Today, Craig Seymor blogged on outrageous and unacceptable policies at amazon.com:
Here’s my story: I’m the author of a memoir, All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. (Atria/Simon & Schuster), which is about my journey from grad student to stripper to entertainment journalist to college professor. (I’m currently Associate Professor of Journalism at Northern Illinois University.) Like many authors, I frequently check my sales status on Amazon, so imagine my shock, back in early February when the “Amazon.com Sales Rank” completely disappeared from the Product Details of my book. The book also disappeared from the search listings, so that if a customer looked up “All I Could Bare by Craig Seymour” on the Amazon home page, nothing came up.
Of course, I immediately sent emails to Amazon asking about this situation. I also placed several phone calls. But I could never get a straight answer, until February 25, when I received an email stating that “the sales rank was not displayed for the following reasons: The I S B N #1416542051 was classified as an Adult product.”
I thought: An Adult product? What does that mean? Who knew that Amazon had such a category and why is it being applied to my book?
I brought this to the attention of my publisher, and they started looking into it. But, in the meantime, I also did some snooping around, and it turned out that the only books I could find without a “sales rank” had gay content like mine. For instance, my gay stripper memoir had no sales ranking, but Diablo Cody’s stripper memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper,did.
Memoirs by gay porn stars Blue Blake (Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star) and Bobby Blake (My Life in Porn: The Bobby Blake Story) didn’t have a sales ranking, but memoirs by straight porn stars Ron Jeremy (Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz) and Jenna Jameson (How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale) did. Clearly, there seemed to be a double-standard.
I found this story through poet Mark Doty’s facebook; later in the day, Doty added:
Okay, this is the most amazing thing. If you go on Amazon and type in “butt plug” in the search window, you’ll see a number of them for sale, with sales ranking attached! So, it’s okay to rank butt plugs but not books? Umm…
. And there’s more to this. See this account and many, many, many others. For this to happen now demonstrates what a crucial moment this is in the fight for civil rights. Below is Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal justifying his resistance to an amendment to reverse Iowa marriage equality:
shigekuni. 