One of the biggest things about getting published was that I could say “I have a page on Amazon!” It was an amazing thing to see my name on one of those pages, to be able to tell people they could just search for my name on Amazon and actually find stuff created by me. Well, today is slightly different, because Amazon is totally screwing over gay and lesbian authors. All of my fellow PD authors, and countless others are being stripped of their sales rank because they are “adult material.”
That doesn’t mean Harlequin romances or Nora Roberts, or other straight romances that get just as risque and detailed as gay and lesbian-featured novels. This is an obvious and blatant attempt to ghettoize GLBT works. Works like Brokeback Mountain and “Radclyffe Hill’s classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description” (quote from the petition site mentioned below), alongside nonfiction books like John Barrowman’s autobiography (because he is gay, and the gay may be catching) and books that help suicidal gay teenagers work through the issues and maybe feel better about who they are. Yes, must hide that.
There is a petition going around which you can sign here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy
If you don’t want to sign, that’s okay. If you do, go right ahead. Add your voice to the countless people who are flabbergasted by this utter and blatant discrimination. Ellen Degeneres did not write an erotic biography. If someone at Amazon got turned on while reading it, that’s not Ellen’s fault. This needs to be corrected, and quickly.
If you’re not the petition signing kind, that’s fine, too. All I ask is that you go elsewhere for your novel-buying needs. SCP Books is a fine lesbian-owned and operated independent bookstore. They may be a little more expensive than Amazon, but the money goes to people who deserve it rather than to some corporation that seeks to shuffle us under the carpet while still getting money from the few sales we manage to make while not showing up on search results. For shame, Amazon. I regret making an order from you last week. If it wasn’t already on the way, I would cancel it. I would threaten to send it back for a refund, but I’ve tried that before and never got my money back. Never again. So Amazon, it’s been real and it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun. Good day, sir.
I said good day.
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