The first publicity campaign is starting for the GLBT Bookshelf; we’ve got a press release out to a few sites, which is pretty cool. Hopefully the site will get a nice wave of people wandering through. (Here’s my main page for anyone who missed it the last time I posted about this. [cough])
The weirdness, though, came just a few minutes ago. Mel Keegan, whose brainchild this project is, e-mailed all of us who’ve signed up on the site about the press release, which says in part:
Frustrated by the infamous “AmazonFail” fiasco of early 2009, in which the online retail giant was suspected of attempting to deny GLBT literature the benefits of its promotional systems, Keegan conceived of an online community in which all such systems were circumvented — replaced by “community promotion” with direct links to authors’ and publishers’ pages.
There’s another mention of “AmazonFail” later on as well. But Mel mentioned that one of the sites to which the press release was submitted, PR.com, would only run the story if the mentions of “AmazonFail” were removed. o_O Umm, excuse me? None of the other sites minded the mention at all; “AmazonFail” was big news a couple of months ago and mention of it will only bring more traffic. So one has to wonder whether Amazon might not own a chunk of PR.com, and be trying to squelch mentions in the news of their more embarassing moments. Only speculation of course, but it’s definitely suspicious.
Angie