A new Modesty Code for romance

first they came for the sex scenes....

Something has changed at Amazon, and it is not good.*

Over the past several weeks, many romance titles have begun returning the same message in Amazon’s SiteStripe interface: This product is excluded from the Amazon Associates Program.** Please link to a related product or category instead. The books remain available for purchase across all formats. Their retail pages load normally. What has changed is that Amazon will no longer allow affiliates to earn commissions for recommending them.

That may sound like a technical adjustment, but it is not a small one. Amazon Associates underwrites much of the online book ecosystem. A great deal of book coverage—reviews, recommendation sites, curated lists, newsletters—is sustained by affiliate income. When a book is excluded from the program, it is not banned, but it is removed from the financial structure that makes it easier for readers to find and hear about it.

The exclusions do not appear to be random although the implementation still is.*** I began tracking the pattern after noticing that titles I had linked to for years were suddenly un-linkable. I expanded my check to a decade of top picks from All About Romance, and roughly ten percent are now excluded. The correlation is striking. These are not fringe erotica titles. They are mainstream romances from major publishers. The common denominator is simply that they contain on-page sex.

Examples include Uncommon Passion by Anne Calhoun, Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran, Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Bailey, Hate to Want You by Alisha Rai, A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, and The First Time at Firelight Falls by Julie Anne Long. These are books that have been widely reviewed, widely recommended, and affiliate-eligible for years. Older backlist titles have flipped alongside new releases, and the exclusions apply across all editions.

Amazon has not announced a policy change. I have contacted Amazon for clarification and have also reached out to several affected authors. As of now, there has been no public explanation. But the practical effect is clear: Amazon appears to be tightening the line on what it considers adult content for affiliate purposes, and books with open-door sex scenes are increasingly being swept—almost certainly by an automated classification system—into that category.

In a moment when sexual content is being policed with renewed zeal, this shift feels ominous. Amazon is not removing these books from sale, but it is making them harder to sustain in the recommendation economy. That is not censorship in the blunt sense, but it is pressure, and pressure works.

If Amazon has changed its standards, it should say so plainly. This is a company that accounts for roughly half of all print book sales in the United States and the overwhelming majority of the e-book market—by some estimates more than two-thirds, and closer to four-fifths when Kindle Unlimited is included. When Amazon--will Google be next?--decides that ordinary, consensual sex in a mainstream romance novel is too risky to support through its affiliate program, it redefines the boundaries of acceptable promotion.It’s not a stretch to worry that mechanism could be expanded to narrow other categories--political and religious beliefs, for example-- just as easily. When a corporation with this reach decides which books are too dangerous to incentivize, that is censorship. We should all be paying attention.

* I first read about this here. Romance authors are beginning to speak out about this issue as well.

** Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, which allows websites and creators to earn a commission by linking to products sold on Amazon.

*** Many books that are very graphic sexually are still available. Even within series, the prohibition varies

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