Purpose: This site is a personal site created and maintained by Harold Underdown as a public service. The information and opinions I express here are my own work and do not have any connection to my current, or any previous, employer. I do not charge for any of the information on the site; that's why I set this up as a ".org" site, not a ".com."
I do provide information about my services as a freelancer, to answer the frequent questions I get asking if I will look at a manuscript, but the site is not intended to promote my services. While using the information in it, you need feel under no obligation to me. If you do want to help support the site, please read how on my Bookstores page.
Privacy: Your privacy is complete while you visit this site, though I can not make the same promise if you follow the links that take you to other sites. I do not track information about visits to my site or send "cookies" to your computer. If you send me an email message with a comment or question I will use your email address only to respond to you. If you join the email announcement service for my site you will only receive emails about my site: you may need to give information in addition to your email address, requested by the company that hosts the service. However, you can provide bogus information if you choose to do so.
The sites that I have affiliated this site with in order to earn commissions (see below) do provide some information to me about the people who have bought things from them after clicking through from my site. The level of detail varies, but at most, I know what items were bought, and for what price. I am not told who bought them, or any identifying information about the person. Some sites only tell me the total amount of the purchase.
Children: This site is not intended for children and most will find it pretty boring. However, parents may rest assured that there is no objectionable language or images on it. I can not make the same guarantee for sites to which I link.
Copyright: The copyright for this site as a compilation is mine. The copyright for all individual articles or other pieces is retained by their original authors, and they must be contacted for permission to use them; you may contact me for permission for articles I wrote or others through me or their author bio. page, if there is one. Permission is granted to print out a copy of any article for personal use.
Links: I welcome links to any page on the site, including the home page, articles index pages, or individual articles.
- Please link to the site's home page with descriptive text along these lines: "The Purple Crayon: A Children's Book Editor's Site."
- If you like to use graphics for links, you may copy either of the crayon logos below to your server (do not hot link): please include a text description also. Please do not use the full-size purple crayon banner found around the site.
I do not do "link exchanges" and do not automatically reciprocate if someone links to my site. Instead, I link to sites I have seen, and selection for a link is based only on my idiosyncratic judgment. Links are not the primary focus of my site, and so I link to only a small percentage of the sites I've seen. Emails with the subject "link exchanges" or "reciprocal links," in fact, are usually ignored. Please do not give me suggestions for links unless your site is clearly related to the world of children's books.
Affiliations: To provide additional services for the site, or to raise funds for the site (as noted in more detail on my Bookstores page), I have created connections to certain other sites. Earnings from them help to support this site: I pay $70/month for DSL access and site hosting, and contribute my time as well.
Here is a list of some of these other sites and what they do for this site:
- Amazon: I have links on some pages of my site to the Amazon.com web site. If you click through to Amazon using the links around my site, including the one here, I receive a commission on any books you buy during that visit. If you return to Amazon later, I do not; the links on my site have a special code.
- Alibris: I have set myself up as a referral site with Alibris too: this is a network of used and rare book dealers. I use this company myself and find it reliable. If you want to buy books and make a contribution to The Purple Crayon, please use the links here or on the Bookstores page.
- Other online bookstores or stores with similar focuses may also appear around the site. I am trying to find the best ones as I work to make the site self-supporting.
- Google AdSense: This program of Google's serves up ads that match up with the content on the page on which they appear. It's unobtrusive and easy for me to manage. Since it's backed by Google, I trust the program and expect that many visitors to this site will too. For more information, go to: Google AdSense. Google also handles the Search function of the site, providing free searches and as with the main AdSense program, serving ads related to the searches you do.
- Yahoo!Groups: This is a company that hosts various kinds of email discussion groups, also known as listservs. I have set up a link to this site on my contact page and a few other places, so that people who want to be notified when I make an update to my site can get an email from me. I am the only person sending email through this mailing list. At present, the only "cost" to you is a text ad that may be inserted into the message.Yahoo also collects information from you, but you can fake this. You can opt into or out of this service at your own discretion.
Awards: This site has won various awards over the years. I used to display them but I find that the logos clutter up my home page, and seem to function mainly as ads for the sites that gave them. So I have eliminated them. If you like this site, you don't care if it's won an award or not.
Thank you for visiting. I hope you have found the site useful.
If you need to get in touch with me, please see my contact page.
