Policies
As our readership is growing, it struck us that it might be worth outlining a few of the policies that we base the State of Independents on, so here’s the small print…
- Every post written is the personal opinion of the author, in the same way that the opinions of commenters are their own opinions and not necessarily those of anyone at the State of Independents.
- We have the complete right to remove comments that are inflammatory, abusive, irrelevant or just generally not nice. We’re friendly, reasonable people but this is not a democracy – play nice or get lost. Or start your own blog where you can be as unpleasant as you like. Most people are lovely though and we hardly ever remove comments.
- If you want to quote something we’ve said then you’re welcome but, if it’s online please include a link back to us, and if in print media, please ask first. We know that it’s ‘in the public domain’ and all that and we can’t stop you as long as you attribute your quote to us, but it’s polite to ask and here at the State of Independents we see manners as important. It also means that if you quote something a bit curt that we’ve said about someone’s book, for example, we know what they’re talking about when we get a stroppy publicist on the phone.
- Links – links don’t necessarily mean that we agree with the content of the site we’re linking to, nor can we be held responsible for the content of external sites. We never knowingly put up links that aren’t work-safe or child-safe.
- Ads – we don’t carry ads. Some of the links to books that we talk about link through to Amazon pages via their affiliate programme but we never put those links in for the sake of it, only if we’re talking about the book anyway.
- Commercial aspects – it’s fairly obvious that this website is linked to Fidra Books, The Children’s Bookshop and The Edinburgh Bookshop. Naturally, when talking about our shop or the books we publish or authors visiting etc we’re going to be positive so please don’t complain if we’re not always completely objective about our own books.
And do leave a comment or say hello – it’s always nice to hear from readers. Unless it’s just to defend Katie Price’s latest literary efforts in which case we may react with scorn and derision…