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 all suddenly 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.
CONCLUSION: Censorship was clearly built into Amazon-Kindle's digital-text-platform years ago when it was programmed to constantly crawl itself for new content and trip the automatic censors whenever it found certain keywords that Amazon's leadership had designated as forbidden. Publishers and customers need to be aware that those dirty words (like "gay" and "lesbian" as well as "erotic" or "sexuality" or "adult") will still cast you into the great Kindle abyss for all eternity, and that missing sales rankings are really only the tip of the censor's iceberg. Moreover, even though sales rankings appear to have been restored throughout its site again, now that Amazon has also introduced this program code into its paperback listings, it'll take awhile for them to completely clean up their system. That is, if they really want to.
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY: This situation has existed in plain view now for more than just one week or even just one year, and I'm sorry to harp on this, but it is apathy that ultimately emboldened Amazon to extend it's gay and lesbian literary purge to its paperback division this April...
With well over ten-million paperback books available on Amazon's site, (as opposed to only 270,000 Kindle books), the resulting debacle was, however, utterly predictable, at least to anybody who had a little commonsense and one ounce of foresight. But bigots are blind-fellows and ignoramuses (thank goodness) and I'm sure the ones responsible for this virtual book-burning frenzy still can't believe that some of the world's bestselling and most respected authors would be affected in the sweep. You can see them huddling now, still looking puzzled and scratching their dopey heads.
Well, ha, ha, ha, Amazon-yes, that's the last laugh-please let us know if we resolved your question!
So we shrugged and walked away, and pondered in silence a different strategy.
In the first week of March 2009, it all suddenly 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.
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY: This situation has existed in plain view now for more than just one week or even just one year, and I'm sorry to harp on this, but it is apathy that ultimately emboldened Amazon to extend it's gay and lesbian literary purge to its paperback division this April...
With well over ten-million paperback books available on Amazon's site, (as opposed to only 270,000 Kindle books), the resulting debacle was, however, utterly predictable, at least to anybody who had a little commonsense and one ounce of foresight. But bigots are blind-fellows and ignoramuses (thank goodness) and I'm sure the ones responsible for this virtual book-burning frenzy still can't believe that some of the world's bestselling and most respected authors would be affected in the sweep. You can see them huddling now, still looking puzzled and scratching their dopey heads.
Well, ha, ha, ha, Amazon-yes, that's the last laugh-please let us know if we resolved your question!
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