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.

Keep your details accurate and your password 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.

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.

This licence exists only so the platform can function; it lets us create a thumbnail of your cover, not publish your novel. It is non-exclusive, so you remain completely free to list the same book anywhere else.

The licence ends when you remove the work. Delete a book or your profile and we stop displaying 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.

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.

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.

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. To close your account entirely, email us and we will delete it.

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, IndieFiction is provided free of charge, and 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.

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.