Amazon is excluding spicy romance & LGBTQ books from the affiliates program. It's Bezos obeying the fascists in advance. And it highlights how, with the flip of a switch, they can easily shadow-ban whatever books they want.
I'm removing all my Amazon affiliate links & will deprioritize Amazon links
READERS need to lead the way by moving to retailers other than Amazon:
@bookshop.org has ebooks now.
AUTHORS need to get their books over there too (via @draft2digital.bsky.social ).
I'm already on 4 other retailers (plus print, audio, libraries), but I'm working on getting my books on Bookshop.
@susankayequinn Sadly, D2D is not great for spicy books either and will not send any of mine to bookshop.org. Like, they will publish to other places, but two of my books they will only publish to Smashwords.
Like I feel you, they are better than Amazon, but there is a strong chance that if it's spicy they will block it from bookshop.org.
@rubyjones do you mean spicy or erotica (I think both should be distributed but they are distinct)? I've only distributed my SF so I should distribute some of my spicy romance to test this.
(it has to be D2D not bookshop because I already distribute my spicy romance paperbacks to bookshop via Ingram)
@susankayequinn Both, but because you said spicy, I was referring to spicy romance. As these are my genres, I do know the difference. My tamest sweet spicy romance was blocked alongside less tame spicy romance and straight up erotica.
Your books might get through, or they might not, D2D uses an algorithm to detect 'issues' and does not perceive nuance. D2D has blocked all my books from distribution to bookshop.org. Amazon only blocked the straight up non-con erotica.
Sue is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱
Ruby Jones