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Sex and Censorability on Amazon.com

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And then again, "Amazon has no means of manually adding sales ranks/categories due to the automated nature of the system."

And again,
"We remain unable to manually add sales ranking information to any product detail pages."

And again,
"This is a fully automated process and we have no way to change this manually."

In May 2008, our Kindle publishing account started tallying zero royalty percentages for each of our sales and when we complained of this, it suddenly froze up on us completely, with no new sales registering in it at all. Because Amazon refused to respond to our inquiries about it, we had to send them this e-mail:

"By now you know that my Kindle sales account has been botched and/or sabotaged. Whichever it is, it's inexcusable and I need it fixed today. I've sold dozens and dozens and dozens of Kindle titles for you...plenty of sales since January-many not fulfilled since January-not to mention the absence of sales rankings and no 'popular' categories on our detail pages...I'm within my rights to ask, 'What the heck is going on here?!' and to receive an honest answer from you and a remedy for this right away."

Amazon replied,
"Send us a list of the ASIN's you've sold a ton of."

And,
"Read the dtp-help page on when people get paid."

And,
"We cannot manually add sales ranking info. Thank you. Please let us know if this resolved your question."

Soon after that, we did get a small wire transfer from Amazon of some of the overdue royalties they owed us. But, naturally, no sales ranks.

Undaunted, however, we opened a second Kindle account and, subsequently, a third one, publishing my titles thereafter under "FSM" with the thought of modifying this later on, once our sales rankings appeared. But, of course, they never did. Interestingly enough, though, other completely unknown authors we published as a test case immediately got-and kept-their Kindle sales rankings, even after only just one sale!

Armed with this odd and intriguing piece of information, we renewed our efforts in the summer of 2008, calling and e-mailing Amazon over and over again for an explanation. Our e-mails were ignored. Telephone calls suddenly terminated. Still, we persisted, even threatening to file a consumer complaint with our state's Attorney General if need be and posting yet another thread in the publishers' forum, this time titled,
"zero royaltie$/zero rank$".

At last, albeit reluctantly, it was Kindle-Team-Manager-Robert who eventually stepped up to the plate and batted-or battled-for Amazon:

"Thank you for contacting us about your kindle book sale rankings. I apologize that the call got disconnected. The associate who was transferring the call explained that your book sales are still not ranked. I have re-escalated this issue for you. Unfortunately this will require additional research. I apologize for this inconvenience. I have contacted our technical specialists who should be able to provide guidance on the issue..."

"Kindle-Boy" (as we secretly called him) was a pretty slick dude at first and I must admit that, with his ever so earnest tone and sincere-sounding proclamations, he really had us all going there for awhile, at least until the end of July when the "relationship" sadly soured. Here's Kindle-Boy's signing off statement:

"Please accept my sincere apologies. After forwarding the issues you presented to me to our developer's [sic] I have been informed that the issues have been resolved. I do apologize if they have not been resolved successfully and your books are still not being rankled [sic] correctly or your royalty payments are incorrect. Regards, Robert. Please let us know if this resolved your question."

A messy mea culpa, I'd say! Did we chuckle at it?

Yes, a little. But then things got even grimmer:

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.

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