Ballast Books
How Ballast Books collects, uses, and protects the information you share with us, and the choices you have. We keep this plain-spoken on purpose.
On this page
Ballast Books LLC ("Ballast Books," "we," "us") is a hybrid publisher based in West Palm Beach, Florida. We provide professional, guided publishing services to authors who retain the rights to their work.
This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect through our website at www.ballastbooks.com and our inquiry forms, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It applies to visitors and prospective authors who interact with us online.
When you submit our "Submit Your Book Idea" inquiry form, we collect:
Your first and last name (required)
Your email address (required)
Your phone number (optional)
A synopsis of your book (required)
The publishing services you're interested in (required)
Any notes you add for our acquisitions team (optional)
Any file you choose to upload, such as a manuscript or excerpt (optional)
If you use the live chat on our website (provided by Pure Chat), we collect the contents of your chat conversation and any contact details you share in it. And if you contact us directly, by email or otherwise, we collect the information you send us.
When you visit our website, we and our analytics providers automatically collect standard technical information, such as your device and browser type, IP address, the pages you view, and how you arrived at and moved through the site. This is described further in Analytics & session recording below.
We may receive limited information about you from the advertising and analytics platforms we use, for example, when you reach our site by clicking one of our ads, so we can understand which campaigns are reaching the right audiences.
We use the information we collect to:
Respond to your inquiry and evaluate your book project;
Communicate with you about our publishing services and your submission;
Operate, maintain, and improve our website and forms;
Understand how our website and marketing are performing, and improve which audiences our advertising reaches (see Advertising & conversion measurement);
Keep records, and meet legal, tax, and security obligations.
We use the following tools to understand how visitors use our website and to talk with you in real time:
Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
Google Analytics 4 | Aggregated website traffic and usage measurement. |
Google Tag Manager | Manages the measurement tags that run on our site. |
Microsoft Clarity | Records how visitors interact with pages (such as clicks, scrolling, and mouse movement) to show us how pages are used. We do not use it to identify you personally. |
Pure Chat | Powers the live chat widget on our site, stores your chat conversations so we can respond and follow up, and sets its own cookies or device storage to keep your chat session working. |
These tools, and the advertising-measurement tags described in the next section, use cookies and similar device-storage technologies (such as local storage) to keep track of your activity on our site, measure how our website and campaigns are performing, and help us improve your experience. By submitting an inquiry through our website, you agree to this Privacy Policy, including this use of cookies and device storage. You can control these technologies through your browser settings at any time.
We advertise our publishing services online, and we measure which of those efforts actually reach authors who are a good fit. To do this, we share limited, protected information with advertising platforms, but we never sell your information.
When you submit an inquiry, we may share a limited set of your information, such as your name, email address, and phone number, in a hashed (scrambled) form, with advertising platforms. This helps those platforms confirm that our ads are reaching genuinely interested authors, and helps us focus our advertising on qualified prospects rather than on raw clicks.
We may also feed back a signal about whether an inquiry became a qualified opportunity (an "offline" or "enhanced" conversion), so the platforms' systems learn to reach people who resemble our real prospective authors, not just anyone who fills out a form.
The advertising platforms we currently work with, whose measurement tags run on our website, are:
Google Ads and YouTube (Google)
Meta (Facebook and Instagram)
OpenAI (advertising in ChatGPT)
Today, the hashed-information sharing described above happens with Google Ads and OpenAI; the other platforms listed receive measurement signals from their tags on our site. As our advertising expands, we may extend the same limited, hashed sharing to the other platforms listed; this policy covers that use so it stays accurate.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
We share your information only as needed to run our business and provide our services. The service providers and platforms we currently work with are:
Provider | Role |
|---|---|
HubSpot | Customer-relationship and lead management. Stores your inquiry and our correspondence. |
Webflow | Website hosting. |
Pure Chat | Live chat widget and chat transcripts. |
Analytics (Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager) and advertising (Google Ads, YouTube). | |
Microsoft Clarity | Session recording (clicks, scrolling, mouse movement). |
Meta | Advertising measurement (Facebook and Instagram). |
Advertising measurement. | |
Advertising measurement. | |
OpenAI | Advertising and conversion measurement (advertising in ChatGPT). |
We may also share information:
With advertising platforms as described in Advertising & conversion measurement, in limited and hashed form;
For legal and safety reasons, when required by law, or to protect our rights, users, or the public;
In a business transfer, see Business transfers below.
We do not sell your personal information.
You can, at any time:
Ask us what personal information we hold about you;
Ask us to correct or delete your information;
Unsubscribe from our emails using the link in any message, or by contacting us;
Ask us to stop using your information for advertising measurement.
To make any of these requests, contact us using the details in Contact us. We will respond as required by applicable law.
Do Not Track & Global Privacy Control: our website does not currently respond to Do Not Track (DNT) browser signals. As soon as this policy is published, we will add a cookie-consent banner that lets you accept or reject non-essential cookies and manage your preferences directly, and that will honor applicable browser opt-out signals, including Global Privacy Control (GPC), once installed.
If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended by the CPRA) gives you the right to:
Know what personal information we collect, use, and disclose;
Request access to, or deletion of, your personal information;
Correct inaccurate personal information;
Opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of personal information (note: we do not sell your personal information);
Not be discriminated against for exercising these rights.
To exercise these rights, contact us using the details below. We will verify your request as required before acting on it.
By submitting an inquiry form, you agree to this Privacy Policy, including our use of cookies and analytics tools described above, and the advertising-measurement and conversion-tracking use described in Advertising & conversion measurement. You can withdraw that agreement at any time by contacting us; withdrawing does not affect anything we did before you asked us to stop.
We keep different kinds of information for different lengths of time:
Information | How long we keep it |
|---|---|
Inquiry and contact records (form submissions, uploaded files, chat transcripts, emails, CRM records) | For as long as they are relevant to your inquiry and our relationship with you. |
Consent records | For as long as needed to demonstrate the consent choices you made. |
Analytics and advertising-measurement data | According to each tool's retention settings, and in aggregated form over time. |
Legal, tax, and accounting records | For the limited period required by applicable law. |
When information is no longer needed, we delete it, and we will delete it sooner on request (see Your privacy choices), except where we must keep a limited record to meet legal, tax, or accounting obligations.
We take reasonable administrative, technical, and physical measures to protect your information, and we work with established providers (such as HubSpot, Webflow, and Google) that maintain their own security programs. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so while we work to protect your information, we cannot guarantee absolute security.
If we become aware of a data breach affecting your personal information, we will notify affected individuals and the relevant authorities as required by applicable law.
If Ballast Books is involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization, financing, or sale of some or all of its assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any resulting material changes to this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law.
Our website and services are intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, please contact us and we will delete it.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "Last updated" date at the top of this page, and significant changes will be made clear. We encourage you to review this page periodically.
If you have questions about this policy or your information, contact us:
Email: info@ballastbooks.com
Mail: Ballast Books LLC, West Palm Beach, Florida