Editorial Policy

This site earns affiliate commission, and that arrangement is set out in full on the disclosure page. What matters editorially is the separation, so here it is explicitly.

• No publisher, retailer or program has any input into which books appear, in what order, or what is said about them.
• Nobody can buy a position. There is no paid placement on this site and there will not be.
• Commission rate never affects a recommendation. Where two books fit equally, we do not check which pays more, and the buyer's interest wins every time.
• We recommend borrowing. Several pages here tell readers to use their public library instead of buying anything, which earns us nothing and is the correct advice for those readers.

The rules below are absolute rather than aspirational, and several of them cost us traffic or revenue.

There are no reader testimonials on this site, no star ratings, no review counts and no scores. Not because those things are unhelpful, but because we do not have them, and manufacturing them is the single most common dishonesty in this category.

The same applies to structured data. Search engines will happily display a star rating in a search result, and we emit none, because a rating in the markup would be asserting a measurement we never made. That costs us visibility and it is the correct trade.

Factual errors are corrected as soon as we can verify them. A page that has been materially corrected says so on the page rather than being silently edited, because a quiet fix is indistinguishable from never having been wrong.

Scheduled updates run on this cadence, and every page carries a visible updated date so you can see for yourself:

• Subscription pages (Audible, Kindle Unlimited): monthly, because plan terms change.
• Gift guides: annually, before the autumn gifting season.
• Year lists: quarterly during their year, then archived permanently — never deleted or redirected.
• Genre pages and roundups: twice a year.
• Read-alikes and format guides: annually.

Report anything wrong through the contact page. Corrections are answered ahead of everything else.

Margin & Muse is built and written with AI assistance, working from the published method, a set of rules that forbid inventing facts, and catalog data pulled from a public API rather than recalled from a model's memory. We say so because you would reasonably want to know, and because the alternative — implying a newsroom that does not exist — is exactly the kind of claim this site is built to avoid.

What that means practically: the facts on this site are as good as the catalog they came from and can be checked against it, and the editorial judgments are arguable and signed. Neither of those is improved by pretending a larger operation is behind them.