If you Google-search "Amazon rank" this morning, the top three hits don't actually take you anywhere near amazon.com. Those top hits either take you to this page, instead, or to commentary about why the Google-bombing happened. And I'll confess, I was deeply, seriously tempted to link the words "Amazon rank" above to the smartbitchestrashybooks.com page, too, because I think it's funnier than heck, and I'm spitting mad about Amazon.com pretty clearly not caring enough about this Easter-weekend "glitch" (that apparently has been going on since late last year, in actuality) to issue any sort of substantive statement beyond what amounts to, "Gosh, there seems to have been some sort of glitch."
LA Times book blog
Wall Street Journal blog on Amazonfail story
Dear Author, on metadata, has the best theory so far
I dunno. Maybe I'm just not in a demographic that Amazon cares about. Right now, though, I'm looking at the Amazon ad in AW's sidebar, and thinking a button that goes to Powell's would look pretty good there, instead. Making Light has a cogent and rational discussion about the #amazonfail debacle, with a smarter-than-average bunch of tech-savvy commenters participating.
And speaking of Twitter, we're playing a query-writing game on the AW forums, inspired by Agent Colleen Lindsay's blog contest back in January, and by this exercise (via agent Janet Reid, on—you guessed it—Twitter!) It's a fairly difficult exercise, which makes it a lot of fun. If you don't want to post in public, think about playing along at home to sharpen your own query hooks.
