Erotica author Selena Kitt is the one who first brought the term #Pornocalypse to my attention, back in 2013. Then and now, her beat is Amazon’s bizarre blunderings in the realm of trying to pretend for investors and the public that they don’t have books about sex, even while books about sex remain a huge seller for them. Selena’s latest:

Pornocalypse 2015 is upon us!

It’s a far too complicated and inside-baseball story for me to summarize well, but the gist is that Amazon has started dumping entire publisher catalogs into the “erotica” category (which gets no search visibility on the site and is thus the kiss of death) if the publisher in question publishes any erotica. Cookbooks, horror, sci-fi, doesn’t matter. This should give you the flavor of the piece:

In my conversation with the Amazon customer service representative about this situation, I was told, “We are improving our ability to identify erotic content, so you’ll see more books put into erotica going forward.”

Me: Just going forward?

CS: No, we’ll also be identifying other content and moving it into the erotica categories.

Me: How will you be identifying this content?

CS: I can’t tell you that.

Me: How can we get our books out of erotica?

CS: You can change the content and resubmit it.

Me: How would we know what to change?

CS: …

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