Privacy and data use/retention policies

This page will serve as a plain-language privacy policy/data use statement. My day job is in digital marketing, so I’m familiar with the norms of the industry, and how much they suck! And I don’t want to obfuscate things or keep information from you.

So! Here’s what data I may collect from you, and how, and what I would do with it!

tl;dr the only PII I get is what you explicitly and consensually give me, which can be deleted at any time, and will only be used for stuff related to this site

This website

Turns out my Google Analytics integration for this doesn’t actually work lol. It’s not so easy to install it on WordPress, okay!!! So you don’t need to worry about that at all.

My webhost probably collects data on you in order to serve you, but I do not have access to any of that data.

You can leave a comment on posts, if you wish, and I can see those, along with whatever username/email/website you attach with it, plus the timestamp the comment was made. I have the ability to delete comments, which I will do if they are spam or abusive. I imagine the anti-spam comment tool Akismet looks at additional info to auto-detect spammy users and comments and catches them in a spam filter, but I do not get shown any of that info.

Otherwise, I do not get any information on who is using my site, or where, or when, or why. The only info I get from www.chasej.xyz usage is what people willingly put on comments.

The email list

I have an email marketing list via mailchimp. You can sign up for that if you wish, and whatever info you put into that is voluntary. You are free to unsubscribe at any time; there will be an unsubscribe button in every email, but you can message me directly and I can delete you from the list if you wish! You can find my contact info under “contact info” in the header. My email address is on there. Sorry for making you hunt for it, but I want to make things a little difficult, to keep bots away.

Mailchimp has “analytics,” and the only ones I have turned on are very basic. I will get information such as X people opened the emails and Y people clicked the link. These are numbers of total actions, and there is no way I can tell if you, specifically clicked something or deleted the email unread. I will use this information to see if people actually like my emails and change things (like the subject line or content) to make it perform better.

Which means content that you actually want to see! You are signing up for my email list because you are interested in me and my writing, and that’s all you’re going to get. I won’t be selling Raid Shadow Legends to you or saying, oh, it’s arbor day! Please go buy my book. The only emails you will get are:

  1. Automated “system emails,” such as confirming you subscribed to the list
  2. An email containing a reward for subscribing, such as a free story
  3. “Major announcements,” which means…
    • When a story is released for the first time, with links for where you can check it out and some fun info about the story
    • When a story is re-released in a notable fashion, such as a “best of” anthology, as an audio adaption, or is now in a free format (and the original publication was behind a paywall)
    • If one of my novels ever gets picked up by a publisher
    • If I ever win a Hugo or Nebula or something like that, but that’ll probably never happen, but I also feel the need to list it here so that I’ll be 100% honest with you

I will never sell your information. I will only share it if I am required by law, and I probably wouldn’t even have a choice; mailchimp would probably hand it over the moment they see a warrant without asking me at all. If I ever do a “newsletter swap,” it would only be for someone that I personally really like and can vouch for and it would be in addition to a regular email that would go out, and not just to sell you on some third party.

I respect you and your time and I am not going to waste it on stuff that is irrelevant to you. As a digital marketer, I know just how much garbage that gets sent out, and how aggressive companies can be to get you to complete a transaction. You won’t be getting any of that here.

Affiliate – Bookshop.org

I have links on my website and some of my emails for books that are available to purchase on bookshop.org. It is both a “bookseller” (it’s really stretching the definition of that) and an affiliate marketing platform. It allows me to make some money from driving them sales, above and beyond any royalties I might earn from having one of my books sold.

bookshop’s links are built as follows:

https://bookshop.org/a/[ID]/[ISBN]

The ID is the unique identifier for the affiliate (i.e. me). The ISBN is the industry-standard identifier for a book. This tells bookshop that I, Chase J dot XYZ, am linking to a specific book, so, if someone who landed on the site via that link buys something, I should get some money for it. There are no additional tracking parameters built into the URLs.

If you buy something from bookshop.org (doesn’t have to be the book the link was for) and it says I’m the affiliate in the upper-left corner of the screen, then the sale is attributed to me, and I make money. 10% of the price of the book (so not taxes or shipping). For a $20 book, I would make $2.

The only information I would get is that an order was placed for book A, for $B, on date C, and, therefore, I will make $D once the transaction is “complete.” Which is about 14 days after the book is shipped, in case you return the book and/or get a refund. I don’t get to make money from a sale that un-happens. I do not get your name, address, payment info, or anything like that. Nothing personally identifiable.

bookshop.org will collect and use your address, payment info, etc in order to sell and ship you the thing you ordered. You will need to look at their own privacy policy to determine what additional things they might use it for and how to have that info deleted.

Affiliate – other

There are a lot of other affiliate programs out there! And, boy, do I know them! I will probably only use bookshop.org because:

  1. They offer the most out of anyone for commission (10%, while most others are 5-6%)
  2. If I did affiliate for my employer (Alibris), it would probably break the terms of service for both of our affiliate accounts, and I don’t think my boss would like it if we lost affiliate marketing
  3. Fuck Amazon. And they only give you 4%, too.

If that ever changes (such as the government breaks up Amazon), I will update this privacy policy/data use statement to include a section about them. But, at the time of writing, I am only using bookshop.org

GDPR/CCPA/etc

Since this website does not have ads, trackers, cookies, or any way to collect your personally identifiable information, there isn’t much for them to cover. However, if there’s ever anything that you want deleted (such as a comment you made or your info on my mailing list), I will gladly remove it ASAP. Just shoot me an email with the relevant info (like the email on the mailing list) and I’ll take care of that for you!

I do not have physical/off-site backups of my site (which maybe is not a smart idea), and I definitely do not such have backups of my mailing list, so there is no concern that if you request your data to be deleted that it’s still secretly existing on a ZIP drive in a storage locker somewhere. Well, that might be the case for mailchimp, but that would be for their big ol’ database that they are storing for their own purposes. You would have to check their own privacy/data use policy for specifics on that.

etc

This was written on Nov 16 2023 and was last updated on Nov 16 2023.

If there’s anything on here you have any questions about, please shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to help (and then I can clarify it on here to make things easier for future readers).