One of my writing career goals for 2025, aside from speeding up my output from publishing 0.5 already-drafted books a year, was to move my main base of sales from Amazon's Kindle storefront to the smaller, more 'indie' storefront of itch.io.
My reasons for distancing myself from Amazon should come as little surprise to anyone who knows anything about the way that monster of a company operates. They're the biggest player in the ebook market by far, and they abuse that position, pushing the authors who do business through them into ever more unfavourable deals, including ones that disadvantage those authors if they try to safeguard their income by simultaneously publishing through other storefronts. On a more frivolous note, their user interface is insufferable and makes publishing new works an unpleasant experience I was simply delighted at the thought of avoiding for all time.
Amazon on the whole is a company with little regard for the human lives crushed under its relentless capitalism. Its employees labour under conditions that sound more like dystopian comedy than real life. Its business philosophy is quantity and savings over quality, offering vast amounts of items at prices and delivery speeds that no smaller operation can compete with. Now, I don't judge anyone who has to do business with Amazon, because this is the kind of deal that dark capitalism has pushed us to. But for me, in this one case, I realised I was moving away from the strategies that would make me successful on the platform anyway, and I decided this was one small thing I could do to fight back against these huge companies that try to control people's creative behaviour, which I absolutely despise!
The choice of itch as a sales venue for my books might have been surprising to some players. It's probably best known as a place to find indie-type games, often built by small teams, and home to a really delightful array of game jams where people have a great time turning out wonderful little bits of digital art for a particular technology or console or mood in a strictly limited period of time. It has also been possible for as long as I can remember to publish books there, with the intention of them being gaming-related books to begin with, but of late more and more people have been publishing non-game-related fiction. In particular I've seen growing communities of traditionally marginalised authors finding their home there and supporting one another by organising special promotions and themed book bundles. It's become a great place to find fiction that explores queerness and disability, race and culture and gender and all the little gems of living a life not the frequently assumed norm.
And so a lot of people were left dismayed when in July 2025, in response to a campaign by a spurious so-called Australian 'charity', itch came under such intense scrutiny from their payment processors over the kinds of works they were hosting that they ended up performing what is commonly known as 'shadowbanning' on a lot of material on their site all at once, a procedure that makes it very hard to find the material if you don't already know where to look. Some of this was sexual material—itch has long been a friendly venue for creators of erotic art. It was not on the whole erotic material that could be said to break any laws: it featured fictional people, or fictionalised the experiences of the creator, and though some of it was no doubt not to everyone's taste, that's something that could be said about sexual material in general.
What added insult to injury was that many creations tagged LGBT appeared to have been affected—whether or not there was in fact anything sexual about the material. It must be particularly bewildering if you are producing art about the asexual experience to be caught up in a campaign purportedly about inappropriate sexual material—but, of course, it's also not some tremendous surprise to be targeted in such a way for being any kind of queer. It is not really about whether there is sexual behaviour happening that could be harmful. The point is that the perpetrators of such activism wish to control the sexuality of everyone around them, and there's nothing that threatens such a goal more than overt queerness, which is frequently not about sex but is always about asserting one's right to make the life and family one wants, often involving casting off the shackles others would like to enforce concerning sex.
But all of this, of course, has been written about many times by those who have thought about it far more deeply than me. What is relevant to this situation: the outpouring of rage towards itch in some quarters over their response, though it appeared from what little was communicated from their side to be an unwilling one designed to protect the site from being entirely shut down in the short term. Itch are being accused of letting down the marginalised creators they created a haven for, and depending on who you ask they have either 'complied in advance', doing far more than they were asked, or have failed to do enough ahead of time to anticipate this problem and defend their vulnerable userbase against it. Or both!
As someone who came from a fiction publishing background, though I sympathised with the pain of those who were facing immediate uncertainty with their art, I was taken aback by the degree of surprise. When itch published a list of themes they would no longer be able to support in erotic materials, I felt even more bewildered by how ill-equipped the community seemed to be able to cope with the contents of that list. To me, the list was not vague or ambiguous at all as some claimed, although I had no doubt certain items could and would be interpreted in certain ways by those with certain agendas. That list seemed to me like a despised guest I had no choice but to entertain.
What I think people need to know, completely separate from whether they do feel a sense of betrayal over the exact handling of the parts that were under itch's control, is that they almost certainly did not come up with that list. It's a list the payment providers itch deals with already have, probably refined through their dealings with other online storefronts allowing erotic material. I am certain from my time with Amazon that other prominent storefronts already operate based on similar lists, sometimes much more willingly.
That is to say, this was always going to be an issue that itch would have to deal with sooner or later. Storefronts only avoid being caught up in this kind of harassment from payment providers and those who choose to lobby them by proactively banning most NSFW material or by flying under the radar. Itch has refused to do the former while becoming more and more successful and frequently mentioned in the same breath as Steam, which was also targeted in this campaign against games storefronts. Once they were on the payment processors' radar—and hundreds of calls about you will do that, whether or not they are justified—there was no hope of their flying under anything any more. With the threat of being unable to trade through those payment processors ever again and limited resources, itch went harder and faster than may have been strictly necessary, which at least ensured they could not be accused of failing to take the scrutiny seriously and risk losing the ability to process payments for all their users.
I think there is a fair case to be made that itch's communication with their users throughout this time was substantially lacking. It seems like they have a very small team devoted towards keeping the site functioning and not so much of a focus on presenting a polished front in marketing and communications. I think this is quite common to many scrappy little startups and those that would like us to think of them as scrappy and little: it is very reminiscent of Cohost, the ambitious LiveJournal-esque social media project that ultimately sank in a swirl of denied-to-the-end financial issues, taking a lot of the time and energy of its users with it that they perhaps might not have put into that project if they had realised how precarious its existence really was.
But my read on the Cohost situation was that there was a lot of bullshit artistry at play, with the small group of people at the top even convincing themselves to some degree that they were fine and doing all the right things, and I don't think the itch situation is quite like that. I think the team at itch simply don't appreciate just how much clear communication with their userbase is an essential part of their business, especially when people are entrusting money to them. Like me I think they were taken aback by how much that userbase struggled to come to terms with the situation that faced them. But for better or worse I think they're going to have to work on developing a better understanding of that aspect of user psychology, especially now that they've made it clear they intend to survive beyond this episode.
What I don't consider to be fair criticism is everything else that has been flung at them. Firstly, the accusation of 'complying in advance', which is a bit ridiculous given the only reason they were targeted was that they didn't just proactively refuse to host anything that might be controversial with regressives. Yes, they responded quickly and aggressively once they were confronted by the organisation that makes it possible for them to function financially. How does one decide the minimum level of compliance when faced with someone who would shut them off from their entire business at a moment's notice, and never think twice about it?
The problem is that for some of the people with grievances against itch's response, the only acceptable response would have been nothing short of refusing to obey the edicts handed down to them at all, even if this would have led to their being shut down—and it would, in fact, have led to their being shut down. That would have been the honourable path from the perspective of these critics: the path of maintaining solidarity with the most politically vulnerable of their users.
There is certainly precedent for this kind of thinking. Of late many politicians have been criticised for trying to bury any issues of trans protection in the name of potentially appealing to a wider base of voters, just as queer people's needs have always been pushed aside in the past whenever it was felt they were not a marketable issue. The thing is, politicians are not always very good at judging when 'it's time' to tackle a particular issue, and they are in fact where they are to push for the benefits of their constituents, not to worry about their own necks. Often they try to cover for their desire to take the safe road by pointing out that they cannot help anyone if they are not able to hold a position of power, and that is true of course, but one might then point out that if they won't help anyone with whatever power they currently have, it is not very meaningful power anyway!
When we vote for people to represent us, we usually expect them to be 'the line' on these matters. That is their number one job! They are who we want to be able to write to or call when 'something must be done'. I do not believe the same can be said for the likes of a storefront like itch. Their number one job is to take care of all the fiddly little bits associated with selling artistic creations. For them to get themselves completely obliterated trying to take a stand with a predictable outcome would be seen by many as a betrayal of those people who had come to depend on them to facilitate their livelihood. Despite what the politicians like to tell you, they are rarely nearly so critical to the lives of others, especially when they choose to adopt basically the same policies as their crueller counterparts without a fight!
Would it be nice if an organisation like itch engaged in activism on behalf of their users? It would be nice, but it sort of depends on their having the bandwidth to do both, and if the communication situation is anything to go by itch is run by a very small group of people who probably have a decent skillset for running a site like itch, but not so much for the kind of lobbying that would yield the kind of results the spurious 'charity' that attacked them has. And in the process of engaging in such activism they probably would have lost the ability to fly under the radar for as long as they did anyway.
I think people make a lot of fundamental errors in how they view other people and organisations out there working on projects. One of those is assuming that if an entity is relatively famous, they have enough money and influence to confront any obstacle. Another error relevant to this one is to get so union-brained that you believe every situation must be an action where you have to 'hold the line' or be letting everyone else down, and that there are no exceptions.
As someone who has published through Amazon and who has known people who were much more successful at publishing through Amazon than I ever expect to be, I can say that it's very foolish to believe any but a handful of the humans you know of, even multiplied by one thousand, has any power at all against the sort of immovable wall that the likes of Amazon represent. Every indie author publishing through Amazon objects to certain of their procedures, including many who have cleared hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and it does not matter. Even if you got some of the most successful authors on their platform to come and call them out it would not matter, because they can delete those authors and have replacements within the hour and not be bothered by the blip in profitability at all. They are simply too big to stumble because of the likes of us, where 'us' means essentially 100% of the planet. The same applies to the likes of Mastercard and Visa, who have the balls of the business-doing world in an unshakable grip.
This is the problem we face now so often when doing business on the Internet as individual creatives: the systems we need to rely on are already too big for us to be able to defend ourselves against them in the way we need to, whether individually or banding together in larger groups. Especially when it comes to fighting for causes that are not universally supported. It has been amazing to see how in this situation, a lot of people against the actions of the regressives and the regressive payment processors cannot actually bring themselves to admit they approve of or even merely accept taboo topics in pornography! There's been so much careful, oh, but what if games and stories that are the creators processing their rape trauma are affected? as if this would be the only negative outcome, because many people cannot actually say with their whole chests that they believe adults have the right to pay money to experience material intended for titillation only that would be illegal and traumatic if it happened to real people, or that some might find disgusting.
Although I have to be completely honest at this juncture: I don't even think that all creative works should be uncritically supported. I think there are some things put out there that primarily cause harm and that would make me not want to associate with the people who create them. I also think that I would not want my perspectives to be what makes the rules for everyone, because who am I to decide I know what absolutely everyone else in the world does or doesn't get out of particular creations? I think we need to make the rules for what is allowed as wide as they can be while we can show that there is no direct line of harm to an actual human, but you can see what we're up against when even within our own circles, there is a lack of solidarity on fighting for the rights of filthy smut as opposed to 'the artistic stuff'.
When it comes to Amazon authors, nobody has any illusions about being able to change the status quo. The ways in which Amazon authors have skirted the rules itch now faces and in turn probably influenced them are myriad and fascinating. I started writing shifter romance early on in my former life creating for Amazon because I love animals and it seemed like a fun way to write about all sorts of animals... well, at some point it hit me that the genre was so big on Amazon in part because it was a way for... a different kind of animal-lover to get their kicks. Bestiality is totally off-limits for erotic fiction published on Amazon and I think monster-fucking is pretty dicey too, but I guess shifter romance is an avenue for people to... imagine whatever they like.
The bigots pulling the strings at Amazon are almost certainly aware of this, because we also know that they do not allow depictions of human characters fucking shifters who are even partially shifted into animal form. No cute little ears or tails or wings or whatever. It doesn't matter that you've established that animal character is capable of the necessary consent! I got myself into a funny situation here when I ended up depicting a shifter character giving birth with definitely non-human anatomy. I couldn't help thinking someone was bound to see this as being for titillation and I'd be pinged for the book, which has never happened, but I think that's down to my relative obscurity more than the likelihood that Amazon wouldn't.
Another area where the rules have influenced the art is in the sub-genre known as dark romance. The core of dark romance is that a troubled almost certainly male hero will violate the main character's boundaries on their journey to mutual understanding and love. There will be sex scenes where consent is ambiguous, or there will be undebatable rape perpetuated by that troubled hero. And most Amazon authors of such romances will insist up and down and in every way that their heroines might be porked that these scenes are not for titillation. I've never personally questioned a dark romance author on this, but presumably these scenes are an integral part of the characters' emotional journeys.
Of course this is absolute twaddle. Those scenes are definitely there to titillate readers who find the notion of a partner who doesn't accept no for an answer exciting—and it's a fantasy, so for as long as they're able to distinguish their fantasies from reality, good for them! Fantasies are dark messy little things and I think in general best kept to one's own bedroom and other friendly circles. I think in fact that understanding that the world at large is not capable of relating to all our fantasies and expressing them appropriately with that considered is an important part of achieving maturity.
The challenge with achieving both maturity in one's thinking and appropriate satisfaction of one's needs is doing so in a world where it may not be safe for a creative to state outright that they cater to a fantasy in an actually legal manner. Creatives who have operated under the same restrictions being placed on itch for a long time have found ways to get their work, their ideas, into the hands of the people who could most benefit, in whatever form will go unmolested. They have compromised to survive. The alternative would have been for their work to go unseen, either uncreated or shared with a much tinier circle of individuals. And there is something wonderful about art created for a small specific audience with no expectations of glory, but another very important kind of work is finding ways to bring ideas that might be considered generally subversive or confronting to those who might only be looking to join those audiences, without a clear idea yet of how. And it just so happens that the people who would benefit most from the distribution of such ideas as well as the people who are usually best at conveying them tend to be marginalised, disadvantaged people. Not always. But frequently.
What are those marginalised people to do: wait until some billionaire decides that actually their stories should be celebrated rather than denigrated? Many of the artists who are currently working out there in the world have chosen to convey their stories in the best way they have perceived they are allowed to do so. They have decided that they are worth more to the world that way than in wasting themselves on effort that will either generate no result or blow up their creative lives, and I believe that is a valid decision to make. And though I do not see itch the entity as the same as an individual artist, I do see them as having made the same choice, the choice you would expect such an entity to make, with the goal of protecting both themselves and the majority of their current users.
The other side of the harshest complaints against itch stated that they had not done enough ahead of time to mitigate the situation they ended up in: that they 'should have known' what was coming and arranged their affairs such that they were not forced to scramble to save their skins.
And again I think it is valid to suggest that they might have been ready with a more thoughtful explanation for their userbase. But then, assuming the exact same sequence of events requiring explaining, would even a polished statement have really alleviated the anger... or would it have simply resulted in distrust of itch for different reasons?
Because many of those who suggest some thinking ahead could have stopped some of this talk about itch working with different financial services to handle payments... and that's just not how any of this works, as the kids on the Internet like to say these days. All the components of the services that count in this case all have exactly the same policies where it counts! And no, you can't just roll your own system. The existing system is set up to ensure that as some random loser on the ground level of the financial world you can't do it without them. The plan some people are floating these days to simply sell your work through your own website is a challenging enough one, if you know even a little bit about the requirements placed upon traders in different regions you might seek to do business in. And the people who have chosen to do so are still at risk of being targeted as itch was targeted, though they may escape for years by virtue of presenting a much smaller surface area.
Thinking ahead, in this case, would have looked like itch loudly and clearly informing everyone who used their website that something such as this could happen, at any time. For better or worse, I don't think the vast majority of sites that want you to sell things through their platform would do that. I don't know whether or not itch realised how precarious their position was to even have the option of deciding for or against doing that. They should have known, but then so many of the people who were doing business through them seemed not to understand it themselves even though this sort of online purging has happened before under markedly similar circumstances. I think unfortunately many people have not ever paid attention to what goes on in the world of those who explicitly call themselves 'sex workers'. I guess it wasn't so outrageous until it was something they considered 'legitimate art' that was threatened.
Even if itch had communicated more effectively about the position they were in, it would not have drastically altered this eventual path. And if they are to be expected to understand the risks and to have done something to address them, then is the same not applicable to every entity seeking to sell through itch? We're all people of business and we should know what the risks are to our own business... right?
So many of our number were not prepared and now want to believe that another entity only slightly further up the chain should have been prepared beyond their powers on our behalf. And now we have people in anger deciding to set out on their own and roll their own storefronts, still with no awareness of how precarious their position is, should someone decide to call attention to their activities.
I do think that itch have a greater responsibility to be aware of these things, but nothing we know about this situation suggests they weren't. And since there's nothing they can do except try to make their userbase aware of the way things work also, which is not really in their interests as a company and won't help anyone once the bad thing happens anyway, to get hugely outraged over it is to choose unproductive frustration. That you can't trust a company to act in your best interests is not news and seems to have in fact been what everyone advocating abandoning them in droves has been lecturing about anyway. In any case, the fact remains that even if you the trader trying to do business through itch consider them to have been negligent in some way, it doesn't absolve you of the obligation to know your stuff too. I do not believe itch is ever promising to make sure your business is right legally, and they would know they do not have the ability to do so.
Ultimately, as individual creatives, we have a lot more in common with the side of the itch team than we do any of those people who seek to bring all of us down. And no, this is not the same as the facetious argument that I keep seeing being put forward that sympathising with itch's position in this scenario is equivalent to seeing them as a poor little uwu company who never did anything wrong. Like if you try to win an argument by pretending your opponent is unreasonable you'd better have receipts, and they're just not out there! I think most people wanting to express some solidarity with itch over this situation understand perfectly well that they are a company and not a bestie, but that all the same, humans are a lot closer to the surface with itch than they are at most other companies you might be forced to deal with when doing business. That doesn't mean they get any sort of pass. It just means perspective is good.
What the backlash against itch reads like to me is a distressed lashing-out in response to being reminded or made aware of just how unsafe the world really is for those who the powerful establishment does not wish to have their freedom. That's understandable, but I think seeking to bring itch down in response to something they had no ability to stop from happening is not helping anyone. Worse: it pushes the fight against these kinds of regressive policies into the shadows. The situation with itch made news in gaming communities because it was happening to a name at least reasonably well known in those circles. That's not going to be what happens once we're all selling our work on our individual websites, waiting to be picked off one by one by these evil bullies.
Is it fair that frequently marginalised artists need to keep themselves abreast of the most profoundly ridiculous and unfair regulations, knowing also that they have little power to fight back against any of this? Of course not: it's outrageously unfair. Life is outrageously unfair for some of us. We can either just give up on it all, or try to band together and support one another in whatever ways we can. Many people have been fighting this by barraging the payment providers responsible with complaint calls. I don't know that the long-term outcome will be more than having aggravated them for a blip of time, but it's a start.
And no, a site like itch is not 'one of us'. But they are a valuable tool that is on our side as much as they can be, and it doesn't make any sense to not treat your tools well just because you dislike their limitations. It doesn't make any sense either to act so personally wounded if you were the smart one who knew all along that they weren't your friend.
No, companies are not your friend, or your little uwu buddy, or whatever you want to call it. But there are lots of things in the universe—heck, the whole universe—that are not your friend, but are also not acting with intent to harm you. You can, I suppose, rail against the rain that spoiled your planned afternoon... but maybe your time would be better spent doing something about the person who collected a whole bucket of the stuff to chuck at you.