Erotica On Amazon #Pornocalypse, 2015 Edition
Erotica author Selena Kitt is the one who first brought the term #Pornocalypse to my attention, back in 2013. Then and now, her beat is Amazon’s bizarre blunderings in the realm of trying to pretend for investors and the public that they don’t have books about sex, even while books about sex remain a huge seller for them. Selena’s latest:
It’s a far too complicated and inside-baseball story for me to summarize well, but the gist is that Amazon has started dumping entire publisher catalogs into the “erotica” category (which gets no search visibility on the site and is thus the kiss of death) if the publisher in question publishes any erotica. Cookbooks, horror, sci-fi, doesn’t matter. This should give you the flavor of the piece:
In my conversation with the Amazon customer service representative about this situation, I was told, “We are improving our ability to identify erotic content, so you’ll see more books put into erotica going forward.”
Me: Just going forward?
CS: No, we’ll also be identifying other content and moving it into the erotica categories.
Me: How will you be identifying this content?
CS: I can’t tell you that.
Me: How can we get our books out of erotica?
CS: You can change the content and resubmit it.
Me: How would we know what to change?
CS: …
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=15069
It’s sad how nutless corporations are becoming so complicit in thwarting the efficiency of access to knowledge, especially when it comes to subjects such as erotica.
This isn’t happening to such an extent (or even at ALL), in most of the more sophisticated European countries. It’s a hangover in America from the era of the puritans…
Porn aside, its a perfect example of big corporation “customer service” – never let the customer know how the system works, so they can never do anything about it.
I eagerly await seeing Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach disappear into the Erotica section of Amazon, given Roald Dahl’s other writings.
Anne Rice and her vampire books will likewise disappear, as will many other works and authors who have had the temerity to write both erotica, smut, or porn in addition to their regular works.
Too bad Beatrix Potter apparently never published any smut.
Fuzzy, Ms. Kitt does have a paragraph or two in her article suggesting that certain “traditional” publishers seem to be exempt from the automatic “erotica” tag-and-move-and-hide rigamarole. It seems to be smaller specialty publishers who do publish a lot of erotica who are having there cookbooks and travel writing get wrongly tagged and suppressed.