Clear information, without the small-print fog.

Tell Us Your Story: your memoir information

Mills & Burch Publishers is the controller for the guided memoir builder. For questions, corrections, permission withdrawal or requests about your story, contact our official Facebook page. Please give your submission reference if you have one, but do not send your private return code or sensitive story details through Facebook.

What you choose to give us

The questionnaire may contain your name, contact email, approximate life dates and places, relationships and memories. Depending on what you choose to share, it may include health, mental health, ethnicity, religion or beliefs, sexuality, trauma, addiction and other personal experiences. Criminal allegations, proceedings and convictions are treated separately. Every story question is optional. A contact name and email are required only for submission, so we can discuss your proposal. The name can be a nickname, pen name or made-up name; your real name is not required. Please use a working email address.

This builder is for people aged 18 or over. Do not include private addresses, account or document numbers, or copies of medical or court records. You can tell us that records exist and discuss sharing relevant material later. Use made-up names and remove identifying details when describing sensitive experiences involving other living people, including children. Your own consent does not give permission to process sensitive information or criminal allegations about somebody else. We will discuss an appropriate way to handle such material before accepting it for further work.

Writing, saving and submitting are different

Answers typed into the page are held in that page until you press Save or Submit. They are not automatically sent to us. Without saving or downloading, closing or reloading the page can lose them. Downloading gives you a private text copy on your device and does not submit anything.

Saving sends your answers and privacy choices to the hosting service for private storage so you can return. Saving alone does not put the draft into the publisher’s review inbox. Submitting deliberately makes it available for Mills & Burch to assess and discuss your proposed memoir and contact you about the next stage. Any further manuscript development is agreed with you first. We do not use your answers for marketing, unrelated purposes or automated acceptance decisions.

Your permission and lawful basis

We rely on your consent under Article 6(1)(a) of the UK GDPR for this optional saving and submission service. If you choose to include your own special category information, we ask for your explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a). If you include criminal-offence information about yourself, we ask for your consent under Schedule 1, paragraph 29 of the Data Protection Act 2018, alongside Article 10 of the UK GDPR. You can instead leave those kinds of information out and still use the builder.

We record the choices you make, the version of this notice, and the dates when you save or submit. You can withdraw permission at any time by deleting your saved story using the builder, or contacting us. Withdrawal does not undo processing that was lawful before withdrawal. If a separate memoir project has already been agreed, we will explain the effect on that project and its separately agreed records.

Your material remains yours

Submitting your life story does not transfer ownership of your original information, photographs, documents or source material, subject to any third-party rights. Saving or submitting gives us no permission to publish your story, share it publicly or use it for unrelated purposes. You review any manuscript, and the appropriate publishing agreement and approval must be in place before publication. Submission is free and does not commit you to publishing with Mills & Burch.

Who can see your answers?

Submitted stories are available to authorised Mills & Burch reviewers. The private online review inbox is restricted to the publisher’s authorised account. Drafts are kept out of that inbox, although authorised technical administration may access stored records when needed to operate the service. Hosting and database providers, including OpenAI Sites and Cloudflare, process data to operate the website and storage. We do not make saved or submitted stories available to the public. No questionnaire answers are sent to Google Analytics; analytics tracking is disabled on the builder and private review pages.

Hosting services may process information outside the UK. Information about their processing locations, contractual safeguards and how to obtain further details is available through the Cloudflare data processing terms and OpenAI data processing terms. Contact us for questions about the arrangements applicable to your information.

Returning to your story

When you first save or submit, you receive a private return code. Anyone who has that code can open the saved record, so keep it confidential. It is not placed in a public link or URL. An essential, HttpOnly session cookie remembers access to that record in the browser you used, for up to 90 days. This cookie is used to provide the saving service you request, not for advertising. On a shared device, other people using that browser may be able to reopen the story; use the delete option when you no longer want it stored.

How long information is kept

An unsubmitted draft expires 90 days after its last save. A submitted questionnaire expires 180 days after submission. Expired records cannot be opened or reviewed and are removed during the next routine storage-maintenance request. The builder’s delete option removes the active record immediately, including its saved answers and consent choices. Provider backup or security-log copies, where retained, follow the providers’ retention arrangements. If we agree to develop your memoir, we will explain any separate project retention arrangements before proceeding.

Your choices and rights

You can download your answers, request access or correction, ask for erasure or restriction where applicable, withdraw consent, and ask for a portable copy of information you supplied. You can delete the builder’s saved record yourself using your return code. Contact us for other requests, including if the code has been lost; we may need to verify your identity before releasing or changing private information. You may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The form is voluntary: you can skip questions, stop without submitting, or talk to us about your book another way.