Guest Author - Lorna London Sloukji

Writer Mark Probst discovered that his book, The Filly, a teen gay romance did not have its sales rankings on Amazon anymore. Many shoppers rely on rankings when placing their online orders, so this naturally alarmed Probst, other writers, shoppers, bloggers, and gay rights activists.

An Amazon customer service rep said that "adult" material is excluded from appearing in searches and best sellers lists. However, when users searched for books that Amazon deemed to have adult content, they discovered bizarre results such as Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman and Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography.

According to Publisher's Weekly, Amazon states that this de-ranking does not reflect a new policy but is in fact, a tech glitch.

Patty Smith, Amazon's director of corporate communications said, "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible."

Salon's Broadsheet asks why Probst would receive that adult content explanation from Amazon if this was in fact a simple tech glitch. Another author noticed that de-ranked books have specific categories in common such as "gay" and "lesbian".

What's Amazon doing about this?

One writer typed "two mommies" from Heather Has Two Mommies in Amazon's search bar on Sunday night which resulted in out-of-print or unavailable versions of the book. After a considerable amount of coverage regarding the de-ranking on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as several news sites, the writer typed "two mommies" again just this morning. The book is back along with its sales rankings. Other titles such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl remain unranked.

Craig Seymour, author of the memoir All I Could Bare about his past life as a gay stripper blogged that when his book's sales ranks were dropped in February, he was informed that this was because his book was classified as an adult product. Seymour protested and his sales rankings were reinstated.
Computer-assisted reporting expert, Daniel Lathrop says that we can only find out what happened once Amazon.com's server logs are studied. "It is possible that it could be the result of some kind of exploit, either what this guy is describing or something else. It is also possible that somebody at Amazon went in and did it locally."

This kind of hacker attack would only work if Amazon's flagging system for books was automated. Only Amazon knows that answer for sure.

Lathrop says, "They should be telling people what happened and what went wrong because staying quiet makes it seem like there's something to hide."