Amazon’s public relations department worked overtime this past Easter holiday, but should have taken a few days off instead.
If you’ve been selling books for a while, you’re familiar with Amazon’s Sales Rank feature. The ranks go from 1 (Amazon’s fastest-selling book, selling hundreds of copies per hour) to upwards of 8 million (slow), which might sell one copy every few years.
Amazon Sales Rank can make or break your buying decision for a book because, all other things being equal, it tells you how fast the book will sell.
Have you ever noticed that Amazon doesn’t display the really raunchy materials you might find in an “adult” bookstore? Nobody complains about that, as far as I know. But over the weekend, Amazon began hiding more borderline material, like risque romance or gay books. Supposedly, Amazon began hiding these materials so as not to offend customers who object, and to protect children. So their sales ranks were deleted, thus excluding the books from search results and bestseller lists.
Some were irked that while “popular” soft-porn material from Playboy are openly sold on Amazon, the company has cracked down on the sales of gay-oriented material.
By the end of the weekend, Amazon claimed it was all a mistake. A “glitch” had hidden the sales ranks of adult and gay-themed books. The excluded books included Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.”
Opinion on the Amazon seller’s board has been mixed. Many sellers have dismissed the controversy, while others have argued that Amazon’s policy amounted to censorship and has slowed the sale of legitimate books. Much more discussion is on BookSquare.
Whether it was really a glitch, or whether Amazon merely didn’t want to admit it was backtracking, Amazon baldly contradicted its own public statements. Either Amazon has no qualms about lying to the public, or its head office is sorely misinformed.
I can’t recall any controversy like this on eBay, which has a separate section of adult materials.
Some years ago, Amazon displayed a Sales Ranking of “0″ when a book had no prior sales, but I believe that has changed. Now, as far as I know, the field is blank when a book first comes onto the market. With the first sale, the book gets a rank of about 50,000. Until another sale occurs, the rank can slide all the way down past 5,000,000.
What’s your take on this?
Related posts:
![[Google]]( http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/wp-content/plugins/easy-adsenser/google-light.gif)
6 Comments
I don’t really see how a “glitch” could have cherry picked those titles. I also don’t know how many children there are ordering books for themselves off Amazon to be affected by the dirty stuff. I’ll bet that Amazon didn’t expect the hullabaloo, though
Clearly as bad biggoted move on amazon’s part. Glad they worked to clear it up.
It would have been a poor PR move to exclaim that Gayness scares them and then retrace on that — at least they have a sense of shame.
Steve, on another note, have you figured out much of a formula for what amazon’s sales ranks mean? 1-100,000 tells me I will sale the book in a couple months. 100,000-500,000 says I should be patient. Over 1 million says to me, what the heck. I have a bunch of books holding the floor down, what’s 1 more?
I have been selling for 4 years now, and still find golden oldies that sell from time to time.
Thanks for returning to your blog. You make my mornings brighter.
Ken
Ken, this is the best estimate I’ve seen:
http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm
Although it would make more sense to me to follow eBay’s lead and have a separate section for adult materials, I have no problem with Amazon “hiding” those titles.
I do have a problem with Amazon suggesting books about, say, gay politics or parenting gay teens or gay-themed fiction are somehow inappropriate for general release.
On the other hand, some of us have seen so many blatant slurs against our community for so many years, even if Amazon is out-right lying about what happened, at least they’ve changed the policy and recognized the earlier decision was a mistake.
Regarding Ken’s and Steve’s comments about books with a sales rank above 1 million, don’t be so quick to dismiss them all.
Although in general you are correct, it’s also important to know your stock and be aware that some titles with a high sales rank can also demand a high price, because they are scarce and those readers and collectors who want a copy will pay whatever it costs to acquire one.
Some of my best sales have been among books with a sales ranking above 1 or even 2 million, and depending on scarcity and the condition of my copy, I don’t always have to wait long for a buyer to jump on it.
To Amazon I would say:
Children are not reading the lists on Amazon that give the sales rank.
Only very interested people know how to look at the sales rank lists–in list format. I only saw them once in a list format and I can’t even remember how to access them again. Kids and teens who are not book authors or publishers or those following the book selling industry closely don’t really care about reading sales rank lists. Believe me kids and teens do very diffrent things on the Internet than read Amazon sales rank numbers! Stuff like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are their main focus.
(If I was a book author I would definatly be looking at the sales ranks in list format.)
As to the sales rank as reported on the product page itself, any person, child, teen or adult, will have to be interested in that one book in order to see the sales rank. In other words they would already be looking at that product page because they are interested in it, they already know about its existence!
Recently I talked to two adults who frequently buy books from Amazon and they told me they never even knew there was an Amazon sales rank. When I showed them where it was on the product page they were surprised they’d never noticed it before.
(Does the NY Times Bestseller list include adult titles and erotica?)