Updated
10/9/2018
Remember that time you gave your number to some guy you thought was cute for reasons completely unknown to you now and then he used it to text you pictures of every meal and snack he ate for a month? Then he shared your number with his entire Fast Food Club (who knew that was even a thing) and you were deleting pictures of french fries the rest of the year and wondering what you could’ve ever seen in him? Okay maybe not that exact thing (although it would be a completely hilarious one-shot on Wattpad), but you know what we mean.
As authors who respect you, our readers, more than anything, please know that we would never, never, not in a million years, not even for a million dollars, do anything like that. We will treat any data you share with us as if it was our own. You can be sure that the only information we will ever store on our website is information you share freely. You can also be sure that our website it protected by SSL which ensures that everything sent to or from our server is encrypted.
Here’s a break down of the categories where data is collected and stored so you know exactly what you’re getting in to. We know, we know. It’s a long list for two authors who just want to let you know when our books will be out, but I promise it’s much shorter than the Itunes privacy policy:
Comments
We would love to hear your thoughts on all the places Amy’s traveled, the books we’ve read, and why you agree with Mary that the Gilmore Girls is the best show ever made (okay, you can disagree too, but you’d be wrong). The thing is, there’s always someone who wants to turn a spirited debate about the superiority of Angel over Buffy into a platform for spam comments. That’s why we use CleanTalk to provide anti-spam services.
When you comment (which, and we know we’re repeating ourselves here, we LOVE!) the information collected includes your name, email address, IP address, and your comment. If you ever wish to have those comments removed (like maybe now you’re dating someone who is so totally into Angel that you don’t want them to see your public declaration of hate), send us an email and we’ll remove them. We’re all for protecting budding new romances or any other reason you may want a comment deleted.
To protect our site from spam, your information is compared with a list of known spam senders by CleanTalk. CleanTalk only stores your information for a few days to give me time to contest its decision as to whether you are a spammer or not.
Cookies (Not the exciting kind, we’re sad to say. Couldn’t someone have come up with a better name for this that didn’t make us crave chocolate chips? Anyway…)
We use cookies on this Site. A cookie is a small text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web page server. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. Cookies are uniquely assigned to you, and can only be read by a Web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you (are you craving an Oreo yet?).
One of the primary purposes of cookies is to provide a convenience feature to save you time. For example, if you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. It’s supposed to make things easier for you. You don’t have to keep filling in your details every time you comment on the last book you read or what you loved about your trip to China. If you don’t want to opt-in, no problem. If you do opt-in, these cookies will last for one year (this is, sadly, very different than a year’s supply of thin mints).
You have the ability to accept or decline cookies (although why you would decline a cookie, we don’t know. Oh, right, wrong type of cookie again). Many Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can modify your browser settings to decline cookies if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to fully experience the interactive features of this or other Web sites you visit.
Okay, after all that, we definitely deserve at the very least a Nilla Wafer. Anyone? Feel free to take your own short cookie break if needed.
Website Activity Tracking
Some days we can’t even find our keys. Seriously. Do you know how expensive it is to replace one of the smart car keys? Ugh! That’s why we let our hosting company handle tracking basic data on those who access my site. The data stored is not traceable back to any individual and is deliberately generalized. It just provides us with information related to the country of origin of site visitors, what browser they’re using, and how long they stayed on the site. If you want to read about what we use, here is a good article.
Newsletters
We’re excited to let you know about our upcoming projects, but promise those updates will be infrequent because you have plenty of other things to read. We get that. We use The Newsletter Plugin which is on our server so your data isn’t shared with any third party other than CleanTalk, because…spam (see “COMMENTS” above). If you ever want to be removed from our email list, just hit the unsubscribe button at the bottom of any newsletter.
The Newsletter Plugin also allows us to see how many people have opened the newsletter and what internal-newsletter links have been clicked. That just helps us know what content is interesting (or not as the case may be) to you guys. And since our main objective is to be fascinating, we definitely want to know.
Contact Form
Our contact form is the most beautiful of creatures—the kind where what you see, is pretty much what you get. Our contact form requests your name, email address, the subject and message that you’re sending us. Your IP address is also captured by the system. This information is checked for spam (again, see “COMMENTS” above) and then transmitted to us via email. It’s not stored on our website. During that transmission, the data will be sent through normal email channels.
Google Analytics
We want to know how you found our site, why you’re here, and what pages you visited. Google Analytics tracks this information. Really, we just want to know what you like and don’t like about our site. It’s scary, but Google knows these things, so we figure we might as well have a look to the information.
Children
We definitely want to hear from you, but if you’re under the age of 16, make sure you get parental consent before using any of the forms on this site.
Changes to this Statement
We may occasionally update this privacy statement. We’re writers. Updating is one of the things we do best. And endlessly. When we do, we’ll also revise the “last updated” date at the top of the privacy statement. We promise you’re in good hands, but we still encourage you to periodically review this privacy statement to stay informed about how we’re helping to protect the personal information we collect. Your continued use of the service constitutes your agreement to this privacy statement and any updates.
If you ever want us to delete your data, a comment, your email address, or you have any concerns about how we’re handling your data, just use the contact form to send us a message and one of us will handle your concerns right away. Thanks for reading through this whole thing. You’ve earned the title of our favorite and most tenacious reader. Really. Tweet your new title. Or post it on Instagram? Or Pinterest? Maybe Tumblr?
