ZoeBrown
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New Covers for Venus Virus 1-3, Weird Stuff Happening @ Amazon
🕑 Added 2022-10-05 18:16:33 +0000 UTCSo, Amazon did something weird today: they removed Venus Virus Part Two from the 'Transgender Erotica' sub-category on their website, where it had been the #1 book for a couple days, and dumped it into 'generic' Erotica, instead. They did this a month ago with Venus Virus Part One, as well. Immediately after they did this, sales for Part One took a nosedive from which they never recovered.
I don't know why Amazon is choosing to do this. I've been worried for some time now that with the increasing demonization of LGBTQ people that is taking place across the world that Amazon might eventually bow under to some hate campaign and remove 'Transgender Erotica' and 'Transgender Romance' as categories on their store, maybe stop accepting erotica and erotic romance that features gender transformation and/or transgender people. But that doesn't seem to be what is happening here. I've talked to a bunch of other Amazon TG Fiction authors, and there seems to be a pattern emerging as of late of Amazon removing certain TG books from the 'Transgender Erotica' category and then dumping them into 'straight' Erotica (where they sell terribly) for reasons that are unclear--it may be a case of a malfunctioning categorization algorithm or it may be an attempt on Amazon's part to filter gender-transformation/gender-change fiction OUT of the category so that only 'futa' and 'sissy' stories remain; we don't know yet.
I've petitioned Amazon to put the books back into the 'Transgender Erotica' category where I originally listed them, and should hear back from them shortly. In case this was a incidence of a new or malfunctioning algorithm, I also made some tweaks to the blurb and keywords for Venus Virus Parts 1 and 2 to make it clear that I want the books to come up under 'transgender erotica.' I also updated the covers for the two books so that they would be more visually distinguishable from one another.
I'm not sure yet what the upshot of all this is going to be, or if any of my old books are going to start getting knocked out of 'Transgender Erotica' and 'Transgender Romance' as well, but just in case you go searching for one of my books to read and can't find any under 'transgender erotica,' some alternate ways to look them up are to search by my pen name, search for 'gender transformation' (my number one keyword), or something along those lines.
