Publish With Confidence

Last updated: October 29, 2019

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully before using The Trusty Bookmark website, services, and social media accounts (“Site”).  Your access to and use of our Site is conditioned on your acceptance of and adherence to this Privacy Policy.

By accessing or using our Site, you agree to abide and be bound by this Privacy Policy.  If you disagree with any part of this policy, you should not access our Site.

Table of Contents

General

This Site is the sole property of The Trusty Bookmark (“The Trusty Bookmark”, “we”, “us”, or “our”), a business dedicated to supporting authors’ dreams of publishing their books with confidence through the provision of editing services, educational writing tips, and other related articles.  We collect data to communicate with you, perform giveaways, provide services, tailor your Site experience, and analyze our ability to reach people.  Access to your personally identifiable data (defined as information that we can specifically link to you, such as your name and email address) is limited to The Trusty Bookmark and is preserved for use as described in each section below unless you submit a request otherwise (please see Records Access & Removal).  We do not lease or sell personally identifiable data to third-parties and only share pertinent data with third parties as necessary (as specified in each relevant section below).  By using this Site, you agree to abide and be bound by this Privacy Policy as well as this Site’s Terms of Use, Disclaimer, and Cookie Policy.

Contact Submissions

Personally identifiable data submitted to any direct email owned by The Trusty Bookmark or through any form or the Live Chat functionality on our Site will be collected and preserved for reference purposes.  For example, when you contact us with a question, we record notes or details explaining what you asked and how we responded for future reference in our communication with you as well as for similar questions submitted by other visitors.  Other data collected during contact submissions may include general identifying information such as your browser type and IP address.  We use Chaport for our Live Chat functionality; you can view their privacy policy here.  We will not use your submitted personally identifiable data to contact you again after or for any other reason than your initial contact submission unless you submit additional correspondence or opt-in to other services (e.g., our email list or editing services).

Feedback & Testimonial Submissions

Information and data submitted through the Feedback & Testimonial form or through email exchange (after receiving your statement of approval) may be used in whole or part for our Client Experiences testimonial index.  This personal identifying information, such as your name and comments, may be used in a variety of ways, such as a testimonial on our Site or as an independent opinion shared with other current or potential clients.  Other data collected during this submission may include general identifying information such as your browser type and IP address; these are collected and preserved for reference purposes only.  We will not use your submitted personally identifiable data to contact you again after or for any other reason than your feedback or testimonial submission unless you submit additional correspondence or opt-in to other services (e.g., our email list or editing services).

Email Subscriptions

Email addresses submitted to any Site subscription form will be stored and used in our contact list for reception of content updates, business notifications, information we think you may find useful, and occasional giveaways.  From time to time, we may contact you for market research purposes as well.  We will use this as well as other personally identifiable data collected through our ConvertKit application for marketing analysis.  We use ConvertKit to collect, store, process, and distribute these forms of communication to you (you can view their privacy policy here).  To update your information or unsubscribe from future emails, please locate the appropriate link in the footer of any of our emails.  After confirmation of your intention to unsubscribe, your email will be removed from our email list and will receive no further communication.  Alternatively, you can email admin@thetrustybookmark.com from the specified email address to request its removal from our subscription list.

Comments

When you leave a comment on our Site, we collect the data shown in the comments form as well as your IP address and browser user agent string to help prevent spam.  This information may be checked through our automated spam detection service.  We use the Akismet plugin; you can read their privacy policy here.  The comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely.  This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may also be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it.  You can review the Gravatar service privacy policy here.  After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

User Registration

If you register on our Site, we will store the personal information you provide in your user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username).  We can also see and edit that information.

Giveaways

Personally identifiable data submitted for giveaways will be used for the sole purpose of the giveaway and only during this time period.  If a third-party requires your data for this giveaway, you are approving our submission of your data to this specific giveaway’s sponsor (and no one else).  You will not receive further communication from us after the giveaway, unless you opted-in to other services (e.g., our email list or editing services).

Offered Services

Personally identifiable data, communications, and information submitted for editing services provided by The Trusty Bookmark will be stored and preserved for internal reference only.  This information will never be shared with any third party.  You will not receive further communication from us, unless you opted-in to other services (e.g., our email list or contact forms).

Records Access & Removal

If you require a record of your personally identifiable data in our possession, please submit a request to admin@thetrustybookmark.com from the associated email address for which you are requesting the data.  You must submit the request from your specified email; this is to protect the privacy of other individuals’ personally identifiable information who use our Site.

If you require us to remove complete existence of your personally identifiable data from our system, please submit a request to admin@thetrustybookmark.com from the associated email address of the data you wish to be removed.  We will abide by your ‘right to be forgotten’, in accordance with these terms, and send you prompt proof of removal.

Data Analytics & Cookie Policy

While you peruse this Site, our Site and analytics software (we use Google Analytics) may collect general information from you including your browser type and version, length of time on Site, our Site pages you visited, IP address, country, demographics, interests, and other statistics.  We only use this data for statistical and marketing analysis purposes to track the success of each of our pages and posts in order to understand how we can best serve you and your interests on our Site.

While using this Site, you agree to the collection and usage of this general data as well as the usage, storage, and access of cookies that will, but are not limited to helping, collect this information for us, provide essential security measures, and allow for quick loading of webpages.  Please review our complete Cookie Policy for more information on the use of cookies on our Site.  We use our own (first-party), Wordfence (third-party), and Google Analytics Advertising Features: Demographic and Interest Reporting (third-party) cookies for these processes.

For more information on Wordfence (our security plugin), their Privacy and Cookie Policies can be reviewed here and here.  For more information on Google Analytics, their Privacy Policy can be reviewed here.  We specifically use the MonsterInsights (Privacy Policy here) and ExactMetrics (Privacy Policy here) plugins to handle this analytics data.  If you would prefer to be excluded from Google Analytics data collection, they offer this browser add-on.  You can also use your own browser settings to notify you when a cookie is sent or reject all cookies.  You can turn these settings on or off at any time at your discretion.

Data & Site Operations

To successfully operate our site, we must share website operation data with our web host SiteGround (please see their Privacy Policy here).  This primarily focuses on The Trusty Bookmark’s personally identifiable information for such things as payment processing and verifying domain ownership, but may include information such as site performance and information to help improve site operations.

Security

Security of your personally identifiable data is of utmost importance to us and we make every effort to protect your data.  We encrypt any information you enter on our Site using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) software to protect its security during transmission to and from our Site.  We also use such measures as two factor authentication and strict control and limitation of who has access to any and all Site information.  However, keep in mind that no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure.  We cannot guarantee your data’s absolute security, but we will attempt to contact you through email as soon as possible if a data breach has been discovered that will affect your personally identifiable data.

Terms of Use

By using our Site and thus agreeing to the Privacy Policy, you also accept and are subject to our Terms of Use.  This discusses your use of our Services; behavior limitations and grounds for termination; our contact and commenting policies; offered services; external links; copyright statement; third party discovered copyright infringement; limitation of liability; severability; and Governing Law.

Disclaimer

By using our Site and thus agreeing to the Privacy Policy, you also accept and are subject to our Disclaimer. This policy discusses the information provided on and through our Site and Services and your use of such information, specifically with regard to the following topics: educational and informational content; not professional advice; no professional-client relationship; user’s personal responsibility; no guarantees; accuracy; reviews; affiliate links; external links; and limitation of liability. Please thoroughly review the full content of this policy here.

External Links & Embedded Content

Our Site may contain links to external websites or other social media accounts we find relevant or interesting.  However, we do not have control over, nor assume responsibility for, these external sites or accounts and cannot be responsible for the content, security, or protection of privacy that they provide.  You acknowledge and agree that The Trusty Bookmark shall not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any such content, goods, or services available on or through any external websites or services.  When you leave our Site, you are responsible for your own internet usage and should view the applicable terms of use and privacy policy for each site you visit.

Additionally, some of our posts may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.).  Embedded content from other sites behaves in the same way as if you had visited the other site.  These sites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.  Please review the privacy policy for each of these pages for information on how they handle this information.

Changes To This Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy is effective as of April 24, 2018.  It will remain in effect unless changes are made, which will then be effective immediately after being posted to this page.  We reserve the right to update or change this Privacy Policy at any time and it is your responsibility to check this page periodically for modifications.  Your continued use of this Site after any updates to this policy will constitute your acknowledgement of the modifications and your consent to abide and be bound by the modified Privacy Policy.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or would like to update information we are holding that you believe is incorrect or incomplete, please feel free to contact us at admin@thetrustybookmark.com.