Privacy Policy

At Foreword, we take your privacy seriously. We only require the bare minimum amount of information necessary to serve you content and process orders, and we discard information once it's no longer used. However, you can often provide additional information to improve your experience even more. Regardless of why you provided us the information, we only share it with third-parties when you give us permission or absolutely necessary.

Information We Collect

Base Functionality, Analytics, and Logging

In order to view our website, our servers need to be able to communicate back and forth with your device (phone, laptop, etc). Your computer will provide some information, such as your current IP address or browser version, which we use to send you the data you request. We also log some of this information to fix bugs in our software and block devices that seem to be participating in abusive behavior (e.g., a denial of service attack).

We use Google Analytics for tracking pageviews, revenue, etc. However, all personally-identifiable information is scrubbed before sending to Analytics and your IP address is anonymized before storage. We also use aggregate and anonymized data for reporting purposes, such as tracking revenue for a service over time.

Profile Data

Your account's unique "User ID", name, and any other information you choose to provide is included in this category. Additionally, your order history and related items (e.g., print subscriptions) is included in this.

By default, this information is stored on our website's servers (owned by DigitalOcean) and accessible only to our staff for customer support and you.

For your convenience, this information is also used to automatically fill in forms throughout our website. Some of these forms (e.g., our newsletter subscription form) may submit information to third parties (e.g., MailChimp processes our newsletter subscriptions). However, you will have the chance to change this information before submitting and, where applicable, not opt in to sending information to the third parties.

Shared Data

To provide the best user experience, we share book data across the entire website, including between accounts. This means, for the most part, that there is only one copy of each book in our system at any time.

That is, a publisher could add one of their books to their own account to purchase a review and the author can then add that same book to their personal account to register for the Foreword INDIES. When the author adds the book, they only need the ISBN and the rest of the information that the publisher entered will be immediately available to the author. Any changes the author makes to the book will also be visible to the publisher. However, for quality control, we manually verify changes to book data before they are visible to anyone else.

Email Notifications

Email notifications are processed by Mailgun. Messages are automatically deleted after send and metadata is automatically deleted after 5 days.

Customer Relationship Management

To better communicate with our existing and potential customers, we use Salesforce to keep track of companies, contacts, quotes, orders, etc.

Third Parties

reCAPTCHA by Google is used to prevent spam and abuse by other computers, or "bots".

Adobe Typekit enables custom fonts on our website to improve the reading experience.