AmazonFail round up. What to do if you’re still delisted.

What a weekend!  I couldn’t keep up with it, especially as I spent Easter Monday in a field, out of range of internet connection.  However, now that I’m back, this is my understanding of the situation at present:

#amazonfail twitter thread, started by storm_grant spreads to be a world wide phenomenon

Numerous blogs, newspapers and TV stations pick up the story and run with it: this is just a sample:

• CRAIG’S POP LIFE: Is Amazon.com Homophobic?

It appears on the TV in the UK (fast forward to 8 minutes in)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1529573111?bclid=19074616001&bctid=19406704001

(and spot the appearance of ‘Captain’s Surrender’ 🙂 )

Amazon claim it was just a mistake:

Amazon calls mistake ’embarrassing and ham-fisted’

and start re-ranking the de-ranked books.  Various internet hacks come out and say hahahaha!  I did it for the lolz.  But as the code they claim they used does not actually do what they say it would, their claims seem doubtful.

Amazon’s ‘it was all a mistake’ gets this response from Slashdot

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/14/0057203

which I think says it all.

I personally fail to see how any kind of mistake or glitch could cause gay-positive theology like John J McNeill’s “The Church and the Homosexual” to be de-ranked as an adult title, but leave right wing anti-gay theology like “Can Homosexuality be Healed” by Francis MacNutt’s sales rank intact, catapulting it and its like to the top of the bestseller list.

That’s a mighty selective and convenient mistake!  That’s a mistake with an agenda to push.  An agenda that’s willing to silence anything that it doesn’t agree with.  I’ll come out and say here that I think it’s hideous.  McNeill’s book saved my faith when I was questioning the church’s stance on homosexuality.  Without it, I would not now be a Christian at all.  I can’t imagine how many gay people’s lives it must have saved, giving them hope that God doesn’t hate them; that they might actually be made right, and be loved.  To de-rank that book as if it was some sort of obscenity is itself an obscene act of hatred and suppression of honest theological and moral debate.

Because it’s such a staggeringly bad move even from a sheer economic POV for Amazon to make, I’m willing to agree with them that it was certainly a mistake on their part.  What caused it, I don’t know.  Some Christianist fundamentalist inside the organization taking the chance to push his own agenda?  I don’t know.

But in the light of Easter, and the message of resurrection – of God bringing good out of evil and life out of death – I find it rather wonderful that all Amazon has achieved by this ‘mistake’ is to bring massive publicity to all the GBLT books on its website, and to get gay romance as a genre into the pages of the NY Times, the UK’s Guardian newspaper, and the mainstream media as a whole.  We could not have bought better publicity if we’d tried.  Good out of evil – it’s very appropriate for Easter Monday, and lets hope it continues 😀

However, although many books have had their sales ranks restored, some have not.  It’s premature to celebrate too much while some books and some people are still being discriminated against.

If your book is still de-ranked, consider joining #stilldelisted, #glitchmyass, and #amazonfail on twitter

and post your book name and Amazon URL on

metawriter’s Are you still Delisted?

Let’s keep the pressure on until everyone has their rankings back!