Who wrote "The Living Dead"?

[julieandrews]

According to Amazon's recommendations page, Stephen King is solely responsible for the The Living Dead anthology. They have apparently decided not to list the editor first when giving the credits, so when it comes to cropping it shorter for the recommendations, wish lists, and shopping carts, one author gets listed and not the editor. Incredibly frustrating, as I don't care two hoots about Stephen King, yet I am very interested in this zombie anthology.

I wrote Amazon an eloquent and annoyed Email. I encourage others to do the same.

But, hey, on the bright side, Eclipse Two, the infamous male-dominant anthology series and particularly male, male, male cover is now credited to Diana Wynne Jones. (Who isn't even on the cover.)

Comments

[tomomi.livejournal.com]

I just went and looked at the cover on Amazon and I can't say it was particularly male male male? It was by no means 50/50 but out of 6 authors listed on the cover, 2 were female. 33% is not the worst ratio I've ever seen. Beats the U.S. Senate hands down.

What boggles my mind is why DWJ was not listed on the cover... surely she has more name recognition than some of the ones who were chosen. Several of them I had never heard of at all.

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

I just went and looked at the cover on Amazon and I can't say it was particularly male male male?

Ooh, interesting. Looks like they scrounged up at least one more woman after the outcry. Here's the original table of contents, which had Nancy Kress as the only female (http://www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/wp/2008/06/16/eclipse-two-2/). (See comments for the beginning of the outcry.) Apparently they brought in Margo Langan and DWJ after this, maybe others.

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

Oh, whoops -- the outcry didn't start there. Here's a better run-up of the whole thing. (http://theviewfromnow.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-you-kidding-me.html)

[tomomi.livejournal.com]

Aha. Makes much more sense now -- I have to wonder what really went on. Because what is showing on amazon now seems much more like what the editor -said- was supposed to happen.

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

The editor is John Joseph Adams (looking at own copy on shelf from WFC). What Amazon's doing is... weird.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

JJA is one editor I'm going to be watching out for. I also look for Sharyn November and Jeff & Ann Vandermeer. And.. probably some others I'm forgetting.

Without the editor, the anthology wouldn't exist, so I don't know why they don't get first billing.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

Here's the Amazon byline for The Year's Best Fantasy 2008:

"by Kelly Link (Author), Gavin Grant (Author), Ellen Datlow (Editor)"

Add it to your cart and Kelly Link is responsible for the whole thing. And she's not even the one listed first on the cover!

[tomomi.livejournal.com]

My best guess is that they're doing something with their search algorithm and somehow the pages being generated for each item have gotten messed up too. Maybe they've started trying to add in more authors to their database rather than just a few to improve findability? It just reminds me of an issue we've been having with one of our modules at work.

In any case the search on amazon is currently warring with eBay for screwiest results, imo. I've had quite a few issues with it over the past couple of weeks.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't they be pulling in their data from somewhere else? It seems like someone somewhere down the line decided, for example, that Kelly Link and Gavin Grant were authors rather than editors for that anthology, but it probably wasn't Amazon.

Their recommendations were acting screwy yesterday, even when I switched browsers. It kept forgetting ones I said 'Not Interested' or 'I Have It' or 'Ignore this' for. Which is really all the fun of browsing that list. To tell it which ones I'm not going to buy. :)