Authors-Police your Amazon listings

I received the following irate e-mail the other day.

 You should be ashamed of yourself and why does your site not warn people you are peddling filth your site should have a warning on it if you are selling porn i would never buy one of your books for my daughter i'm going to tell everyone about your scam!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 (Sidebar--why is it people think that adding a dozen exclamation points somehow adds validity to their e-mails)

 After determining where the punctuation should be, I was at a complete loss as to what she was talking about.  Against better judgement, I decided to send her a reply asking her to clarify what she was talking about.  She said I was promoting a book on foot fetishes to children.  I soon realized she had to be talking about Foot Ways.  I tried explaining to her that she was misunderstanding and the book was not actually about feet.  At which point she informed me that Amazon said my book was similar to...

 So I went to check Amazon.

First, Amazon had added a section of tags, but they weren't tags for the book.  It was "Books similar to this are tagged"  and the tags included kink, sex, foot fetishs, bondage, and toe sucking. 

ACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Sidebar:  now I understand why people add dozens of exclamation points to make a point.)

Then there was the "Customers who bought books LIKE THIS also bought" listing (which appears directly under the book cover before your reviews...) that included a bunch of fetish books.

So apparently the Amazon algorithms automatically associate any title with the word Foot in it with sex.  I'd say that says a lot about the folks at Amazon.  Like, maybe, they need to get out more.  I mean, they didn't get this information from the book itself.  It's set up with Search Inside, so they have the actual content of the book. 

So I've been fussing with Amazon for the last few days over this.  I finally got the tag issue resolved (I think).  But the books are still there.  I can't believe I have to worry about this kind of stuff.  And if I do, chances are others do to.  So if you are an author with a book listed on Amazon, you may want to check your listing to see how the Amazon system is associating it.