Legal
This Author Agreement (the "Agreement") is between you ("you," "Author") and [Entity name] ("Novelop," "we"). It applies whenever you submit a book to the Novelop Service, in addition to the Terms of Service and Content Policy. By clicking "Submit for review" you accept it.
In plain terms: you keep your copyright; you give us a non-exclusive license to sell and display your book on the Service; you can publish it elsewhere too; you earn $0.60 every time a member unlocks it and 70% of the net on every à la carte sale (and more for an audiobook edition you add); we pay you monthly through Stripe once you've earned $25; you promise the book is yours to publish and honestly labeled; and you can unpublish at any time, though readers who already bought it keep it.
You must be at least 18, have an account in good standing, and be able to receive payments through Stripe in a country Stripe Connect supports. If you publish on behalf of a company or a co-author, you represent that you are authorized to bind them and to receive payment for them.
You keep all copyright and other rights in your book. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-bearing license, for the term of this Agreement, to host, store, reproduce, convert, format, display, distribute, sell access to and otherwise make your book available to readers through the Service and our apps, in any format and on any device we support; to display the free sample chapters to anyone; to use the title, cover, blurb, your author name and excerpts of up to 500 words to promote the book and the Service; and to sublicense these rights to our service providers as needed to run the Service. You also grant readers the personal reading license described in the Terms of Service, which continues for readers who unlocked or bought the book even after this Agreement ends.
We will not translate, abridge, adapt, produce audio or other derivative editions of your book, or license it to third parties, without a separate written agreement with you (an audiobook edition you upload yourself is covered by Section 6). We will not use your book to train machine-learning models, and we do not permit our providers to.
This license is non-exclusive: you may publish the same book anywhere else, at any price, at any time.
You represent and warrant that:
Every submission is screened automatically (length, duplicates, prohibited content) and then read by a moderator before it goes live. We may approve it, send it back with a note, or decline it, at our discretion; we aim to decide within a few days. After a book is live we may unpublish it if it breaches this Agreement, the Content Policy or the law, if we receive a credible infringement notice, if readers report it and review upholds the report, or if required by a court or regulator. Where practical we will tell you why and give you a chance to fix it. We may correct an inaccurate AI label after notice to you.
Revising a live book. You may change a live book's cover, blurb, price and genres at any time, and the change takes effect immediately. A new manuscript, a new title or author name, or a change to the "how it was made" label or the 18+ flag is submitted as a revision and reviewed like a new submission; the current version stays on sale until the revision is approved, and on approval it replaces the current version for every reader, including readers who unlocked or bought the book earlier. A revision must be a version of the same work — not a different book under the same listing.
You choose the à la carte price for non-members from the tiers we offer (currently $0.99 to $4.99). Members read your book with an unlock rather than paying the à la carte price. We may run promotions — including making a book free for a limited period, "new this week" and "reader-verified" placements, or introductory subscription pricing — and may set the sample length (currently the first three chapters). Promotional free reads are paid at the unlock royalty in Section 7.
6.1 Adding narration. Once a book is live you may add an audiobook edition by uploading the recording (one audio file, several chapter files, or a zip of chapter files). We play the files in order as one audiobook, with each file as a chapter, and use the opening chapters (or, for a single file, the opening minutes) as the free sample; we do not edit the recording. You may replace the recording, change the narration label or narrator, or change the price at any time. An audiobook edition is sold and unlocked together with the text under the license in Section 2, carries the narration label you choose (AI-narrated, or Narrated by a named person), and goes live without a second content review. You may remove it at any time; listeners who already have it keep it.
6.2 Price and royalties. You choose the audiobook price from the tiers we offer (currently $4.99 to $14.99); it includes the text. Readers who already own the text pay the difference (never less than $2.99). Members unlock an audiobook for two unlocks, or one unlock added to a book they have already unlocked. You earn:
6.3 Your promises about the recording. In addition to Section 3, you represent and warrant that: you own or have licensed all rights in the recording, including the narrator's performance and voice, sufficient to grant the Section 2 license; if the narration is synthetic, the voice is not a clone or imitation of a real, identifiable person made without that person's written consent, and you used the voice tool in accordance with its terms; if a person narrated it, they have agreed in writing to its sale here and you are responsible for paying them; the recording is of the same book as the text, complete and unabridged (or clearly labeled as abridged), and contains no advertising or other material; and the narration label and narrator name are accurate.
6.4 Technical limits. We may set limits on file size, length, format and sound quality, and may decline or remove a recording that fails our technical checks, is unintelligible, or does not match the book.
Royalties are credited to your account when the unlock or sale occurs and shown on your dashboard and monthly statements. We may change the royalty rates or tiers on 30 days' notice; a change never applies to unlocks or sales that already happened. If a store changes its commission, Net Revenue changes with it.
Payouts are made through Stripe Connect. Before we can pay you, you must complete Stripe's onboarding, which collects your identity, tax form (W-9 for U.S. persons, W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E otherwise) and bank details directly — we never see or store them. We pay on or about the 1st of each month everything you earned through the end of the previous month, provided the balance is at least US $25 (smaller balances roll forward). Payouts are in U.S. dollars; Stripe converts to your local currency at its rates and may deduct its cross-border fees. We may withhold or delay a payout while a dispute, chargeback, fraud review or infringement notice concerning your account is open, and we may offset refunds, chargebacks and amounts paid in error against future payouts. Payouts to accounts Stripe reports as restricted are held until the issue is resolved.
You are responsible for all taxes on your royalties. For U.S. authors, Stripe files the annual information return (Form 1099) on our behalf where the threshold is met. Nothing in this Agreement makes you our employee, partner or agent.
Your dashboard shows unlocks, sales, completions and earnings per book, and monthly statements you can download. If you believe a statement is wrong, tell us within 12 months of its date and we will investigate and correct any error. Once a year, on 30 days' notice and at your expense, you may have an independent accountant review the records relating to your books; if the review finds an underpayment of more than 5% for the period, we will bear the reasonable cost of the review.
This Agreement starts when you submit your first book and continues until either of us ends it. You may unpublish any book at any time from your dashboard, and delete it entirely if no reader has unlocked it; you may end the Agreement by deleting your account. We may end it on 30 days' notice, or immediately if you materially breach it. When a book is unpublished or the Agreement ends: it is removed from the store and search within a day; readers who already unlocked or bought it keep their reading license; sample chapters stop being shown; and we pay any royalties you have earned in the normal payout cycle. Sections 2 (as to existing readers), 3, 6.3, 8, 9, 11, 12 and 13 survive.
You will defend, indemnify and hold us and our providers harmless from any third-party claim, and the resulting damages and reasonable costs including attorneys' fees, arising from your book, your breach of the warranties in Sections 3 and 6, or your violation of law — including copyright and defamation claims. We will notify you promptly of any such claim and let you control the defense with counsel reasonably acceptable to us, provided you do not settle in a way that admits fault on our behalf without our consent.
Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive damages, or lost profits, arising from this Agreement. Our total liability to you under this Agreement will not exceed the royalties we paid or owed you in the twelve months before the claim arose. These limits do not apply to your indemnity obligations, to either party's breach of the other's intellectual property, or to liability that cannot be limited by law.
This Agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Texas, and the dispute provisions of the Terms of Service apply. We may update this Agreement on 30 days' notice by email or in the app; if you don't agree to a change you may unpublish your books before it takes effect, and continuing to publish afterwards means you accept it. You may not assign this Agreement without our consent (except to a company you control that owns the rights, on notice to us); we may assign it to a successor. If any part is unenforceable the rest stays in force. This Agreement, with the Terms of Service and Content Policy, is the entire agreement between us about your books.
[Entity name] · [Postal address] · authors@example.com