Erotica author says Amazon is hurting her $10 million yearly sales

It may actually be the biggest store, period. It sells damned near everything, damned near everywhere.

Erotica is porn with class pretensions.

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Isn’t most written porn referred to as erotica, regardless of intended audience? Most definitions of the word seem to be along the lines of “literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire”.

Nope. Some of it is just porn. The difference between say a Penthouse Forum Letter and a Harlequin romance novel.

Better grammar and correct anatomical descriptions?

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More metaphors and better grammar, also plot, actual plots apart from “so I ordered pizza and this babe delivered the pie and more!”

They’ll make TV series out of lady wank erotica, have they ever made TV series out of penthouse letter?

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Wasn’t that the Red Shoe Diaries?

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I was thinking Outlander, but sure, we can have more than one example sure. :wink:

I don’t think that the issue has been slugged out in court yet (anyone feel free to chime in if this is false); but the potentially tricky bit is that, in this case, ‘search engine tinkering’ and ‘arranging stock on our shelves’ are effectively the same thing.

Architecturally, it’s definitely search engine tinkering(Amazon uses the engine developed by their A9 subsidiary for product listings, among other purposes, and I’m guessing that A9 is competent enough to find an unusual name); but that tinkering is simply a means to arrange items on the closest analogy to ‘shelves’ that an online retailer with a catalog too large for easy application of terrible spatial-metaphor-UI-horrors has; and retailers are generally acknowledged to have the right(and they pay a lot of attention to how to use it most profitably) to arrange the products that they carry in whatever layout amuses them.

Amazon probably has enough market power for a potential argument to be made along those lines; but their behavior, in itself, looks pretty similar to walking into a pharmacy and discovering that the store brand vitamins are nicely at eye level, with brightly colored price tags, while the name brand ones are close enough to guide you to the store brand; but close to the floor and a pain to reach.

They are hyperaggressive, efficient, and apparently willing to lose modest amounts of money every quarter more or less indefinitely, so Amazon is legitimately scary; but I wouldn’t want to argue with the legality of what they are doing here unless I was bringing an antitrust/monopoly flavored argument with me.

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I agree that it’s not illegal.

I think people are just unaware that their searches on sites that sell things are manipulated in this way because if you are searching for “bordeaux” and you get bordeaux shown in response, it’s not obvious that the search is working but still being adjusted for the seller’s benefit.

But, in this case, it’s pretty obvious that they have deliberately done something, because her name is so unusual and should be a direct hit. You would then expect there to be “people who bought this book also bought…” and there would be the other options that A9 could return whatever they wanted. But you can’t even find what you are looking for.

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It does seem pretty blatant to fail to even land her name on the first page(especially given that, if memory serves, users frequently zone out at about the point where they have to scroll, so they seem to be veering in the direction of burying her hard enough to actively annoy people looking for her). I’m not surprised that they are pushing their own self-published stuff; but that seems dangerously close to the point where you start annoying potential customers.

Honestly, with Amazon, I wouldn’t even be confident that I’m getting the same search engine manipulations that you, or any other person, is. They’d be exactly the company that would be attempting to modify both ‘store layout’ and item price per viewer, per platform(if people impulse buy more digital downloads when on tablets; but more hardbacks when on desktops, they’d know) as aggressively as possible.

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I love how you monetize my profit centers. Do it again, slower. Like Microsoft.

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As stated, an actual plot, vocabulary choices, but not much else. One of the girls I knew in the dorms read us a passage from one and we were all like wait that is basically a better written version of letters to and yet that gets sold on the regular store shelves for whatever reasons.

didn’t the whole fifty shades of grey start off as a fan fiction community organized around the pretense that Stephanie Meyer didn’t actually understand female anatomy/sexuality?

The link escapes me atm, though.

When I do a search for “Jaid Black” on Amazon.com, the second search result is Amazon’s Jaid Black Page. Sure, it takes till the 4th search result to get one of her actual books, but her author page is technically all of her books.

Although, now that I’ve searched for her, my Amazon recommendations are going to be pretty wacky for a little while.

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And look how well that turned out! >.<

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