Editorial policy

Novel & Narrator is written by Mike M. and published by Iron Mako Media. This page sets out how it is produced. The companion page, how we choose, covers the ranking method and the data provenance in detail; this one covers conduct.

Independence

• No paid placement. Nobody can buy a position, a mention or a ranking on this site.
• No sponsored content. Nothing here is sponsored, and if that ever changed it would be labeled on the page itself rather than disclosed in a footer.
• No products in exchange for coverage. We do not accept free books, review copies or access in return for writing about something.
• Commission does not affect ranking. We earn Amazon commissions, disclosed on every page — see how this site is funded — and the ranking criteria are published separately and do not include it.
• We recommend free alternatives. On several pages the honest answer is to use your public library, and we give it, despite earning nothing from it.

Sourcing

Every factual claim on this site falls into one of two categories, and they are kept visibly separate from opinion.

1. Machine-verified. Narrator credits, author credits, editions, publication dates, cover art and prices all come from the Amazon catalog record for the exact product we link to, and can be re-checked at any time.
2. Cited. Listening lengths come from a published page that states them, and that page is linked underneath the figure on every page that shows it.

Anything that is neither of those is editorial judgment, and reads as judgment: whether a book is good, who should skip it, how a performance lands. We would rather a reader disagree with a clearly-marked opinion than mistake one for a finding.

What this site will not state

These are commitments rather than aspirations, and each is checkable.

• No fabricated reviews or testimonials. There are none on this site, because we have none that are real. We will not write one to fill a layout.
• No star ratings. We do not operate a ratings panel, so a number would be decoration pretending to be measurement. Ratings are also deliberately absent from our structured data.
• No claim to have tested a product. No lab, no panel, no “in our testing”.
• No invented credentials. The byline is Mike M. and the bio is what the owner provided. We will not add years of experience, certifications or a listening-hours total that nobody gave us.
• No narrator biographies. We can verify a credit for an edition; we cannot verify a career. Individual narrator pages stay unbuilt until we can.
• No invented prices or runtimes. Prices come from the retailer and expire automatically; runtimes are cited or absent.
• No fake urgency. No countdowns, no “only 2 left”, no invented deals. We have no sale to run.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. The policy is straightforward:

1. Email contact@novelandnarrator.com or use the contact form, with the page and what is wrong.
2. Factual errors — a wrong narrator, a mischaracterized book, a broken link — are corrected as soon as we can confirm them.
3. Where a correction changes the substance of a recommendation, we note on the page that it was corrected rather than editing silently.
4. Where we disagree with a complaint, we will say so and why, rather than quietly changing nothing.

Prices are a separate case. They update automatically on a daily schedule and are timestamped, so a price that looks wrong is usually a price that has moved since the last check rather than an error — the date beside it tells you when it was true.

Updates

Every page carries a published date and a last-updated date. The last-updated date changes when the content changes, not on every deploy, so it means something. Prices refresh independently and carry their own timestamp.

Content we treat with extra care

Two kinds of material on this site get handled more conservatively than the rest:

• Content warnings. Audio gives you no chance to skim a page, so books involving child harm, sexual violence, self-harm or terminal illness carry a note saying so. That matters most on the children's pages, where every pick names the thing a parent would want to have known.
• Health and research claims. Several popular nonfiction books rest on research that has not replicated well, and we flag that on the individual entries rather than recommending them as settled science. Where a claim is contested we say it is contested. We do not give medical advice.

Contact

Corrections, questions and complaints: contact@novelandnarrator.com, or the contact form. We do not publish a phone number or a postal address.