Privacy Policy

Last updated: March 18, 2019

Our Author Services, Inc. Privacy Policy is designed to assist you in understanding how we collect and use the personal information you provide to us and to assist you in making informed decisions when using our site and our products and services. This notice describes our privacy policy. By visiting WritersoftheFuture.com, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Notice.

What Information Do We Collect?

When you visit our Website you may provide us with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected on an individual basis and website use information collected on an aggregate basis as you and others browse our Website.

We collect your information when you:

  • Interact or correspond with us in letters, by phone, email or via our Website
  • Attend events we hold or interact with us in person
  • Submitting entries to the Contests
  • Subscribe to our mailing lists
  • Complete one of our surveys
  • Participate in the forum

Personal Information You Choose to Provide

The information you provide to us might include your name, postal address, email address, phone number, gender and date of birth.

We use WizeHive to manage our Contest contacts and entries and your personal information is retained by them as part of providing us with this service. WizeHives’s privacy policy can be viewed here: www.wizehive.com/privacy_policy.

We use HubSpot as our marketing automation platform and your personal information is retained by them as part of providing us with this service. HubSpot’s privacy policy can be viewed at https://legal.hubspot.com/privacy-policy.

If you choose to correspond with us through email, we may retain the content of your email messages together with your email address and our responses.

How Do We Use the Information That You Provide to Us?

Broadly speaking, we use personal information for purposes of promoting and selling and delivering to you the books and products offered on our website. Occasionally, we may also use the information we collect to notify you about important changes to our Website, new services and special offers we think you will find valuable. The information is also used to deliver the books and products that you have ordered and as part of providing customer service to support that. You may notify us at any time if you do not wish to receive these offers by emailing us at [email protected] or by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any of those communications.

We will also collect certain information about how you use our website. This includes your IP address, geographical location, device information (such as your hardware model, mobile network information, unique device identifiers), browser type, referral source, length of visit to the website, number of page views, the search queries you make on the website and similar information. This information is collected by Google Analytics on our behalf and by some of our apps using cookies. To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. For more information on cookies see below.

Our Website may include links to a third party website such as Galaxypress.com so that you might purchase the Writers of the Future books from them. By clicking on those links or enabling these connections you may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. Please ensure that you read the privacy notices on any such external websites.

We participate in affiliate programs offered by our retail partners and allow affiliate links to be encoded on some of our pages to third party websites, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, GooglePlay, iBooks, Indiebound, and Kobo so that you might purchase the books and products from them. This means that we may earn a commission when you click on or make purchases via those affiliate links. By clicking on those links or enabling these connections you may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these websites and are not responsible for their privacy notices. Please ensure that you read the privacy notices on any such external websites.

Our Website contains social media features, including share links that enable you to share, post or link our content through your accounts with third-party social media services. If you choose to share content from this Website with social media features on other sites, you should confirm that the sharing of such content doesn’t conflict with the terms and conditions of the other site.

Our Website may include links to third party websites, including YouTube and Facebook which hosts videos and media content. By clicking on those links or enabling these connections you may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these websites and are not responsible for their privacy notices. Please ensure that you read the privacy notices on any such external websites.

What Are Cookies and How Do We Use Them?

A cookie is a very small text document, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier. When you visit a website, that site’s computer asks your computer for permission to store this file in a part of your hard drive specifically designated for cookies. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser’s preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites. Some of our business partners (e.g. advertisers) use cookies that originate from their sites. We have no access or control over those cookies.

Similar to other commercial websites, our Website utilizes a standard technology utilizing “cookies” and Web server logs to collect information about how our Website is used. Information gathered through cookies and Web server logs may include the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent at our Website, and the websites visited just before and just after our Website. We, our advertisers and ad serving companies may also use small technology or pieces of code to determine which advertisements and promotions users have seen and how users responded to them.

As you use our Website, the site uses its cookies to differentiate you from other users. In some cases, we also use cookies to prevent you from seeing unnecessary advertisements or requiring you to log in more than is necessary for security. Cookies, in conjunction with our Web server’s log files, allow us to calculate the aggregate number of people visiting our Website and which parts of the site are most popular. This helps us gather feedback in order to constantly improve our Website and better serve our customers. Cookies do not allow us to gather any personal information about you and we do not generally store any personal information that you provided to us in your cookies.

How Can You Access and Correct Your Information?

You may request access to all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain in our database by emailing [email protected].

How Long Do We Retain Your Information?

We will retain your information for as long as is necessary to provide you with the services that you have requested from us or for as long as we reasonably require to retain the information for our legitimate interests, such as for the purposes of exercising our legal rights or where we are permitted to do so for purposes of academic, literary expression and research purposes. We operate a data retention policy and look to find ways to reduce the amount of information we hold about you and the length of time that we need to keep it. We operate a best practice email retention policy requiring password protected folders and departmental shared drives to provide restricted access to information. We maintain a suppression list of email addresses of individuals who no longer wish to be contacted by us. So that we can comply with their wishes we must store this information permanently.

How Do We Keep Your Information Secure?

We use appropriate technological and operational security measures to protect your information against any unauthorised access or unlawful use, such as (a) ensuring the physical security of our offices, warehouses or other sites; (b) ensuring the physical and digital security of our equipment and devices by using appropriate password protection and encryption; and limiting access to your personal information to those in our company who need to use it in the course of their work.

Certain Disclosures

We may disclose your personal information if required to do so by law or subpoena or if we believe that such action is necessary to (a) conform to the law or comply with legal process served on us or affiliated parties; (b) protect and defend our rights and property, our site, the users of our site, and/or our affiliated parties; (c) act under circumstances to protect the safety of users of our site, us, or third parties.

What About Other Websites Linked to Our Website?

We are not responsible for the practices employed by websites linked to or from our Website nor the information or content contained therein. Often links to other websites are provided solely as pointers to information on topics that may be useful to the users of our Website.

Please remember that when you use a link to go from our Website to another website, our Privacy Policy is no longer in effect. Your browsing and interaction on any other website, including websites which have a link on our Website, is subject to that website’s own rules and policies. Please read over those rules and policies before proceeding.

Use of Site by Children

We do not market to children. If you are under 18, you may use our Website only with consent from a parent or guardian. We collect data about all users of and visitors to these areas regardless of age, and we anticipate that some of those users and visitors will be children. Such child users and visitors will inevitably visit other parts of the site and will be subject to whatever on-site marketing they find, wherever they visit.

Your Consent

By using our Website you consent to our collection and use of your personal information as described in this Privacy Policy. If we change our privacy policies and procedures, we will post those changes on our Website to keep you aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances we may disclose it.