And don't forget that classic fishing book by Richard Brautigan

Other categories that have quite literally come out of nowhere and captured the imagination of readers are Scandinavian crime fiction, particularly the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, and Latin American crime fiction by Roberto Bolano.

Article in the Times of India

A classic case of judging a book by its title.

Amazonfail being put to bed for the moment

A day after learning, along with most of the rest of the English-speaking world, about Amazon de-listing LGBT and erotic books, I see that the rankings on my own books have been restored. Not that they're much to brag about -- they are numbers 704,277 and 1,436,221 at the moment -- but at least they're there.

Someday we'll know what it was all about. The technical explanation, that some guy in amazon.fr fucked with the code, makes sense -- but only if you ignore the explanations about "policy" changes that some inquisitive authors got. Man, what a clusterfuck this whole thing was.

technorati: amazonfail, books

Amazon pulls functionality for 'adult' books

Amazon.com arbitrarily de-listed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of books for so-called adult content. They're still selling them, but no longer including the de-listed books in sales rankings. The de-listed books include award-winning gay-friendly books and general erotica. My own books are included, and they're definitely "gay friendly," but Stephen Elliott"s "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" is also affected, and it has practically no gay content.

Good coverage, comments on jezebel.com, Publishers Weekly.

Update: Associated Press is reporting that Amazon is now saying "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed."

People on Twitter are putting up reaction using the #amazonfail tag.

technorati: amazonfail, amazon.com, books