I hear ya! I had to literally ask people if they were buying – and thank G*d I knew people who sold books. I like Advantage; I know how much I’m selling and when; as for Amazon treating authors poorly– Hayden, dude…what online store has to treat authors with any sort of respect?

Barnes and Noble is a HUGE pain in the ass for an author trying to sell their book, they’re also a royal pain when it comes to promoting your book through them–they would rather deal with your rep, publisher, or agent–then you. To be honest, I don’t know why anyone expects Amazon to treat authors differently then any distributor or other bookseller would treat an author. :/ Pleasing Authors and making us happy is not their bottom line.

Again, I still feel that’s it’s skeesy to be suddenly selective about what is ‘adult’ material. I can’t imagine that someone sitting at laptop at Amazon Central saw two m/m romances selling the romance category and decided on their own that a distinction needed to be made. I think one should ask–who really benefits from making the distinction? I bet the cause of this policy is due to some publisher wanting this distinction made.

OT a bit, but it’s been bugging me: m/m romance being the same as Gay romance…the semantics of it all irks me a bit. Why not just call it gay romance? Why put it in the ‘mainstream romance’ category? Are gay men the primary market for romance? No—it seems that women are. Is this why Running Press is calling their titles m/m romance, instead of ‘gay romance’, because the authors are touting their work as gay romance, and want to know why their books aren’t at the top of the ‘gay romance’ rankings?

I feel like it’s a matter of principle. Their actions don’t support their stated goals. If they want to be consistent, they ought to just eliminate all rankings across the board.

So now Amazon stoops to this, eh? Not surprised at all. They’ve always been utter bastards toward authors.

I pay no attention to Amazon sales ranks, because online sales trends are never consistent. You can go there and be #1 for about four hours–until another part of the country [or world] wakes up and buys some books, which sends your ranking into the toilet. It’s a ranking based on user buying–and Amazon’s buyers are too many and too diverse to establish ’sales trend’ in that books can easily be ranked in categories. I find these rankings to be complete sales tools–and yes, their far too unpredictable to build a ‘promotional’ blurb around.

Only authors tend to care about Amazon sales ranks because it sounds great to say ‘hey I’m #2 in the Gay Romance Sales at Amazon!’ – but publisher’s would never use this as a promotional tool because they know those lists change for whomever is surfing them. For example, if I bought A Strong and Sudden Thaw, the next time I type in Gay Romance, you’re book likely wouldn’t even crack the top 10–even though before I bought it, and I entered in Gay Romance, your book was at #5. Another quirk about how the Amazon bot collects for listing is down to how it’s put into their catalog; unless your book is labeled to include things like ‘gay adult romance’ then your book won’t make rank in that sales category = even though it’s a ‘gay adult romance’ and your pub has key worded it as such. I discovered that publisher contributing directly to Amazon don’t always have the option of choosing exactly what category their books are sold in. Many Yaoi publishers were forced to enter the word {YAOI} in the title of their books, just to get the books placed properly– that is, until they got a distributor. I suspect that Amazon deals with distributors by allowing them more catagorization choices, because distributors sell to them at one time, a more diverse range of titles. There’s too many elements at play before the dice is tossed – so Amazon sales rank is not a fair crapshoot.

As for Amazon pulling this – ‘it’s only adult if it’s gay in nature sort of thing…’ I find that sadly typical, especially in graphic novels. I’m so used to that sort of bullshit that it doesn’t even phase me. Two men kiss, or hug? It must be shrinkwrapped and labled for adults. Welcome to gay themed comics…this only matters though, when you put it in the ‘manga section’. Put your yaoi in ‘GLTB Studies’ and no one seems to care. :/

The truth is though, as long as you have a link and your keywords are correct– the readers will find you. The sales ranks don’t mean squat unless you’re trying to use them to promote your book–in which case, I wouldn’t.