Affiliate disclosure
When a link earns us something, it says so
No link on this site currently earns a commission. This page states the arrangement in advance, so that when the first one goes live nothing about it is a surprise.
Last updated 4 August 2026 · Effective for affiliate links from the date they appear
Status: not yet active. As of the date above, SmittenSpines carries no affiliate links and earns no commission from anything on this site. The terms below take effect the moment that changes, and this notice will be replaced with the live version, dated.
The standard disclosure
SmittenSpines is a participant in retailer affiliate programmes, including the Amazon Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
In plain terms: if you follow a link from here to a bookshop and buy something, we may receive a small percentage of what you paid. It doesn't cost you anything extra. The retailer pays it out of their margin.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- Commission never moves a book up the page. What gets recommended is decided by the match between what you asked for and what the book contains. Which retailer pays what is not an input to that, and cannot become one.
- Nobody can buy placement. That covers authors, publishers and retailers alike. Beyond it being a bad idea, paid placement inside search results is prohibited for a business operating in Germany.
- More than one shop. Books get links to several retailers where we can manage it, including ones that pay us nothing, because a catalogue that only points at one shop stops being a catalogue.
- Marked where it happens. Any page carrying commission links says so on the page, not only here.
- No tracking passed along. An affiliate link from here never carries your search text, your preferences, or a persistent identifier. Just the book and our shop code. See privacy.
Why this arrangement and not another
The economics are worth stating plainly, because they shape what this site can be. Ebook affiliate commissions are tiny, at cents per sale. You can't build a business on that without chasing volume, and chasing volume would mean optimising the recommendations for what pays instead of for what fits.
So commission gets treated here as a small contribution towards running costs, not as the engine. If SmittenSpines ever needs real revenue it will come from something readers choose to pay for, and we'll say so on this page rather than quietly turning the recommendations into advertising.
Questions
If a recommendation ever looks commercially motivated to you, please say so: hello@smittenspines.com. That is exactly the failure this page exists to make visible.