If the titles were in the bestseller list, several hundred customers per day were purchasing the titles. But those customers are wrong?Hillsy wrote:The customer is always right, right? - but doing so in the manner of a prize idiot.
It's not about taking them out of personal recommandations lists. Taking them off the bestseller list can't do that, because the recommendations are based purely on sales (not ranking) to people with similar buying habits. What removing them from the list does do is deny the title visibility with people who actively shop off the bestseller lists. As someone who has actually been on these lists, I can tell you placement there is worth a LOT of money.Hillsy wrote:Taking the facts as reported (B&N knocking some books down the top 100 list so they don't appear on recommndation lists for customers) - I don't think this is censorship.
If we're good with B&N taking the actual bestsellers off the list, I assume we are also good with them...say...selling spots on the list. For instance, St. Martin's can pay $100k to have their latest title show up as the #3 title on all of B&N for 2 weeks. Without, of course, telling the readers that the placement is paid rather than based on actual sales. So long as it's the right kind of book, I'm sure. Preferably a thriller written by a traditionally published man, not a romance from a self-published woman (though one of the authors recently hit was a fairly well-known romance author with several small presses). And if it hasn't occured to anyone that there's a gender issue at work here, I suggest getting more familiar with the recent happenings with PayPal, AllRomance, BookStrand, the Amazon filter, etc.
And now, I think I'm going to leave this topic alone as it is pretty much a repeat of the PayPal sweep six months ago, aimed at romance this time instead of erotica. Maybe they can go after violent thrillers next time and work their way toward offensive books like The DaVinci Code (because a LOT of people were offended by that one. Not me, but the customers who are offended are always more right than the customers who aren't).