The follow is quoted from Publishers Weekly:
After GBLT and Erotica Titles Lose Rankings and Other Features at Amazon, Company Says "Glitch" Will Be Fixed A firestorm of Internet-driven protest built up on Sunday after YA author Mark Probst posted on a Live Journal blog that two days prior the Amazon sales ranking for two recently-released gay romance books had disappeared from the titles' Amazon pages. An Amazon Advantage publisher, Probst posted the explanation he says he received from Amazon Advantage Member Services representative Ashlyn D: "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."
As word spread via blog postings and Twitter (where #amazonfail became the top "trending" topic), posters asserted that sales rankings and other search-matching features had disappeared from what appeared to be many gay and lesbian books on Amazon, as well as erotica/erotic romance titles, in both cases often involving prominent authors and books. (Without a sales rank, a title cannot appear on a category bestseller list, and it is said to inhibit other kinds of search matching and recommendations as well.)
On Sunday evening, Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener told Publishers Lunch, "We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible." Without commenting on the explanation attributed to the Advantage representative, Herdener assured that "things will go back to how they were before."
Disbelieving posters have continued Twittering (adding the hashtag #glitchmyass) while others have tried looked more closely at the metadata issues. Over at Dear Author they have deduced that "it appears that all the content that was filtered out had either 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'transgender,' 'erotic' or 'sex' metadata categories."
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