Found: Deux on Amazon
Now, here’s a screen shot from the recent hourly bestseller chart over on Amazon — vintage, oh… 15 minutes ago
I call this to your attention for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with the featured title or the fact that it’s on sale for 20% off.
[*sarcasm*] “Amazon has books on sale? We had no idea… that’s crack internet journalism there, Mr. Blind, top notch.” [/sarcasm]
Note, however how the title is listed: Lovers And Souls (Yaoi) (Deux)
All the Deux titles seem to be listed this way — so if one were to plug Deux manga or Deux yaoi into Amazon’s search engine then one would be presented with a tidy little list. While it might be Amazon adding tags to titles to improve the user experience (might be happening) I’m more likely to credit publisher Aurora making the most of the tools available: by merely specifying how their title is listed and adding the search tags to the title they not only get more hits on Amazon —
Look at this:
http://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Souls-Yaoi-Deux-Miyamoto/dp/1934496405/
The url of the amazon page with their product also has the words Yaoi and Deux in it, so other searches for yaoi or Deux manga will also lead one to a place where the product is for sale.
A quick verification over at Google will prove the point: the top 10 results includes (at time of posting) an Amazon page with a Deux manga in it. (The rest are blog posts. Unavoidable; this is still the internet)
This is what we call Search Engine Optimization folks.
(a search just on Yaoi is less illustrative of my point — though perhaps more entertaining in it’s own way — as one has to click through to the 7th page to find the first Amazon sales listing, and given the way Google lumps ‘similar pages’ together in reporting results, that makes a single DMP June title the front for all 984 listings.) (damn. 984.)
Amazon knows which side of the greenback their sales are buttered on: here’s another screenshot from one of those [that is to say, Amazon’s] Yaoi search results:
Each of those is a clickable link (on Amazon — above is just a cropped screen-shot — I’m not set up as an affiliate otherwise I’d be glad to take a commission on all this free advertising I’ve just given Amazon. Damn, and they’re one of my competitors…)
I had no idea Salarymen in hot, elicit after-hours embrace (likely after-drinking, too, at least the first time) was it’s own freakin’ kink. Thank You, Japan, you are always educational.
Regarding the Amazon categories, they get an A+ for concept but D for implementation; only 498 books (a minority of Amazon’s yaoi offerings) are in fact filed under “Yaoi”, and many of the subcategories are all but unused: only 9 books filed under “Action”, 3 under “Comedy”, 7 under “Fantasy”, 12 under “Salarymen”, etc.
The vast majority of the categorized books seem to have the “(Yaoi)” tag in the title, so there may be a relationship there – and this includes books not from Deux, so it is probably something Amazon is doing, although I see no rhyme or reason for which books have been labeled “yaoi” and which ones haven’t.
Comment by JRBrown — 26 January 2009, 18:15 #