In 2009, some Amazon Kindle users discovered that books they had purchased from the Kindle store platform, specifically versions of “1984” and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell, were deleted from their devices without warning. Despite Amazon explaining that this was due to those specific versions of the books being uploaded to the platform by a company that didn’t have the rights to sell the book, it still raised concerns over whether this was an abuse of power by the company.
In 2025, Amazon finally clarified on the Kindle store that “by placing your order, you’re purchasing a license to the content” of that particular book, not that you own the book. This raised concern among consumers and Kindle users about the increasing lack of control they have over their digital book media, including terminating the ability to transfer their licensed books onto physical hardrives. This essentially locks readers who own a Kindle into an Amazon ecosystem if they wish to keep reading the books they licensed; publishers argue that this discourages the purchase of physical media and puts more power in the hands of Amazon, which has been accused of placing a stronghold on low e-book prices across online booksellers.
The digital purchase and lending of book licenses has long been in use on digital library platforms such as Hoopla and OneDrive, and publishers expressed concern that “library lending of ebooks will ‘train’ readers that the value of ebooks is zero.”
On June 21, 2024, Yunjian (云间), author of novel Application for Divorce (离婚申请), was quietly detained in the night. Her suspected crime: writing danmei, a popular Chinese-specific genre of queer male romance and erotica that developed alongside its more popular Japanese counterpart, shounen ai (lit. “boys love”). In official terms, she was suspected “of producing and selling obscene materials for profit.”
Since last June, authors have been silently disappeared off Taiwanese-based website Haitang Literature City. Late December, they revealed that they had been implicated by a series of police crackdowns in Anhui province, east China, specifically targeting danmei authors.
It’s not merely a matter of sexual impropriety. Amidst the turbulence of beloved authors being arrested, a frightful note on censorship law incited online outrage: sexual assailants get off easier than erotica authors. More specifically, authors earning over 250,000 yuan (USD 34,700) from “obscene materials” can face a lifetime of imprisonment—though the severity of the sentence could, hypothetically, be lessened by paying back “between one and five times the amount of illegal income.” Authors who made less were typically placed on probation. Meanwhile, the punishment for rape of a female minor by guardians under “heinous circumstances” is between three and ten years.
For Yunjian, it wasn’t until December 6th that she received her official verdict: a sentence of 4 years and 6 months, with a fine double her earnings.
According to South China Morning Post, as of January 1st, Anhui police had detained over 50 writers in China since June 2024.
Taiwan, the birthplace of beloved Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee and the origin of queer film Your Name Engraved Herein is a known safe haven for sexual minorities and free speech. Haitang Literature City previously served that purpose for authors of queer fiction, but authors are frequently finding themselves with nowhere for their craft to go.
Domestic censorships had grown tighter. Since previous years, the fate of progressing live action adaptions for danmei novels have been left in the dark. Since 2021 and 2022 respectively, Immortality, based off beloved novel The Husky and His White Cat Shizun (dubbed 2HA, as a shortening of its original Chinese name), and Eternal Faith, the live action for Heaven’s Official Blessing (dubbed TGCF), were under rigorous censorship review before news of releases ambiguously fizzled out.
However, Heaven’s Official Blessing also has a widely accessible Netflix-housed donghua animation adaptation, and both 2HA and TGCF have official translations licensed by a Los Angeles publisher, Seven Seas Entertainment. Previous works of Mo Xiang Tong Xue, author of TGCF, have also spurned other adaptations: including a live action Chinese drama The Untamed, the Mo Dao Zu Shi donghua, and recently, even a four-part stage play in Japan. Seven Seas’ latest acquisition, Thrice Married to Salted Fish, was just announced last week. Suffice to say, danmei isn’t a genre kept in the dark, or to be shelved in with the “pornographic” label. It is a thriving worldwide phenomenon.
Due to the covert nature of queer fiction in China, even Mo Xiang Tong Xue, was at one point suspected of being arrested, with rumors claiming either censorship or tax evasion.
The Haitang incident is a fearmongering response to the increasing popularity of danmei. “They were all arrested on the same day, and the police had all the authors’ information; it was clear that they had been targeted,” speculated Chenchen, a longtime danmei reader.
As a result of the fines, many authors still had to turn back to writing to pay off their dues.
The question of free speech is complex—the legislation is largely freely interpreted by those in power. What constitutes as “obscene materials,” and how do we measure the “social harm” that dictates the severity of a sentencing? The lines keep shifting: whereas euphemisms used to slip under the radar, new reinterpretations of censorship easily place restrictions on “nothing below the neck.”
In one interview by RFA Mandarin, longtime writer Si Yueshu laments that the lines keep shifting for authors, despite danmei being a low-paying labor of love. “You can’t actually know what you’re allowed to write and what you’re not allowed to write,” she says. “Very successful authors usually upload three chapters a day, or more than 10,000 words, and the most they can make is around 20,000 yuan (US$2,740) a month.”
The extensive fines for this hard-earned salary become, more clearly, examples of economic exploitation.
Danmei remains an explorative space for women and queer individuals to express their sexuality. Infringement of this freedom based on historical stigma against homosexuality has long been criticized as outdated. Why must independent queer authors be martyrs for creative expression? And for the average American fan, what can they do besides consumption?
For some like Yunjian, who have been facing poverty, medical conditions, and innumerable other hardships, donations have helped authors stay afloat.
In the Western or even Chinese diasporae consciousness, danmei isn’t without its faults, in terms of reinforcing certain gendered stereotypes or beauty standards. Yet that critique is entirely quashed under the face of legislative censorship, which seeks to perpetuate the idea that gay people, below the neck, have never existed in China at all.
Above: “cut sleeve,” a euphemism for homosexuality, originating from a folktale regarding Emperor Ai of Han, who had cut his sleeve rather than disturb his lover resting upon it.
In December 2023, soon-to-debut authors of color began noticing strange 1-star reviews cropping up their Goodreads. As part of a larger debut group chat, took to investigating. Some of these reviewers, in echoes of Yellowface, took on Asian names as though to deflect blame:
Even stranger than the mass negative reviews was the culprit’s usage of the same accounts to boost up one specific debut novel: Cait Corrain’s Crown of Starlight, a sci-fi adaptation of the romance of Ariadne and Dionysus.
On December 5th, the bubble burst. “If you as a debut author are going to make a bunch of fake Goodreads accounts one-star-bombing fellow debuts you’re threatened by can you at least not make it so obvious by upvoting your own book on a bajillion different lists with those same accounts,” tweeted Xiran Jay Zhao, influencer and bestselling author of Iron Widow.
In a Twitter thread compiled by review-bombed fellow debut author Bethany Baptiste, the pieces fell together to expose the culprit to public eye. Corrain, a former Reylo fanfiction writer, attempted to claim that the review bombs were done by her fandom friend Lilly, accompanying claims with Discord screenshots. Corrain sent these back-and-forths between Corrain and “Lilly” into a Slack group chat with debut authors.
Then she shares the "screenshots" with Lilly, a Reylo friend. A lot of you are probably very familiar with them, but the shots were shared out of order. This is the correct order. 15/? pic.twitter.com/IVweUv10mu
— susan c. sheffield (a white dove's whimpers 🕊️) (@StorySorcery) December 8, 2023
These screenshots surrendered Corrain’s motives, in exchange for shifting the blame to a hypothetical Lilly character that she could not prove existed. “It was just the books you said you were worried would bury yours on social media wicked gods and fate inked in blood,” wrote Lilly. In another text: “I just remembered something important. a lot of my bad reviews were for poc authors. when the callout post eventually comes for you they’ll call you a racist too. you’re welcome. bitch.”
In response, Xiran Jay Zhao wrote, “They knew. They knew they were being racist.”
After the “Lilly” ship sank, Corrain blamed her actions on being under the influence of new ADHD medication, autism, and bipolar depression. “I want to try and change the conversation around mental illness, around addiction, and around what it actually is like to be in the publishing industry as a first-time author, as a disabled author,” said Corrain, trying to shift her narrative to an epic of mental health recuperation. The situation never went the way she wanted. Corrain wrote her writing career into fatality.
Crown of Starlight was a drop in the bucket of Hellenic mythology retellings frequenting the romantasy aisle today, following the wild success of Song of Achilles and Lore Olympus. Nonetheless, it stood out amidst all other Spring 2024 releases, and was slotted for a special edition box through Illumicrate, fitted with illustrations by Corey Brickley. Following the controversy, however, Illumicrate, Penguin Random House’s Del Rey Books imprint, and Daphne Press all dropped the debut, albeit in a manner that highlights the complicity in the publishing world to some.
“i can’t get over the passive voice in all of these statements (that are basically all the same). they do not identify Cait Corrain as a perpetrator or that there were victims,” tweeted @novatjerneld.
More recently, Corrain has been spotted attempting to infiltrate book Twitter through another persona under the Twitter username @coderoxannaxo, but her attempts were quickly exposed once again—through a mishap involving her sharing a Pinterest post to another author, exposing her name.
— V. Chaos- 🧟♀️🖤 no. 1 hetjoshi (@tropotropotropo) July 18, 2024
Now, Corrain has become a cautionary tale for authors attaching their worth too closely to review culture—a space meant for readers. Her targeting of BIPOC authors and reliance on mental health excuses sparked larger discussions about what it meant to be a minority member in publishing. There were no winners here.
Nevertheless, the point of a social media community surrounded by book lovers is to ensure love goes where it needs to be. Rather than dwelling lifelong on the perpetrator, here’s a list of the affected authors: Kamilah Cole (So Let Them Burn), Bethany Baptiste (The Poisons We Drink), Molly X Chang (To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods), Frances White (Voyage of the Damned), and KM Enright (Mistress of Lies).
While the act of “separating the art from the artist” continues to be a debate that divides fans and pop culture enthusiasts, publishing houses have recently found themselves trying to navigate controversy when authors’ personal behaviors have forced their published work to come under scrutiny.
In 2024, the daughter of celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro came forward with allegations that her mother deliberately avoided intervening when her husband sexually abused her during her childhood. The content of Munro’s stories, which often focused on “passive” characters who grapple with feelings of abandonment or betrayal, drew scrutiny from both readers who believed that her personal actions were inseparable from her work, including her famous short stories “Vandals” and “The Children Stay.”
The public backlash was swift, as authors and readers like Rebecca Makkai lamented on social media, “I love her work so much that I don’t want to lose it, but am also horrified to see the meanings of many favorite (foundational, to me) stories shift under us.”
In January 2025, popular British author Neil Gaiman (whose work has been adapted into television and film projects) was accused of sexual misconduct by eight women in an article by Vulture. Critics in academic journals like Ad Fontes noted that it was nearly impossible to believe that these alleged acts didn’t influence his work, as “Gaiman’s fiction doesn’t dabble in sexual debauchery—it’s almost everywhere.” The long list of allegations inspired pop culture critics to create think pieces on YouTube and NPR, arguing whether publishers should play a role in “deplatforming” Gaiman by dropping his projects and whether readers could ethically enjoy his work, including novels like Coraline and comics like The Sandman.
In both of these controversies, the publisher was stuck in the middle of two sides of a raging public debate: either stop publishing the author’s works (which one side argued was censorship) or continue to publish them and be criticized for ignoring serious allegations in the pursuit of financial gain. In the wake of the allegations against Neil Gaiman, graphic novel publisher Dark Horse Comics cancelled the upcoming publication of additional books in Gaiman’s graphic novel series Anansi Boys. Alice Munro’s books remain available and in print after the allegations were made public and are available through sites such as Penguin Random House and Munro’s Books, which also published a statement of support for the victim.
These two controversies demonstrate that “when it comes to the question of whether authors are visible in their works or whether audiences can be complicit in destructive art,” publishers have started to grapple with their long-held role as gatekeepers of the literary world and what responsibility they bear when allegations emerge (Lawson, Ad Fontes).
On June 6, 2020, YA author L.L. McKinney started the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, calling for authors to transparently share the advances they received for their books. Earlier in the year there had been a lot of talk about publishers seemingly paying white authors more for their stories than they do authors of color. McKinney was hoping to highlight the pay inequality between Black and non-Black writers. The hashtag quickly trended on Twitter, with authors sharing their advances, which is the amount of money they receive for their books before any royalties start coming in. Renowned authors like Jesmyn Ward and N.K. Jemisin shared that they were underpaid for some of their more popular work and had to “wrestle” for decent advances. Meanwhile, nonblack authors reported receiving significantly larger advances for books that were not as popular.
The campaign revealed that the publishing industry’s systemic biases spread all the way down to the numbers. Furthermore, it showed how much the industry underappreciated black authors and their stories. In the following days, the hashtag became a movement beyond social media. Around 1,300 publishing workers signed up to participate in a ‘day of action,’ in which those in media and publishing would spend the day working on books by black authors, phone banking, or donating their day’s pay. However, not much more has been done in the past few years to eradicate the disparities within the industry.
American Dirt: Cultural Appropriation and the Publishing Industry
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins was released in January 2020 and was anointed the biggest book of the season well before it came out. The novel tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, fleeing their home in Acapulco, Mexico, for the US after their family was murdered by a drug cartel. It received amazing blurbs from authors like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Sandra Cisneros. It all seemed to be going fine, until it wasn’t. Critics started to bring up one major problem within the book; it was a book about Mexican migrants written by a white American author.
Not only had Cummins written a story that was not hers, but she also fetishized the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings. On social media, people started to deem the book as “stereotypical” and “appropriative,” with some even calling it trauma porn. Flatiron Books decided to cancel Cummins’s book tour, citing threats to both the author and booksellers. This controversy added fuel to the ongoing debate about who can tell what stories.
The question surrounding the debate is “is it empathy or exploitation?” Did Cummins write American Dirt because she empathized with a group of people and wanted to uplift their voices, or did she want to exploit their traumatic experiences?
