice to be gay or straight, I’d choose gay. And, again, there’s nothing you can do about it. Imagine this whenever you’re keying in one of your antedeluvian postings — every time I read one, I laugh out loud. Then I read it to my wife — and I have this very tight-assed voice in which I read it — and we both laugh. We fucking love your postings. You are one of the funniest characters on the web. Just thought you’d like to know. Oh, and by the way, the bible is fiction.

  3. If we’re concerned about violence and sexuality falling into the hands of children–we better start ripping pages out of that bloody and steamy Old Testament…

  4. 48 Happy Easter to you and yours Kim!

    It’s my most sincere wish that the joy brought about the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ reigned completely this day at your house.

  5. Unbelievable.

    This is already emerging as a topic in Amazon “Customer Discussions” related to gay-themed books that have been deranked. I started a new discussion under Radcliffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (Well of Loneliness?! I mean, really. What are they thinking?!), but it would probably be better to move this out of the gay lit ghetto into the mainstream. Maybe flooding Amazon’s bestseller discussions with news about this ridiculous policy will get someone’s attention …

  6. @42
    We are happy for you that you can find that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. However we object to you forcing your religious views on the rest of us and trying to have your religious view of marriage stamped into civil law.

  7. @55 Well, I can actually understand de-ranking Well of Loneliness. Have you ever read that book? It… is not good. Undoubtedly an important book for the time, but it is a terrible read. More to the point, though, it’s pretty idiotic of them to de-rank all books that have any gay themes. This is not how a good business operates.

  8. @ 56, I wasn’t trying to force my religious views on the rest of you, and I don’t believe that restrictions on marriage should at all be related to religion, because that isn’t the way this country was founded, but, if the reason that Loveschild believes that homosexuality is wrong is because the bible said so, I feel it validated in explaining some of the context for the quotation of the bible that he/she/ze choose to show that lesbian relationships are wrong in the bible.

  9. Loveschild @ 36,

    Great new (and I mean it, most sincerly) your reading your Bible. Bad new your pulling scripture out of context, even as it is written in English.

    Please read post 42, excellent context. Now, you have taken those verses out of the begining of Paul’s letter to Romans. Why was Paul writing Romans? Two reasons: 1) To encourage the newly growing church. 2) Because there was bickering and fighting amongst the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians. The big issues of the day was circumcision and eating food from temple sacrifices. The Roman Christians were at odds with each other. Paul’s letter opens rhetorically, he is poking fun at both groups while pointing out both of their faults in a very serious manner. Paul is not talking about homosexuality in this passage, he is refering to pagan worship which involved sex (again see post 42). We know this for two reasons: 1)There is no word for homosexual in ancient Greek or Hebrew, the word is of English origin and first appeared in the Bible in 1946. 2) The Greek’s had muliple words for the word natural (the same is true for many of their words), the word natural being used there is (physin) and the word unnatural is (paraphysin), those are the same two words used in Romans 11. In Romans 11, Paul writes that God grafts the Gentile Christians onto the olive tree. He grafts us to the Jewish Christians, the wild olive trees. Paul chose the word (paraphysin) to refer to you and I, and the word (physin) to refer to the Jewish people. We the unnatural (paraphysin) were grafted to the natural (physin)to become co- heirs of salvation. This takes us back to the verses you quoted, Romans 1: 26, 27. I hope this helps you understand that Paul was not condemning loving same-sex relationships, he was pointing out to the Roman/Gentile Christians that they too once uses to worship in the pagan temples and participated in fertility orgies. I hope you continued past that verse and on into the Chapter 2, where Paul hammers the Jewish Christians for all the wrongful things they were involved in. Finally, I hope you get that he hammers both groups for being judmental of each other. Please sit down and read the entire letter, the purpose of the letter to both encourage and bring harmony to the Church is Rome is really lovely, especially Chapter 7 where Paul talks about his own struggles.

    I am grateful that you want to be a devoted and strong Christian, but please when posting try and read your words through someone who doesn’t know Christ. Try to remember that we are not called to judge the world, we are called to bring the gospel as an invitation for every single person on this planet. Our job is to offer love, and to show the world the goodness of Christ through our deeds. Let the Holy Spirit do its job, let us both be know for loving all of our fellow man.

  12. @ 36,

    Loveschild, I hope you had a great Easter, too.

    I guess it should go without saying, but my letter is going to cancel yours if they are keeping a tally. 😉

  13. not to interrupt the douche-war, but I’m watching Breaking Bad streaming thru Amazon’s Video-on-Demand service right now. It is awesome.

  14. @56: Where does P@42 do either of those things?

    BTW, I always preferred giving my money to local indy bookstores anyway. Now I have another reason to continue.

  16. Well, I’ve already pee’d in three pairs of panties about this- if it is just a hoax I will be very very peeved!!

  17. “….let us both be know for loving all of our fellow man.”

    Perhpas it was best summed up where Jesus gave his sermon on the mount and asked his followers to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jesus was reported to have stated that it is an incredibly narrow road to follow, however that simple, profound statement (oft stated in many other religions prior to and after Christianity)
    is the single tenet that should define being Christian. The rest of it is really a lot of air. Unfortunately, as pointed out in more recent times, there are so many who profess their profound belief in Christ but are completely unlike Christ in their lives. Indeed, the
    road is narrow.

  18. If Bezos and Amazon are going to join the ranks of religious fanatics and fundamentalist censors, perhaps, they should relocate the company to Alabama or South Carolina where they can be among like-minded bigots and social control-freaks.

    Does Bezos somehow not know that these conservative fundamentalists read fewer books than almost any of the liberal, creative, progressive, lesbian and gay book readers and consumers?

    Great news for local, independent booksellers, though! My apologies, Bezos; keep up the good work…the indy stores appreciate your stupidity.

  19. @65:

    My biggest problem with the bantown theory is that no one has pointed out any kind of automated mechanism for flagging things as adult in the manner that he describes. I want to believe in that theory (because I’d always imagined Amazon as a sensible company and would rather this all be a big mistake) but it doesn’t look like users can flag things that way.

    Also: Kim in Portland, I really love your posts.

  20. @11

    “Loves Child,” humans and human sexuality are not distinct and separate from one another, regardless of the sermons born of your own cognitive dissonance. Thus, any story about an individual human or group of humans is going to include by default something of their sexuality, regardless of sexual orientation.

    Your learned behavior of guilt, shame and discomfort with your own sexuality is evident in your condemnation. Most phobias and disorders find something of their origins in such poisoned wellsprings of fear and ignorance.

    Face your fears instead of howling about them in the darkness.

    Your chosen xenophobia is a recipe for a miserable life. Why do you choose to embrace and to create such misery?

    Break the surface; delve the depths. Discover a path to knowledge, understanding and enlightenment.

  22. #46 – glitch? then how does that jibe with the emailed response regarding “adult material” – seems to me that if there’s a glitch it’s that someone noticed and now amazon’s got to find a way to cover their ass, hence the “glitch.”

  24. I just called Amazon to complain and let them know that I’ll take my online shopping elsewhere. The rep was very polite and said that it was basically a technical error that is being corrected immediately, and that he would forward my complaint on to the appropriate department. Don’t know if I believe ’em or not, given the responses so many authors and publishers received.

  27. Searching at Amazon beginning with the “Heather has two Mommy’s” title, which has indeed been stripped of it’s sales ranking, and following the links to similar titles listed under the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” heading, you find other titles such as “Emma and Meesha My Boy: A Two Mom Story,” and “Flying Free,” about gay parents, that still have their sales rankings displayed.

    Still, a gay themed title—the classic autobiography: “My Father, Myself,”—doesn’t have a sales ranking, while the equally well respected but primarily heterosexual “The Basketball Diaries” does. Both contain explicit sexual content intergral to the authors’ stories, yet only the gay themed work has been delisted. Curious indeed.

  29. @69 Yeah, I really don’t know enough about how their system works, I just figured I’d toss the link up there as a possibility. It’s certainly believable to me that a group of fundies could’ve spent their weekend maliciously flagging pro-gay/feminst books, but I’ve never really paid much attention to Amazon’s ranking system till now, so I gots no idea.

  31. @56
    I regret that your interpretation of the bible means that you believe it condemns homosexuality. I further regret that you believe this is more important than the biblical instructions to “love thy neighbor” and “judge not.” However I strongly object to you forcing your religious views on the rest of us and trying to have your religious view of marriage stamped into civil law.

  32. After hearing from people on the inside at Amazon, I am convinced it was in fact, a “glitch.”

    Well, more like user error–some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between “adult” and “erotic” and “sexuality”. All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get this situation.

    The CS rep who responded that this was Amazon policy was just confused about what they were talking about, and gave standard boilerplate about porn.

    The dumbest part is saying it was a “glitch”. A “glitch”? Just say that it was one of your workers making an editing error. Really dumb PR move, that one.

    Let me know if you actually want more details on how it went down, but it’s pretty boring and technical.

    md

  33. Amazon’s reasoning for de-ranking these books is flawed on several levels. It is very clear that their intent was to de-rank any gay-related books. If their claim is that they have only de-ranked books featuring adult material, then why has the book “Heather Has Two Mommies” – a children’s book that clearly does not deal with any “adult” material – been de-ranked recently? If this de-ranking was not meant to specifically target only books with any sort of reference to gay culture, why have innocent books on issues such as gay marriage and gay adoption also been de-ranked, while traditional marriage and adoption books have not? It is obvious that amazon has made an effort to keep these books off of best-seller lists and routine searches.

  34. I have just showed Amazon my opinion about this “glitch” (yeah right) by deleting my account and sending them an email detailing why I did this. I used to be a regular Amazon shopper. Not anymore. A sweet little KIDS book’s rankings being deleted for having “adult” content (“Heather has Two Mommies”)?? That’s ludicrous.

    Amazon investors, beware. Us gays love to show bigoted businesses exactly what we think of them via closing our wallets and our purses.

  35. I’m really confused about this now. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES are ranked again, THE CELLULOID CLOSET on DVD is ranked, but THE CELLULOID CLOSET the book is not, but a book called SCREENED OUT on the same subject is, but the top books when you search for “homosexuality” are still anti-gay tracts.

    I’m actually given to say that this is a glitch because a deliberate delisting would be much more coherent than this. The rep who said it was policy may have been wrongheadedly trying to cover.

    I’ll be keeping an eye on what happens with this, but I honestly think the best solution would be for Amazon not to de-rank anything. The actual adult material they sell can still be found by many tools not related to the rankings so it doesn’t actually make it harder to find, and I doubt it’s popular enough that it’d be all over the best seller lists.

    Hopefully they’ll either fix or abandon whatever they were testing soon and the site will be normal. But a public statement wouldn’t hurt either.

  36. @81
    I regret that you have made false assumptions about what, if anything, I believe about the Bible
    I further regret that you want to force your interpretations of the Biblical instructions to “love thy neighbor” and “judge not” on the rest of society.
    I strongly object to you forcing your religious views on the rest of us and trying to have your religious view of marriage stamped into civil law.
    Matters of social policy and Civil Law should be decided based on what is best for society and not based on the religious beliefs of any sect or philosophy.

  37. @71 and 73

    Do any of you “proud conservatives” still work for an AMERICAN company?

    I guess that one plantation master as good as another when you’ve never known or wanted different or better, huh?

    If your family tree don’t fork, why would anyone expect that your life or perspective would ever deviate from the patch of earth upon which you fell head first into this world?

    Keep on signing, boys; master needs a tune to carry him on his merry way to deposit all that money you’ve earned him into HIS bank account…overseas.

  38. One can certainly explain to their child why Heather has two mommys without discussing any sex acts. I have had this this discussion with my six year old son. It is simple. “some women fall in love with men and marry men. Some women fall in love with women and marry women.” So simple. No mention of cunnilinguis necessary. (mentioning “sex” is necessary, as you can’t have this, or any other conversation about marriage without using words like “male” and “female,” you know, the sexes.

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