Please – please – read my policies section before you contact me. I have been receiving requests that go against my blog policies almost daily for the past month. It’s bad enough when I’m asked to review or highlight a clothing line that does not actually have plus size clothing – it’s screwed up when someone claims that when they stop at 14, and one such contact stopped at 8.

8!

I don’t pretend that this blog serves everyone. I try to highlight all the places people can find plus size clothing, and I try to do it on my terms, not on the terms of the various businesses who look at my blogs and other blogs with extra dollar signs in their eyes. This has been especially the case ever since Glamour magazine came out with their first plus size issue and got that madcap response. I know some people question my skepticism about the real meaning of the plus-positive trend, but I’m getting a firsthand view of some of the business machinations going on behind the scenes, and the approaches, assumptions and concepts I’m seeing daily in my email really do not make me feel positive about the way the plus size consumer is viewed.

There seems to be this assumption that because I blog about “plus size clothing” I am interested in every sale, non-news press release or vaguely related plus publication out there. I’m not. I am one of those bloggers out there who got a journalism degree in college, and that means I come equipped with a very good sense of what’s newsworthy…and what’s really, really not. It’s also very obvious to me that a lot of businesses approaching me are not actually reading this blog.

As it says in my policies:

1. I do not do giveaways – if you want to mine the data of my readers, do it some other way. Also, those that don’t involve data mining still just annoy me. I deal with enough semi and irrelevant comment postings without getting a flurry by motivating people through greed. (If I post your comment, you’re totally fine.) I also don’t do sales postings in most cases because they get repetitive and relentless, and constantly urging women to spend is exacerbating an already serious disempowerment situation.

2. I am not just going to hand over my email so you can slap it on your mailing list. I was none too pleased when someone I initiated contact with just went ahead and did it without my permission. Just because you serve the plus market doesn’t mean I personally consider your contribution positive, and to such situations I apply my silence.

3. In the hierarchy of happiness, I put myself first, my readers second, and everyone else is graded according to modern Emily Post. I’m not bastion of ladylike disempowerment, but I’d still rather ignore you than tell you off.

4. No, I am not going to link to your BBW dating site, ever.

5. I tried affiliate programs. I don’t like them, which is why I’ve quit them or am in the process of quitting them. Mostly they make blogging a really boring chore that’s not much more than catalog copywriting.

Fat Chic isn’t my full time job. It’s not the core of my business. It’s not even entirely a hobby.

Fat Chic is just one of those things I do – when I started it in 2007 there were barely any blogs on plus size fashion out there, and most were along the business-end of the sphere. While I don’t always succeed, I try to make mine different enough to be worth following, and that means that I’m very mercurial about when and if I take the standard commercial approach.  I am building something plus women can use, can enjoy, and can even at times rely on in a way that allows them to incorporate the information on Fat Chic into the life they have, not by disempowering themselves through a life they aspire to.

Yes, I welcome clothing reviews, and if I’m sent a truly compelling press release you can bet I’m going to run it – with a probable rewrite to make it fully relevant to my readers. But I am not a glorified sales catalog or community corkboard.

So please, read Fat Chic before you send me a message.