I’m sure most of us by now have heard about the craziness around Amazon and their deranking of erotic and GLB material. In case you haven’t heard, here is a good link explaining what happened and Amazon’s response.
Yes, this impacted me. My Amazon sales rankings for The Bond That Ties Us were gone, and you were unable to search for the book from the main page. Yes, I wasn’t pleased that people could find my book for purchase. Yes, I do believe Amazon had a programming issue and that the person responsible has caught hell.
What I find fascinating in all of this was how quickly word spread through the writing community. This was discovered on Easter Sunday. In between chocolate highs and Sunday cooking, Twitter and Facebook exploded with outrage. There was a time not that long ago, it would have taken weeks for this to have circulated around until it hit a major news source. In today’s world, a quick one sentence tweet can ignite people world wide.
The power of social networking is amazing, and quiet frankly, terrifying. It also serves to reinforce the fact that comments made in an online environment are there forever. They DO impact people. They HAVE changed corporations, policies, and called out human error.
In the case of Amazon and the “glitch”, I am thankful this power was used for good. It saved many fantastic books from falling off the radar. On the flip side, for those of you who saw #agentfail, you can see that the power isn’t always on the side of good.
Be careful out there…
Twas pretty amazing.
I watched it unfold on Twitter the other day, and it was amazing. Yes, change at the speed of light. Or close.