Privacy

This site is published by Open HR, a société par actions simplifiée with its registered office at 60 rue François Ier, 75008 Paris, France, registered at the RCS of Paris under number 994 927 242. Open HR is the data controller for the personal data described on this page.

J.F. Evans is the pen name of Johnathen Evans-Guilbault, Open HR's president, who writes the books and reads the email. Where this page says “I”, that is who is meant, acting on the company's behalf. This page explains what personal data the site collects, why, and what you can do about it.

The short version: I ask for your email address if you join the readers' circle, and for what is needed to complete a sale if you buy a book directly from me. I do not sell your data, and I do not share it with anyone beyond the services listed below that are needed to send you the emails you asked for and the books you paid for.

What I collect

Your email address, if you choose to give it to me. There are three places you can: the signup form on this site, an optional box on the confirmation page after you buy a book, and the sign-up form for an advance review copy. Only the first of those is a mailing list. Each of the other two carries its own separate box, never ticked for you, and ticking one is the lawful basis (consent) for sending you the newsletter.

Buying a book does not put you on the mailing list. If you do not tick that box, your address is used to deliver your book and to keep the sales record, and for nothing else.

Aggregate, privacy-preserving usage analytics — page views and referrers, with no cookies used to track you across sites and no attempt to identify you individually.

What I do with it

Your email address is used to send you the readers' circle newsletter: news about new books, release dates, and occasional behind-the-scenes writing. That is the whole purpose. I do not use it for anything else, and I do not pass it to other authors, promotions, or advertisers.

Buying a book directly

If you buy an ebook from this site, the payment is handled by Stripe. Stripe is the merchant of record for that sale: it takes the payment, calculates and remits any sales tax or VAT, and issues your receipt. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach me — I never see or store a card number.

What I do receive is your email address, the book you bought, the amount, and whether the payment succeeded or was refunded. I keep that record so I know which books you own, so the book can be sent to you again if a download fails or a device is lost, and so my accounts are correct.

The lawful basis here is not consent — it is the performance of a contract. I need this information to deliver the book you paid for. Keeping the transaction record afterwards is a legal obligation under French accounting and tax law.

The newsletter is the exception, and it is separate. If you ticked the optional box on the confirmation page after buying, your address is added to the readers' circle and your order record notes that you agreed. You can unsubscribe at any time without affecting the books you have bought.

The book itself is delivered by BookFunnel, which sends you a download link and hosts the file. Your email address is passed to BookFunnel for that purpose. Ebook files carry a hidden watermark linked to the delivery, which exists to discourage redistribution; it is not used to track your reading.

Advance review copies

Sometimes I give away a finished book before it is published, to readers who agree to review it. If you sign up for one, I collect your name, your email address, which store you intend to review on, your country and preferred file format, optionally a link to your reviewer profile, and — if you tell me — which of my other books you have already read.

All of it is used to run the campaign: to send you the book, to point your review link at your own country's store rather than the wrong one, and to find your review afterwards and check that it published properly. The lawful basis is not consent — it is that you asked me for the book, and this is what delivering it and running the campaign takes.

Signing up for a review copy does not put you on the mailing list. There is a separate, optional box for that, and your copy is sent whether or not you tick it. If you leave it unticked, you will get one email — after your copy has been downloaded — that mentions the newsletter once and carries a link to say you would rather I did not mention it again. That is the only marketing email a reviewer ever gets from me, and it is sent once.

The copy itself is delivered by BookFunnel, which watermarks the file with information identifying you. That exists to discourage an unpublished book being passed around; it is not used to track your reading.

If you sign up and never confirm your email address, the record is deleted after seven days. If you withdraw, your name and address are removed straight away.

Reviews you write

You can leave a review of a book on its page here. If you do, I collect the name you choose to publish it under, your email address, your rating, what you wrote, and — all optional — a few short descriptions of what the book was like to read, one book it reminded you of, a line about who you think should read it, and which of my other books you have read.

Publishing it is the one thing on this site that runs on consent. You give that by ticking the box on the form, and you can take it back with one click: the email telling you your review is live carries a link that deletes it. Deletes, not hides — the record of the review is the published copy, so removing it removes the review, and there is no second copy anywhere for me to forget about.

Your email address is never published. It is used to confirm the review is really yours — nothing is queued until you click the link — and to tell you when it goes up. The name beside your review is whatever you typed in that box, which is why the form asks for it separately rather than using anything else I know about you.

When you confirm, I check your address against my own records — purchases made here, and my advance reader list — to work out what to say beside your review. If you received an advance copy, it says so. That note is required by the US Federal Trade Commission and by most retailers, and it is added whether or not you remembered to mention it. If neither record matches, your review is published with no claim attached, because I have no way of knowing where you got the book and would rather say nothing than guess.

I read every review myself before it goes up, oldest first, whatever it says. A review is only ever withheld for reasons on a fixed list — it is defamatory or abusive, it contains someone else's personal information, it is discriminatory, it is clearly false, I have good reason to think it is fake, or it is about something other than the book. Not liking what it says is not on that list and cannot be added to it without changing the code.

If you start a review and never confirm your address, the draft is deleted after seven days. If a review is withheld, the record goes thirty days later. A published review is kept for as long as it is published, which is until you take it down or ask me to.

Who processes it

A small number of service providers handle data on my behalf:

• MailerLite — stores the mailing list and sends the newsletter. Your email address is held here.
• Vercel — hosts the site and provides aggregate analytics. Server logs may briefly include your IP address, as is standard for any web host.
• Sanity — stores the site's content (book descriptions, cover images). No reader data.
• Geniuslink — handles retailer links so that a link to a book sends you to your local Amazon store rather than the wrong country's. It records aggregate click data.
• Stripe — takes payment for direct sales and acts as merchant of record. It holds your payment details and your billing country, and issues your receipt. Stripe decides how it handles that data for its own legal and anti-fraud purposes, so for the payment itself it is not simply acting on my instructions.
• BookFunnel — delivers ebooks, both the ones you have bought and advance review copies, and hosts the download page. It holds your email address and a record of what was delivered.

Resend — sends the site's own email: your review copy confirmation, the two emails about a review you have written, and the alerts that tell me when something on the site has broken. It handles your address only for the message being sent, and holds no mailing list.

• MongoDB Atlas — stores the record of which books you have bought, so that they can be re-sent, along with advance reader sign-ups and any review you write. It holds your email address, the book, and the payment reference. No payment details.

Where your data is held

The site and the record of your purchases are hosted inside the European Union — the database in Paris and the site itself in Frankfurt. Sanity, which holds the site's content, stores no reader data.

MailerLite, Stripe, BookFunnel and Resend are United States companies, so your email address and transaction details are transferred there. Those transfers rely on the safeguards each provider has put in place for EU personal data, including standard contractual clauses and, where the provider participates, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

Affiliate links

Links to Amazon on this site are affiliate links through the Amazon Associates programme. If you buy a book after following one, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. It does not change the price you pay, and it does not affect which books I recommend.

How long I keep it

Your email address stays on the list until you unsubscribe. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you — you do not need to ask me. If you would rather your record be deleted outright rather than marked unsubscribed, email me and I will do that.

Purchase records are different. French accounting law requires me to keep records of sales for ten years, so I cannot delete a transaction record on request the way I can delete a mailing list entry. Unsubscribing from the newsletter does not remove your purchases, and it does not remove your access to the books you bought.

Review copy records follow the French data protection authority's guidance for people who are not customers: three years from the last time you were in touch with me — signing up, confirming your address, downloading your copy, or clicking a link in an email. Opening an email does not count. At the end of three years I either ask whether you would like to keep hearing from me, or delete the record.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access the personal data I hold about you, to correct it, to have it erased, to restrict or object to its processing, and to receive a copy of it in a portable format. You also have the right to withdraw consent at any time, which for this site means unsubscribing.

The right to erasure has one limit: where I am required by law to keep a record, such as the sales records described above, I cannot delete it until that period expires. Everything else I can and will remove.

To exercise any of these, email hello@jfevans.com, or write to Open HR, 60 rue François Ier, 75008 Paris, France. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority; in France that is the CNIL.

If you are in California

The California Consumer Privacy Act applies to businesses over a certain size — broadly, more than $25 million in annual revenue, or handling the personal information of 100,000 or more people, or making half their money selling personal information. This is one author selling books, and it meets none of those thresholds, so the CCPA does not apply to me.

It would not change much if it did. I do not sell your personal information, and I do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. The rights set out under “Your rights” above are available to you whether or not a particular law obliges me: email hello@jfevans.com and I will act on it.

Cookies

This site does not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and does not run a consent banner because it does not need one.

Do Not Track: this site does not track you across other websites, so there is nothing for a “Do Not Track” signal to switch off, and the site does not change its behaviour when it receives one. No other party collects information about your activity across other websites through this one.

Children

These books are written for adults. The site is not directed at children, and I do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.

Changes

If the site starts doing something materially different with your data, this page will be updated before that begins, and the date at the top will change. The last such change was the addition of advance review copies, and naming Open HR as the data controller, in August 2026.