FTC Disclosure Info

General Posting: While we occasionally accept guest posts by independent authors on subjects relating to their literary accomplishments, we do not allow authors to review or critique their own works on our pages, and none of our book reviews can be purchased at any cost (i.e. no pay for play). All works of original fiction (both poetry and prose) are published with permission of the individual authors, and all copyright to these works remains with their authors. These works may not be reproduced without permission, as per standard copyright laws.

Artwork: Works of art appearing on our site are used courtesy of Flickr members who have listed their media under Creative Commons licenses. We will always attribute these works under the artist’s legal name (when available, or their Flickr pseudonym when not) plus the work’s original title, along with a link back to the Flickr page where the piece was originally posted. Photos may be cropped to fit a 300 x 200 box that appears alongside our Featured Story, but will appear in their original form within the text.

Book Reviews: Books reviewed on the site should be assumed to be complimentary review copies, supplied by the publisher or author (in the case of e-books) at no cost to us. This is standard operating procedure in the book reviewing world, and does not constitute payment nor endorsement of said book. Books published by friends of magazine staff or guest reviewers will always be disclosed within the first paragraph of the review. We aim to publish non-snarky reviews, and while most take a positive tone, our reviewers attempt to give an even-handed appraisal of the book’s strengths and weakenesses in order to provide a point of view that will allow potential readers to decide for themselves whether the book is of interest to them.

Featured Video: Featured videos are whatever catches our fancy this week, and are usually at least tangentially related to our Featured Story; these are updated randomly, and we try to avoid posting videos with embedded ads wherever possible. We do not receive any advertising dollars via the posting of these videos, as they are for entertainment purposes only.

Links & RSS Feeds: Links to other sites under the “Recommended Reads” section may change at random according to the whims of the editor. We do not engage in paid link exchanges; these links are to other sites that we enjoy reading, and hope you will too.

Mailing List: Our mailing list is private and will never be sold, under any circumstances. What do we look like, some evil megaconglomerate? In case you couldn’t figure it out from the mailing list page, we use our list to contact subscribers with information such as submission deadlines for digital issues, updates to our site’s content, and other items of interest on an occasional basis. Readers can easily unsubscribe at any time via our list host, MailChimp.

Writing Contests: For more information about the Writing Contest of the Week section of our site (currently on hiatus), as well as our annual KICK-ASS Writing Contest, please click here.

NOTE: This whole page makes us sound more uptight than we really are, but is somehow, allegedly, mandated by the U.S. government. We think this is a bunch of bologna, since any reasonably intelligent person can discern the difference between advertising and content, but if you have any other questions about the material on our site and whether it is somehow “tainted” by advertising dollars (as if all the other sites you read, from Gawker to The Atlantic to the New York Times, don’t receive ad dollars?), feel free to contact us directly with questions.

P.S. If we do receive money (or non-monetary compensation) for any posts, we’ll be sure to keep you informed using cheeky blogger icons like this.