Diversity and harassment policies
At Grimdark Magazine, we see the SFF community as inclusive and open. Most of us live in countries with broad freedoms of speech and behaviour. However, that freedom does not come without responsibility. Below are GdM’s policies on the behaviour of our team and the authors we publish, promote, and review.
Harassment and discrimination policy
During their time with us, GdM expects our team members to behave in a way that treats all people—no matter their age, race, gender, sex, sexual preference, nationality, or religious choices—equally, with respect and dignity.
With regard to the authors we review and promote, authors that we at GdM feel have exhibited behaviour that does not respect the age, race, gender, sex, sexual preference, nationality, or religious choices of persons within or without the SFF community will have their previously published reviews tagged with a notice that GdM does not recommend or support the author. These notices will remain in place until the team feels comfortable removing them. GdM will not publish any further reviews for those authors.
Diversity policy
The grimdark community loves perspective. We encourage people from the BIPOC communities of the world (especially First Australians), the LGBTQIA+ community, PwD community, authors that have ESL, female authors, and authors from marginalised genders to approach us for reviews, to join our review team, and to participate in our submission open windows.
Reviewer harassment policy
GdM is run by people who do this for the love of it—they aren’t paid in anything but free books; they aren’t employees. They review what they want to review, when they want to review it. They promote books and spend their free time writing reviews because they love books and they love promoting authors. While you are at all times welcome to have a go at me and what I choose to publish on the site and in our books and magazine issues, I have zero tolerance for authors who go after our reviewers (eg. on their personal social accounts), try to force reviewers to change their review, or badger reviewers to try and push certain books up the review queue, or to review them at all.
Where a GdM reviewer feels attacked by an author, that author will be blacklisted from further review activity.
Allowing people to do better
I firmly believe that a person can be a complete waste of oxygen at one point of their life and then change, improve, and do better later. When the GdM team determines that a blacklisted individual has realigned themselves to support our diversity policy, we reserve the right to reconsider the decision to blacklist them.
Time stamp
The above polices were released on Friday 17th of July 2020, AEST.
