As our readership is growing (hello – who are you people?) it struck me that it might be worth outlining a few of the policies that we base the blog on.

• Every post written on this blog 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 Vanessa or anyone else at Fidra Books. 
• 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 I 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.  I 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 Fidra Blog 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.
• Reviews – we do review some books on here and would like to find the time to review more.  If a book has been sent to us free then we’ll always mention that in reviews but it doesn’t affect what we write.  If you’d like us to review a book then feel free to send it but don’t expect us to automatically be postive about it.  If it’s good we’ll say so but if it’s dire we’ll say so too.  It’s probably not a good idea to send us children’s books by D-list celebrities or written-by-committee princess/fairy/glittery books as we don’t generally like them much and find it hard to write glowingly of them – your one might be the exception though in which case feel free.  If you’re really lucky your book will be reviewed by our resident 8 year old but he tends to tell it like it is too so don’t expect an easy ride.
• 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 - given the title (The Fidra Blog – pay attention at the back) it’s fairly obvious that this blog is linked to Fidra Books Ltd, publishers and booksellers based in Edinburgh.  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 even though we might be very quick to be objective about, say, Jordan’s latest pony books. 

And do leave a comment or say hello – it’s always nice to hear from readers.  Unless it’s just to defend Geri Halliwell’s latest literary efforts in which case we may react with scorn and derision…