Hello again, adoptee readers!
Some of you may have noticed that Adoptee Reading has been inaccessible for many months.
In late 2025, I realized that the site was being inundated with traffic originating from China. I was unable to find any explanation for this except that Adoptee Reading was under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Why? I have no idea. The site quickly became unusable, timing out whenever someone tried to view it. Behind the scenes, I could also see that mixed in with the deluge of traffic were repeated attempts to break into the administration side of the website. Thankfully, those attempts failed and I was able to retain control of the site.
After much consideration, I decided to make a change to how I’ve been managing the site, which included migrating it to a new hosting provider. I believe this will provide better security for Adoptee Reading while allowing me more time to focus on the site’s content rather than on all the techy stuff required to keep a website up and running smoothly.
I’m happy to share that Adoptee Reading is back!
The catalog of nearly 500 books written and/or recommended by adopted people is intact and remains searchable in a multitude of ways: by type of adoption, by genre, or by author.
There are a couple of changes to the site, though, that I want to explain.
Purchase Links
From the beginning in 2015, my intention with Adoptee Reading has been to help adopted people find books that reflect their life experience, which is why I’ve always tried to include at least one purchase link for every title included in the catalog. Amazon.com has been the place where most books could be found, and their affiliate program enabled me to earn a few cents from every book purchased.
Then in 2020, Bookshop.org was launched, offering an alternative retail option for buying books online with the added bonus of supporting independent book stores. Bookshop.org is a certified B corporation, which means that they’re working for purpose rather than for profit—similar to my intention for Adoptee Reading. I decided to set up an affiliate shop at Bookshop.org and to include their purchase links on Adoptee Reading as well.
By 2025, Adoptee Reading included graphic links to both Amazon and Bookshop that showed current pricing at each site for comparison.
As many of you probably know, shopping at Amazon has become increasingly questionable from an ethical perspective for a number of reasons. Additionally, being an Amazon affiliate has become more difficult over time; Amazon has made changes to the program that make it clear they’re not that interested in small timers such as myself who don’t bring tens of thousands of shoppers to their platform. Over the years, I’ve had to redo every Amazon link at Adoptee Reading multiple times because of sudden, poorly communicated changes they’ve made to how affiliate links work. Furthermore, the percentage of affiliate income earned from a sale at Amazon is much lower than what Adoptee Reading receives from Bookshop.org.
Therefore, going forward Adoptee Reading will prioritize Bookshop.org for purchase links. If a title is available for purchase at Bookshop, that will be the only purchase link included in its listing at Adoptee Reading. Bookshop links will remain graphic links displaying current pricing, as Bookshop makes this simple and easy for affiliates.
But this doesn’t mean Amazon links are disappearing from Adoptee Reading. The fact of the matter is that Amazon has been and remains the most popular platform for self-published authors, as well as an often-used platform for small presses. A whopping 43% of the titles listed at Adoptee Reading are only available for purchase via Amazon. For these books, Adoptee Reading will continue to include an Amazon link, though it will no longer be a graphic link since Amazon has made it too difficult to continue including these.
List of Authors
Adoptee Reading book listings have always indicated whether or not an author is an adoptee, and this distinction will continue. However, the former menu options to view lists of adoptee authors and non-adoptee authors separately have now been replaced by a single list of all authors included in the site catalog. I hope to be able to restore the separate author lists at some point in the future.
Thanks to everyone who has visited Adoptee Reading in the past, and to all who have shared links to the site or contributed by suggesting books. And if you’re an adoptee discovering the site for the first time, welcome! This place is for you.
May you find the book you need in this moment.
Karen Pickell
Founder & Editor