Privacy Notice

Alterean is a trading name of Ollinton Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company no. 17060543). Its registered office is 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom.

Ollinton Ltd is the controller of the personal information described in this notice. Ollinton Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under reference ZC099703. You can contact us at privacy@alterean.com.

Alterean is a directory of UK literary agents and publishers that is free to browse. You can use it without an account, and we don’t run ads or sell personal information. We hold three kinds of personal information. The first is the professional details of the agents listed in the directory, drawn from their own and their agencies’ public pages. The second is the small amount of technical information any website receives from its visitors. The third is what you give us if you create an account or subscribe to the newsletter, and we hold that only to run the thing you asked for. If you’re listed and would like something corrected or removed, email us and we’ll sort it out.

The directory exists to give writers accurate, current information about literary agents in the United Kingdom. That means we process some of your professional information, and you have the right to know how.

What we hold. Your name, your agency, your professional role, and what you and your agency publicly state about your work. That covers whether you’re open to submissions, what you’re looking for, submission guidelines, stated response times, and listed clients. This is professional information, not private life. We don’t collect or publish personal contact details, home addresses, or anything about you as a private individual.

Where it comes from. Your agency’s public website, your own professional pages where you publish them, and occasionally other public professional sources such as an agency’s announcement or a professional membership listing. We check these pages regularly, and each listing shows the date we last checked it. What we record is what you and your agency state. We quote and summarise the source, and we don’t invent, infer or embellish. The wording stays yours, apart from small grammatical adjustments so it reads naturally in a directory, such as a wish list’s “I” becoming “she” or “they”. Those adjustments never change what was said.

Why we hold it (our legal basis). Legitimate interests. We provide writers with an accurate directory of a profession whose details are published in order to be found. Your professional details appear here because your agency publishes them for exactly that audience.

How long. While you’re listed. If you leave an agency or the public record changes, the listing changes with it. Archived listings are removed from public view.

Your rights. You can ask us to correct anything we’ve got wrong, and we want to know if we have. You can also object to being listed at all, ask for a copy of what we hold about you, or ask us to remove your listing. Email privacy@alterean.com and we’ll respond within one month. If you’re unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

You can use Alterean without creating an account, and we like it that way.

Technical information. Like any website, our hosting providers receive standard technical data when you visit, such as your IP address, browser type, and the pages you request. This is used to serve the site, keep it secure, and understand aggregate usage. It isn’t used to build profiles of you. Our host also counts page views for us, without cookies and without following you to other sites, so we know which pages are read and nothing about who read them.

Cookies. We use only the cookies the site needs to function. No advertising cookies, no third-party tracking.

If you arrive from one of our ads. We note which ad it was (a tag from the link and the campaign name), kept in your browser and, if you go on to subscribe, on your account. It only tells us which ads are worth the money, and we never send it back to Google or share it with anyone.

If you email us. We’ll hold your email and our correspondence for as long as we need it to deal with whatever you wrote to us about, and for a reasonable period afterwards in case the conversation continues.

We hold your email address to send you the newsletter, on the basis of your consent. A newsletter service sends it for us and holds the list on our instructions. Every issue has an unsubscribe link that works, and unsubscribing removes you from the list; it doesn’t touch an account if you have one.

You don’t need an account to use the directory. If you create one, for a watchlist, a submission log or a membership, we hold what it takes to run it and nothing more.

What we hold. Your email address and how you log in: a link we email you, or the login provider you chose. Whatever you add: the agents and publishers you watch, your projects and submission log, your notes, and your email preferences. If you take out a membership, the customer and subscription references our payment provider gives us and the record of what you paid for; your card details go to the payment provider and never reach us. If you arrived from one of our ads, the note described above.

Why we hold it. To provide the account and the membership you asked for: our contract with you. Members get one email a day when something on their watchlist moves, with a link on every message to turn it off. We don’t use your details for anything else without asking, and we don’t send marketing to them.

How long. For as long as the account exists. Ask us to delete it and we’ll delete the account and everything you added. We keep only what tax law obliges us to keep about payments, for the period it requires.

Deleting your account. Email privacy@alterean.com from the address on the account and we’ll delete it within one month, usually much sooner.

We use a small number of service providers to host the things that run Alterean. They process data on our instructions and can’t use it for their own purposes. We don’t sell personal information, we don’t share it with advertisers, and there are no ads on Alterean to share it with.

If the law requires us to disclose information, or if Ollinton Ltd is ever sold or restructured, personal information may be transferred as part of that, with this notice’s protections travelling with it.

Our database is hosted in the European Union, in Ireland. Some of our providers operate infrastructure outside the UK and EU; where that happens, transfers are protected by the safeguards UK data protection law requires, such as the UK’s data bridge arrangements or standard contractual clauses.

UK data protection law gives you rights over your personal information. You can access it, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to our use of it, and take a copy elsewhere. To use any of them, email privacy@alterean.com. We’ll respond within one month. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, though we’d appreciate the chance to sort it out first.

When we add features that change how we handle personal information, we’ll update this notice before they launch and change the date at the top. Significant changes get flagged on the site, not slipped in quietly.

Email us at privacy@alterean.com.