Terms & Conditions

These terms are between you and Abhishek Aggarwal, a sole trader based in Victoria, Australia, trading as IndieFiction (“we”, “us”). By using the site or creating an account, you agree to them.

If you do not agree, please do not use the site. Our Privacy Policy forms part of these terms.

You must be 18 or older to create an account. You may browse the site at any age, but submitting a book or creating an author profile requires an adult account.

You do not need an account to ask a question in Ask, our community Q&A, but you must still be 18 or older to post anything, signed in or anonymously. Answering a question does require an account, so every answer carries a real author name.

The free author services are for individual indie authors. Presses, publications, and other organisations or businesses must not use them, including to list a catalogue through a personal account. If you represent one, the Business plan described under paid plans below is built for you, and you can always write to hello@indiefiction.com if you are not sure which fits. We may decline, remove, or convert accounts that breach this rule, on the same terms as any other free-service removal described under book submissions below.

You can sign in with an email address and password, or with your Google account. Keep your details accurate, and keep whichever one you use to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so tell us promptly at hello@indiefiction.com if you think someone else has access to it.

Please don't create an account impersonating another author, or run multiple accounts to make one author look like several.

There are three kinds of account. An author account lists books and has a public author page; a business account is for organisations on the Business plan; a reader account saves books to a private shelf and follows authors, and cannot list books. The kind is chosen when the account is created and does not switch between the three, so if you read and write, you will want an author account, which can save and follow too.

A reader account may publish reviews and notes on its own page and in the public feed at /reviews, about any book, listed on IndieFiction or not. They stay yours, and so do any photos you add to a review; by publishing you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to show them on IndieFiction and in previews of it, which ends when you delete the post. Only add photos you took or have the right to share, and no photos of people who have not agreed to appear. A review must be your own honest opinion of a book you have actually read: no paid reviews, no review swaps, no reviewing your own work under a reader account, and no attacks on the author rather than the book. We may hold, remove or edit for formatting any post that breaks these terms or the community guidelines, without notice.

Readers may message authors, and authors may message readers, where the other person has left their inbox open; either may reply. A conversation is private to the two of you, except that we read a message our spam filter holds or that either of you reports, and may remove it. Don't use messages to harass, to sell, to solicit reviews, or to reach someone who has blocked you by other means; doing so will end your account. Either person may block the other at any time, and a block closes the conversation both ways.

Message tokens. Opening a new conversation uses one token; replying in a conversation that already exists never does. Every account gets 5 free tokens on the first day of each calendar month, and unused ones are not carried over. A token is used when the conversation is opened, and it is not returned if the message is held by our filter, blocked by the other person, or never answered. You can also buy tokens, $5 USD for 50 tokens, plus tax where it applies, through Stripe; paid tokens never expire, are not refundable once bought, and are forfeited if you delete your account. A conversation opened with a paid token is also announced to the recipient by email; the message itself is only ever shown inside their account.

You keep every right you have in your book, its cover, your biography, and your photograph. Listing on IndieFiction transfers no ownership to us. We claim no share of your royalties and no stake in your publishing rights.

What we do need is your permission to show your work to readers. By submitting material, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, resize, and display it for the purpose of running and promoting IndieFiction, including on book and author pages, in genre listings and search results, in previews shared on social media, and in our newsletter.

For a book listing, this licence exists only so the platform can function: it lets us create a thumbnail of your cover, not publish your novel. A short story is the deliberate exception — there, publishing the whole work to readers is the entire point, and the terms for it are set out below. Either way the licence is non-exclusive, so you remain completely free to publish the same work anywhere else.

Your cover may appear in our social media posts. When we promote a book, or the platform itself, on our social accounts, we may use the cover you uploaded, always as promotion of your book and wherever the platform allows it, linking back to your page here. If you would rather a particular post came down, ask and we will delete it: email hello@indiefiction.com and it goes. What we cannot do is recall copies other people have already shared on, which is true of anything posted anywhere.

The licence ends when you remove the work. Delete a book or your profile and we stop displaying it, and we publish no new promotion of it. Copies may briefly persist in backups and content-delivery caches, which clear on their own schedule.

When you submit anything, you confirm that:

• you wrote it or otherwise hold the rights to it, including the rights to the cover artwork and any images you upload;
• granting us the licence above does not breach a contract with a publisher, agent, or anyone else;
• the work does not infringe anyone's copyright, trade mark, privacy, or other rights;
• the details you give us (title, author name, retailer link) are accurate.

Cover art is the clause authors most often trip over: if you commissioned a designer, check that your agreement lets you use the image for promotion. Most do; some do not.

Short Stories is where you can publish a finished piece of short fiction and have it read on IndieFiction, free, by anyone. It is separate from listing a book and separate from the Upcoming Release subscription, and it costs nothing.

You keep the copyright in your story. Nothing here transfers ownership, and you may publish, sell, adapt, or withdraw the same story anywhere else at any time.

Because we display the whole work rather than a thumbnail, the permission you give us is wider than for a book listing. By publishing a story you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to:

• publish and display the full story on IndieFiction, on any device, for readers to read free of charge; and
• publish short extracts to promote it — for example a paragraph in our newsletter or a quotation on our social accounts — always credited to you and always linking back to your story on this site.

That second permission is what makes the exposure real: a story nobody is pointed towards is not exposure. It does not let us sell your story, licence it to anyone else, include it in a paid product, or publish it in full anywhere but here.

The licence ends when the story is removed. Delete a story and we stop displaying it; delete your account and your stories go with it. Extracts we have already published stay as they are, because a newsletter that has been sent cannot be unsent — but we will publish no new ones.

You can see how your story is doing. A live story shows its view count publicly, and your account shows you the view count and the average time readers spend on it. These are aggregate figures only — they tell you how the story is received, never who read it. How the counting works is described in the privacy policy.

Publishing your story elsewhere is fine with us. It may live on your own site, on Wattpad, or anywhere you like. But some platforms and publishers ask for exclusivity, and checking that you are free to publish here is your responsibility, not ours. We have no way of knowing what you have agreed with someone else.

When you publish a story you confirm that you wrote it, that it is yours to give us permission to publish, and that publishing it here breaks no agreement you have made with anyone else. Our position on AI tools is at AI on IndieFiction; this confirmation applies however a story was made.

New stories are reviewed before they reach search engines. Your story is live and shareable as soon as you publish it, but it stays out of Google, out of site search, and off our home page until we have looked at it. Stories marked as containing adult content are never shown on the home page.

A story must be at least 1,500 words and no more than 15,000 words. We check this when you publish, so a story outside those limits cannot go live. The minimum is there because very short pieces do not give a reader enough to arrive for; the maximum is there because this is a place for short fiction, not for serialising a novel. If we ever change these numbers we will not apply the change to stories already published.

We may remove a story, or take it out of search, if it breaks these terms — see moderation and copyright complaints.

Every book submission is reviewed by a person before it appears. We are under no obligation to publish any submission, and we may decline, edit for accuracy and formatting, re-categorise, or later remove a listing at our discretion.

Being declined is not a judgement on your writing. The usual reasons are a broken retailer link, a cover we cannot verify you own, or a listing that duplicates one already on the site.

We tell you the outcome by email, and your account page keeps a record of it. The record is a convenience: the email address on your account remains the address of record for decisions about your listings, so keep it one you actually read.

An account can list up to 5 books. If you have published more than that yourself, write to hello@indiefiction.com and we will sort it out together; accounts that already held more when the limit changed keep every book they had.

A listed book must be available to buy or to pre-order at your retailer link, and you tell us which when you submit; a pre-order says so on its book page until you mark it available from your account. Books that are still being written are declined: the Upcoming Release plan exists exactly for those, and a free listing is not a substitute for it.

For the free parts of IndieFiction (book listings, short stories, author profiles, and Ask) we may remove content, or decline to carry it, at any time and without giving a reason. We rarely do, and never casually, but a free shelf only stays worth being on if we keep that judgement. This clause does not apply to anything you have paid for: paid services carry the consumer rights described under the Upcoming Release subscription, and content is removed there only as those sections describe.

Edits you make afterwards are not held for review. Once a book is live you can change its details from your account and the change appears straight away. We are told that it was edited and check it after the fact, on the same terms as the original submission, so a listing edited into something we would not have accepted can still be corrected or removed.

Posts in Ask work differently: see the next section.

Ask is our community Q&A, where indie authors answer each other's publishing questions. By posting a question or an answer you agree to our Community Guidelines, which form part of these terms.

Posts appear immediately. Unlike book submissions, questions and answers are not reviewed before they are published. We moderate reactively: we may hide, edit, or remove any post, and suspend or close the account behind it, if it breaks the Guidelines or these terms. We are not obliged to monitor every post, and we do not.

Your posts stay yours, but they are public. You keep the rights in what you write. By posting you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, and display your post for the purpose of running and promoting IndieFiction, including on the question page, in topic listings and site search, and in previews shared on social media. Ask pages are public and indexed by search engines, so anything you post can be read by anyone and may appear in search results.

Ask a question while signed out and it shows as Anonymous. Answering requires an account, so your author name and photo appear on your answer. Either way, ask us and we will take your post down.

Answers are the opinions of the people who wrote them, not advice from us. We do not verify, endorse, or fact-check community answers, and we are not responsible for them. Publishing, marketing, tax, and legal decisions are yours to make: treat what you read here as one author's experience, and take your own professional advice where it matters. The same goes for any link, tool, or service another member recommends: we have no relationship with them unless we say so.

Listing a finished book is free and always will be. For individual authors the first paid feature is the Upcoming Release subscription ($4.99 USD per month, plus any tax due where you live, no trial, cancel anytime), which lists a book you have not finished yet: a place in Upcoming, public sample chapters, a reader interest list, and an “Upcoming release” badge. The full offer is on the pricing page.

Payments are processed by Stripe as merchant of record: your purchase is from Stripe, made with a card entered on Stripe's own checkout, and any applicable sales tax or VAT is calculated and collected there, on top of the subscription price. We never see or store your card details. Your card statement will show LINK.COM* INDIEFICTION rather than IndieFiction, because Link is the Stripe service that completes the sale. Card updates, invoices, and receipts live in Stripe's billing portal, linked from your account.

Subscriptions renew automatically each month until you cancel. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for: your book stays up until then, and we do not pro-rate refunds for the remainder of a period unless the law requires it. Resubscribe later and your book, chapters, and badge come back exactly as you left them.

If you are ever charged twice for the same plan, we refund it. Two subscriptions cannot both stand on one account: we cancel the newer one and refund it in full, including any tax, without you having to ask. We email you when this happens. If a refund does not reach you, tell us and we will chase it.

Failed payments. If a renewal fails, nothing is hidden while Stripe retries the card. If the retries run out, the subscription lapses: your work in progress and its chapters are hidden (your finished books and author profile are untouched), and the reader-list retention window described under “The reader interest list” below begins.

Consumer rights. If something goes wrong with a paid plan, Australian consumers are entitled to a repair, replacement, or refund under the Australian Consumer Law, and to compensation for reasonably foreseeable loss. Those rights apply regardless of anything else in these terms. Consumers in the UK or EU normally also have 14 days to change their mind, though that right ends once a service you asked us to start immediately has been fully performed.

Price changes. We may change the price, but never mid-period, and we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before a change affects your renewal, so you can cancel first.

For billing problems, email hello@indiefiction.com. We would rather sort it out than have you dispute it with your bank.

The second paid feature for individual authors is extra book slots. The free plan covers five published books; past that, slots come in bundles of five for $3 USD a month or $30 USD a year, plus any tax due where you live, up to two bundles (fifteen books in all, counting the free five). Bundles are added from your account page. Everything under “The Upcoming Release subscription” above about payment processing, renewal, cancellation, duplicate charges, consumer rights, and price changes applies to slot bundles in the same way, with renewal happening each month or each year depending on the billing period you chose.

If a bundle lapses, whether cancelled or through failed payments, your books all stay up for a further 30 days. If the bundle has not resumed by then, your newest books beyond your remaining slots are hidden, never deleted: they leave the public catalogue but stay in your account exactly as they were, and they return the moment a bundle covers them again. We warn you by email when the 30 days start and tell you by notification if anything is hidden or restored. Books hidden this way are separate from moderation: nothing about your standing changes.

Presses, publications, and other organisations or businesses list their catalogues on the Business plan: $9.99 USD per month, plus any tax due where you are, with the first 15 days free. It covers up to 50 book listings, a public publisher page, and short stories. Everything under “The Upcoming Release subscription” above about payment processing, renewal, cancellation, duplicate charges, consumer rights, and price changes applies to the Business plan and its add-on in the same way.

A business account is its own account type, chosen when the account is created, and it does not convert to or from an author account. The organisation's name, and its website if you add one, appear on your public publisher page. You may also name a contact person, a name and an email address, both optional: we hold them only so a person at your organisation can be reached about the account, we never send marketing to that address, and everything we send goes to the account's login email.

The trial. Your card is taken at checkout and the first charge is at the end of the free period. Cancel before the trial ends and you are not charged. During the trial the plan counts as active, so everything is live. The free period applies to an account's first Business subscription only: if your plan has lapsed and you subscribe again, billing starts straight away.

Business listings are visible while the plan is active and the account is in good standing. This is the honest difference from the free author services: if the plan lapses, or the account is suspended for breaching these terms, your listings, publisher page, stories, and any works in progress are hidden from the public. Nothing is deleted, you can still sign in, and everything returns when the plan restarts or the suspension is lifted. We tell you on your dashboard and by a notification when either happens.

Deleting a business account deletes its listings. Unlike an author account, whose books stay listed, a business account's listings exist while the account does. The deletion screen says this again before anything happens.

Unpaid accounts. A business account whose plan has lapsed or that remains suspended may be deleted after two years, so we are not holding an organisation's data indefinitely with nothing to show for it. The privacy policy carries the same promise.

The works in progress add-on ($4.99 USD per month, plus tax) covers up to 3 works in progress at a time on a business account, on the same terms as the Upcoming Release subscription, including the reader interest list rules below. It needs an active Business plan.

The subscription covers one work in progress at a time (up to 3at a time on the Business plan's add-on): to list another beyond your plan's count, remove one first. A finished book is always submitted free, like any other. A work in progress publishes immediately: nobody reviews it first. You are responsible for your own proofreading, and for the content of every chapter you publish. We moderate reactively: any reader can report a work in progress, and we may hide one, or end a subscription, at our discretion.

Rules for the work itself:

• it must be your own writing, and everything in “What you promise us” applies to it;
• no self-promotion inside the chapter text: no links, mailing-list pitches, or “buy my other book”. A reader who likes the chapter will register interest; that is what the feature is for;
• steamy and other 18+ content is welcome provided you declare it with the explicit-content flag when you set the book up. Readers then see a notice before the chapters. Explicit content that is not declared is grounds for removal;
• no harassment, and nothing unlawful.

Enforcement is proportionate: depending on severity we may warn you, hide the work, cancel the subscription, or remove you from the platform. Where we end a subscription for a breach of these rules, no refund is given. If you are removed from the platform, your published books remain listed without an owner, the same as when an account is deleted, so readers keep what they came for.

A work in progress never converts into a published listing: when the book is finished, delete the work in progress and submit the finished book free, like any other.

Sexual content involving minors is prohibited absolutely. It is removed immediately and permanently, the subscription and account are terminated without warning and without refund, and no tier of enforcement applies. Unlike everything else in these terms, this is not a judgement call and has no second chance. Australian law may also require us to report such material to the authorities, and we will.

Readers can leave their email address on your work in progress so you can tell them when the book is published. You see a running count; the addresses themselves are released to you only when you explicitly download them, and every download is logged.

From the moment you download the list, you are responsible for that data. Those readers gave their address for exactly one thing. As a condition of the subscription, you agree to:

• use the addresses for this book and only this book: the occasional update while you are writing it, and the news when it is out, which is what each reader was told to expect. Not your other titles, and not a general newsletter;
• ask again before you widen it. These readers agreed to hear about one book. To email them about anything else, including your next book, ask them to opt in again in one of these messages, and keep only the ones who do;
• never sell, share, or trade the list, fold it into unrelated marketing, or upload it anywhere it will be merged into another audience;
• identify yourself and include a working unsubscribe link in everything you send, and honour opt-outs immediately. In most countries, including Australia under the Spam Act 2003, that is the law and not merely our rule;
• delete your copy once the book is out and you have told them, or if your subscription ends before that.

If a reader tells us you are spamming them, we may cancel your subscription and remove your account, with no refund. We look into complaints before acting, since one can be a competitor or a forgotten signup, but this is the obligation we enforce most readily: those readers trusted us when they handed over an address.

The list reaches you only when you explicitly download it, and downloading is your acceptance of these obligations. We record the exact wording you accepted at that moment, alongside who downloaded it, which book, how many addresses, and when.

Retention on our side: if your subscription lapses, you have 30 days to download the list (we email you when the window opens). After that we delete our copy, and it cannot be recovered. Copies you downloaded earlier are yours and are unaffected, which is exactly why the obligations above survive the end of your subscription.

Misusing the list is a breach of these terms, handled under the enforcement rules in “Works in progress” above. Readers can report misuse through the contact form.

Please don't:

• upload unlawful, hateful, or sexually exploitative material, or content involving minors;
• submit work you did not write or do not hold the rights to;
• use the site to send spam, or scrape it to build a competing database;
• attempt to break, probe, or gain unauthorised access to the site, other accounts, or our infrastructure;
• post fake reviews or misrepresent who you are.

We may remove content or suspend accounts that break these rules, usually with an explanation and a chance to put it right (immediately where the law or someone's safety requires it).

If you believe something on IndieFiction infringes your copyright, email hello@indiefiction.com with:

• a link to the page in question;
• a description of the work you say has been copied;
• proof you own it, or authority to act for the owner;
• your contact details.

We take these seriously and act quickly, usually removing the material while we investigate. If your listing is removed and you believe that was wrong, write to us and we will review it.

The IndieFiction name, design, and our own writing (guides, editorial descriptions, and site copy) belong to us. You are welcome to link to us and quote us with attribution. Please don't republish our guides wholesale or copy the site's design.

Book pages link to external retailers such as Amazon. Those sites are not ours: their prices, availability, and privacy practices are their own, and we cannot take responsibility for your purchase. We currently earn no commission or affiliate income from these links. If that changes, we will say so plainly on the pages concerned.

Our writing, editing, publishing, and marketing guides are general information, not professional advice. Publishing outcomes depend on far more than any guide can control, and we cannot promise sales, reviews, or income. Please take your own legal, financial, or tax advice where it matters.

We work to keep IndieFiction running, but we cannot guarantee uninterrupted access. The service is provided “as is”. We may change or discontinue features, and if we ever shut the platform down we will give you reasonable notice and time to retrieve anything you have uploaded.

You can remove your books and take down your author profile at any time from your account page, and you can close your account yourself from the same page. We ask you to type the word DELETE and show you exactly what will happen first, because it cannot be undone. Prefer a person to do it? Email us and we will.

Deleting your account removes your profile and the answers you wrote, which also removes them from other people's threads. Questions you asked stay up, shown as Anonymous. Books you listed remain on the site, still credited to your name, but no longer yours to edit. We keep a one-way hash of your email address, never the address itself, so a deletion stays accountable without undoing the erasure it records.

Closing your account cancels any active subscription immediately, so you are not billed again, and deletes the work in progress along with our copy of its reader list. There is no refund for the current month. If you want to keep reading your invoices, do that in the billing portal before you close the account.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms. If we do, we will tell you why unless the law prevents us. Where we close a paid account through no fault of yours, we refund the unused part of your subscription.

Australian Consumer Law comes first. Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts, or modifies those guarantees, and nothing below applies to the extent it would.

Subject to that, we are not liable for lost profits, lost sales, lost data, or other indirect losses arising from your use of the site or from any listing on it. Where we are liable on a paid plan and the law permits us to limit it, our liability is limited to resupplying the service or refunding the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

Content posted by other people. Books, author profiles, and Ask posts are submitted by their authors, not written by us. We host and display that material but do not endorse it or guarantee it is accurate, and, again subject to the Australian Consumer Law, we are not liable for loss arising from something another member posted or recommended.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you posted or submitted (for example, a cover image you did not have the rights to, or an Ask post that infringes someone's rights), you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it. This is why the promises in section 5 matter.

We may update these terms as the platform develops. The date at the top shows the current version. For material changes we will give notice, by email if you have an account. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Victoria, Australia, and disputes will be subject to the jurisdiction of the courts of Victoria, Australia. If you are a consumer elsewhere, including in the UK or EU, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer laws in your own country.