The Amazon associates (also known as affiliates) program lets websites earn a percentage of sales on products purchased via links from their sites. If I recommend a product and include an affiliate link, and you click on the link and buy the product, Amazon gives me some percentage of the sale price. (The percentage varies by product.)
It doesn’t affect the price you pay — you still get Amazon’s lowest price, which they try to make sure is the lowest price anywhere. And for things like book sales, the dollars don’t exactly add up quickly. If you buy one of my books for $4.99, I would get .20.
But the link works to purchase any one product for a period of 24 hours. So if you decide not to buy the book I linked to, but do decide to buy some shampoo, my site gets credited for the shampoo purchase. This is obviously much nicer for me when the purchase is something like a computer rather than shampoo, but pennies do add up.
And while I blog because I like it, I do spend time and energy and writing hours working on my blog when I should be writing books, so if you enjoy reading it, supporting it via the affiliate links is a good way to encourage me to keep writing it.
That said, I’m not going to turn my blog into a product recommendation blog. I don’t have room in my life to start buying things to recommend!
I’m also not going to start running ads on my main page. But I am going to add an ad to this page, just to make it a nice, convenient, large link. And because I still think it’s fun to see one of my book covers in an ad. 😛
Thanks for your support!
And the formal stuff, as required by Amazon: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Some more formal stuff — a Privacy Policy:
Who I am:
My website address is: https://sarahwynde.com.
What personal data I collect and why:
If you leave a comment, the software collects the data shown in the comments form, including your IP address and browser user agent. I have no control over this and it seems sort of obvious to me that if you comment, you should understand that your comment is not private. I’m going to read it and so is anyone else who visits the comments section.
But there are some other details from the software: an anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) is probably provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. If you use Gravatar, after I approve your comment, your Gravatar profile picture will be visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Cookies:
If you leave a comment on the site you can opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. That’s so that you don’t have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in, a temporary cookie determines if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, several cookies will save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
Embedded content from other websites:
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. (However, I rarely embed content — I think I’ve only done it two or three times in the decade I’ve been writing here.) These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who I share your data with:
No one.
How long I retain your data:
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. If you register to leave comments, the personal information you provide in your user profile will also be stored. You can see, edit, or delete your personal information at any time. Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data:
Apparently, if you’ve left a comment, you can request an exported file of the personal data I hold about you, including any data you’ve provided. I wouldn’t have any idea how to go about giving that to you except by the probably highly tedious process of sorting through 3000 comments to find yours. But if you want it, you can have it. You’ll just have to provide me with all the information I’d need to find your comments amongst the others. It could be kind of entertaining. Anyway, you can also request that I erase any of your personal data, which I would certainly do if you needed me to.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. (I’m keeping this line in here, because maybe I’ll do that someday. Right now, the spam service is me, reading comments and deciding which ones are real.)