Here at Author Buzz, we hope everyone has a good time every time they visit. We are trying to build a community here for people who like reading books and those who love writing them too. These guidelines are designed to promote that sense of community by keeping the site a nice place to visit.
Almost Always Acceptable
This type of content is almost always acceptable in forums, blogs, and groups.
- Content about authors, publishers, self-publishing, and literary agents
- News from the publishing world – especially the UK publishing space
- Content about you as an author, agent, small publisher, or writer
- Fandom of a particular writer or genre
- Writing advice, tips, or insights
- Anything else remotely interesting from within the bookish industry
- In General Chat: Any topic within reason (without links) if not in the never-acceptable list.
- In comments: Anything on-topic for the post including polite disagreement.
- Publishing or author press releases
Your publishing journey: If you are an aspiring author, it is completely acceptable to start a group, a blog, and a forum about your journey and released media. This is exactly why we started this site. Writers and authors promoting their books and charting their writer’s journey are granted considerably more leeway.
Authors aspiring or otherwise can import your headlines via RSS to your group so your blog does not even have to be on our network. This is also true for fandom groups.
Never Acceptiple Ever
- Hate speech
- Offers or links promoting cheating services such as essay writing and assignment completion
- Unsolicited Advertising
- Abuse, harassment, disruption, and/or law-breaking
- Promoting or encouraging harm to self or others
- Spam – if it smells like spam and quacks like spam then, by golly, it might be spam
- Anything that looks purely commercial without some redeeming qualities
- Purely AI-generated content
- Low-quality content designed only for SEO
- Adult content
- Spoilers without warnings
- High-volume content that drowns the front page – please pace yourself
A particular note about blogs. Sure, you can register a blog; you fill it up with writing but this is not the same as being about writing, publishing, or authors. Wildly off-topic blogs may be removed with little or no notice. Exceptions or grey areas exist by pre-arrangement with the moderators and admins.
Just to be clear, accounts pushing essay writing and assignment services with be deleted with extreme prejudice. Take that nonsense somewhere else.
Commercial Content
Your profile has sections expressly for promoting your business. Anything outside of that will likely be considered spam and removed. If you want to promote your commercial business (outside of sharing press releases with us we always want those) get in touch and maybe we can arrange something.
Guest Writing
We are always willing to consider guest writing. You’ll want a free account to write your draft idea. You may also wish to chat with the admins about what we are looking for (in case this has not made our topics obvious already).
Disagree with Kindness
You are not required to agree with everyone about everything but you are expected to disagree with kindness. Free exchange of ideas is good, but name-calling is not. Imagine that you and the other person are meeting your family for lunch after the discussion. If you are uncomfortable with what you say being shown in that sort of company, it might not be the right time to say it.
The Final Word
On your blog, you are primarily responsible for the comments you allow – you are the editor. We reserve the right to review this in the case of egregious or highly unacceptable comments.
Everywhere else it is the admins’. If something is deemed off-topic or unacceptable and is removed, endless debates about it are one way to give everyone a bad day. Please don’t do that.