This privacy policy explains which information we collect, process, and share so that we can deliver our services to you.

What kind of information do we collect?

Personal details

We collect all the personal details that you enter in your account. This includes the information you enter when you sign up to our website and any personal information that you enter specifically into the website, such as: your email, name, address, and phone number, IP address, author photo. This can include information in or about the content you provide (for example: metadata), such as the creation date of a file or the location where a photo was taken.

Bank account information

Our website also asks you to provide your bank account information. Providing your bank account information is optional as long as you don’t decide to sell your book via our sales channels. We treat your bank account information with the utmost care.

Data with special protections

In your account you can enter your gender. Entering this field is entirely optional: you don’t have to select an option if you don’t feel like it. The gender you provide is subject to special protections under EU law.

Book information

We collect any information about the book that you provide in the platform. This includes the title, subtitle, author, the book specifications (size, binding, paper type, etc.), description, as well as the manuscript, cover and pricing information. This can include information in or about the content you provide (e.g. metadata), such as the creation date of a file, user that created the file and other metadata of the book files you upload.

Order information

We collect information about the orders that you place on our website. This includes your contact details, billing address, shipping address, the products you bought, and payment information.

Account usage data

We collect information about how you use our services, such as when you create an account, when you login, when you perform actions for a book, and the frequency of these activities.

Cookies and analytics

We use cookies to improve your browsing experience while using our website. We use cookies for the following purposes:

  • Authentication: when you want to automatically login everytime you visit our website, we save some authentication data in cookies
  • Current session data: we save a few unique keys about your current visit on our website. These keys do not contain data about your behavior, but are purely used to make sure you can seamlessly use our website without having to login again multiple times.
  • Language: we save your current language selection for our website in a cookie
  • Analytics and research: we use these cookies to better understand how you use your website. These cookies help us analyze which parts of the website you use often and which parts should be improved.

How do we use this information?

We use the data mentioned above to deliver the services detailed in our terms and conditions. This is done in the following manner:

To provide and improve our services

We use the information that we’ve collected to provide you with the ability to create, order and sell your books. To make this as easy as possible, we use your personal details and book information so that you can edit and reorder your books at a moment’s notice. Additionally, we use your book information to print your book, make the book available via the sales channels that you select, and deliver your book to any customers that buy your book via the sales channels that you’ve selected.

  • Royalty payments: if you published your book and it sold via any of the select sales channels, we’ll use your bank account details to pay royalties to you. That is the only situation in which we use your bank account details.
  • Product research and development: we are constantly looking to improve our services to you as an author. We use the information you provide and usage data so that we can research, improve and test our services.
  • We will use your usage data for measurements for our own use. We use the data to calculate statistics on how many users use our platform and how users use your services.

To communicate with you and help you

We use the information that we’ve collected to communicate with you effectively via the email you provided when creating your account on our platform. We use it to update you on developments, send you personalized marketing communications (you can opt out of receiving promotional emails via your account settings), provide you with advice when you’re stuck, and to help you effectively when you request it.

How do we share this information?

We take your privacy seriously. Therefore, we only share any information that is absolutely necessary, and we only share it with partners that we trust.

Payment

We want to make sure that whenever you pay for an order or a service, you can do so safely. To do this we share your order information with our payment provider. They will store and process your data according to EU regulations.

When you sell books, we will pay the royalties to your bank account. To do that, we will share your bank account details with our bank, so that we can perform payment.

Printing

To print and deliver your books we will share your book information and order information with our printing partner. They will store your books and order information according to EU regulations. Additionally, they will share your shipping information with the shipping company that will deliver your package.

Publishing

To sell your book, books need to be available via sales channels. We will share your book information with the sales channels that you have selected. When you delete a book, we will tell the sales channels that your book is no longer for sale, however we cannot promise that all sales channels will delete all data about your book.

Social services

We share some of your data with social services. This includes sending your booklink to social media when you use our social media sharing functionality.

It also includes sharing your address – without your name – with Google Maps when you enter your address in your account. We share your address with Google Maps to check the validity of your address input and to show you the location on a map. That way, we can prevent that we send your future shipments to an address that doesn’t exist.

Law enforcement and legal requests

We share information with law enforcement or in response to legal requests when this is required. See the section ‘How do we respond to legal requests or prevent harm’ for more information.

To serve the public interest

We sometimes process your data to calculate anonymized statistics that service the public interest. This includes providing statistics to newspapers, research and academics, and market research.

What is our legal basis?

We collect, use share the information as describe before, on the following legal basis:

  • Consistent with your consent: by filling in the data or removing it you can determine which information we currently store and share
  • As needed to comply with our legal obligations
  • As necessary to fulfill our terms and conditions
  • As necessary for our legitimate business interests, which includes providing an easy-to-use, innovate, profitable self-publishing and book printing service
  • To protect your vital interests or those of others

How can you exercise your rights under GDPR?

Under the EU GDPR regulations you have the right to access, rectify, delete or transport your data. By default you have access to all personal details, book information, and orders information. You can access, rectify and download the data from our website by logging in to your account.

Next to these rights, GDPR also gives you the right to object and restrict processing of data. This includes the right to object our processing of your data for marketing communications. You can exercise this right by unsubscribing from newsletters in ‘account settings’.

Data retention, account deletion

We store your information until it is no longer necessary to provide our services or until your account is deleted, whichever comes first. Additionally, you are free to remove your personal details from your account or to delete your book information.

To delete you account, please send us an email requesting to delete your account. Make sure you send the e-mail from the same account as the one you used to register your account. When you delete your account, we will delete the following data:

  • Personal information including bank account details
  • Book information
  • Order information
  • We will delete usage data as far as we are capable of doing this: some usage data is anonymized and not traceable to your account, this data will not be deleted.

We won’t delete any invoices, because we have a legal obligation to save those invoices.

How do we respond to legal requests or to prevent harm?

We will access and share your information with regulators, law enforcement or others in the following cases:

  • When we receive a legal requests and we have it on good-faith that we are required by law in our jurisdiction, or the jurisdiction of the legal request, to comply.
  • When we have it on good authority or strongly believe that is necessary to comply with investigations to prevent death or imminent bodily harm to us, you, or others; to detect, prevent, and address fraud; to detect, prevent, and address unauthorized use of our services.

Information that we collected about you could be stored for longer periods than mentioned under ‘data retention, account deletion’ when the data is subject to an ongoing legal request.

How do we operate and transfer data?

We work with printing and sales channels in many countries across the globe. We will transfer data to these parties only when your decisions in our website require us to do so. Transferring your data is necessary for us to deliver the service to you that you requested. It is possible that these companies store your data outside the EU.

For example, if you wish to print and deliver a book in a foreign country, we will transfer your book information and the order information to the closest printing company. Example 2: When you publish a book we will transfer your book information to the sales channels that you have selected.

How to contact us with questions

If you have questions about this policy, the way to that we collect, store, and process data, please contact us online or via post:

Online
privacy@mybestseller.com

Post
Mybestseller B.V.
Delftestraat 33
3013AE Rotterdam
The Netherlands

If you would like to lodge a privacy complaint, please direct your question towards Mybestseller’s Data Protection Officer (DPO) or to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Authoriteit Persoonsgegevens).

Last edited: 25 May 2018