carolyn kellogg

While most of the country was knee-deep in Easter baskets, I was home getting a blog post ready and reading twitter and planning a sortie to purchase Cadbury Creme Eggs before they disappeared from shelves.

But something came across Twitter — which is like a combination of passing notes in class and an old-style news ticker — that the journalist Rebecca Skloot was circulating. Something had happened to Amazon’s sales rankings, and it seemed like that something wasn’t good.

Without sales rankings, books can’t appear in Amazon’s bestseller lists. Some — but not all — affected books had been removed from Amazon’s search results completely. To find a book that wasn’t showing up in searches, I discovered, you’d need to search for another title by the same author, or find a used copy of it, and then click on the author’s name for a secondary list of their works and try to dig up the book you really wanted.

The troubling thing about this change was that it seemed, at first blush, to be affecting books with gay and lesbian themes the most (heterosexual erotica and romance were also affected, as were books about sexuality and disabilities). One author/publisher posted a response he’d gotten from Amazon that said his book had been de-ranked because of “adult” content; another pointed out that his book about being a male stripper for men was de-ranked, while Diablo Cody’s book about being a female stripper for men had not.

In the time it took me to write the first post for Jacket Copy at the LA Times, the hashtag #amazonfail had not only popped up on Twitter but climbed to its top spot.

If adult content was the reason for de-ranking, I found, it had been unevenly applied. Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho — which includes a scene in which a starving rat is inserted into the vagina of a live woman and must gnaw its way out — was still ranked. Rubyfruit Jungle, the lesbian coming-of-age novel by Rita Mae Brown, had been de-ranked. In several cases, the same book was both ranked AND de-ranked, in different editions.

Amazon soon responded to Jacket Copy with a message they were sending to everyone: that this was just a “glitch.” Appeals for further detail came up empty. I wrote a follow-up post on Jacket Copy. Talking to my editor, who was leaving for dinner, made me realize I hadn’t had lunch.

By this time, there was a new Twitter hashtag: #glitchmyass.

So far there’s been no more news from Amazon, although there has been plenty of news: 227 reports in the last 16 hours or so, according to Google News (which always misses stuff). I’d say that someone at Amazon — the person who’s got to fix the glitch — is having a pretty rotten Monday.

I eventually had lunch, but those Cadbury Creme Eggs are going to have to wait until next year.