Author submissions
These terms apply when you submit a book promotion, author story, or other author material to Indie Book Stories. They explain what we may publish, what we may review or reject, and how we may contact you about your submission.
Indie Book Stories offers two main author submission routes:
Both routes are reviewed. Submitting a book, promotion, or author story does not guarantee publication, promotion, homepage placement, social sharing, newsletter inclusion, traffic, sales, downloads, reviews, rankings, or any other performance result.
If you submit a time-sensitive book promotion, your book should normally:
A failure to meet these criteria may result in your submission being rejected. We may also reject or remove a submission at our discretion if we believe it is unsuitable for Indie Book Stories or our readers.
Author story submissions are intended to help us understand the human story behind a book: the inspiration, writing journey, themes, emotional intention, worldbuilding, creative choices, and the kind of reading experience the book offers.
If your author story submission is accepted, we may use the information you provide to create, edit, publish, promote, update, or repurpose a public feature about you, your book, or your creative work. This may include website pages, collections, social posts, emails, images, summaries, excerpts, and related editorial material.
We may edit submitted material for clarity, length, tone, accuracy, formatting, search visibility, reader interest, brand fit, or legal and safety reasons. We will not knowingly misrepresent your work, but the final editorial presentation is at our discretion.
You confirm that the material you submit is accurate to the best of your knowledge and that you have the right to provide it to us. This includes text, images, links, book covers, author photos, prompts, descriptions, and any other material supplied through our forms or by email.
You give Indie Book Stories permission to use, edit, publish, display, reproduce, promote, and distribute your submitted material for the purpose of reviewing, presenting, promoting, and discussing your book, author profile, promotion, or story feature.
You retain ownership of your own material. The permission you give us is non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, and may continue for as long as the relevant page, feature, archive, social post, email, or related editorial material remains useful to Indie Book Stories and its readers.
If your submission relates to a discounted or free promotion, your book must be reduced to the agreed price by 6am EST on the first day of your promotion. If it is not, we may choose not to display or share the promotion.
Your book must also be discounted on any other platforms for which you have provided links, such as Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, or other retailers.
It is important that your book remains discounted to the agreed price throughout the full promotion period. Our ability to maintain trust with readers depends on the accuracy of the information we publish.
If you would like to reschedule or amend your promotion details, please let us know via our contact form at least 5 working days prior to your chosen start date. We will do our best to accommodate reasonable requests, but we cannot guarantee that changes will be possible.
Some submissions and services are free. Some optional services may be paid. Paid services are not required for editorial consideration unless clearly stated on the relevant service page.
If your application is for a paid service, we may request payment details at the time you place your order. Where a service requires acceptance before payment is taken, your card will not be charged until your book or service request has been accepted.
Any refund terms shown on the relevant payment, upgrade, or service page will apply to that service. Where a paid promotion slot has already been allocated and the promotion cannot run because the submitted information was inaccurate or the required discount was not available, fees may not be refundable.
When you submit a book promotion, author story, or service request, we may contact you with service-related emails about that submission. These may include confirmation emails, review decisions, approval or rejection notices, publication notices, correction requests, payment or service updates, and other messages needed to process or manage your submission.
These service-related emails are separate from optional author updates or promotional emails.
If you choose to opt in, we may also send you occasional author updates and opportunities. These may include new free features, author story opportunities, optional paid services, promotional tools, editorial opportunities, platform updates, and relevant Indie Book Stories news for authors.
Opting in is optional and is not required for your submission to be reviewed. You can unsubscribe from optional author updates at any time. If you unsubscribe, we may still send service-related emails about active submissions, payments, published pages, account issues, or other necessary administration.
Indie Book Stories does not guarantee book sales, downloads, traffic, rankings, reviews, income, reader response, retailer visibility, newsletter clicks, social engagement, or any specific promotional outcome.
Any examples, editorial placements, homepage appearances, social sharing, collections, emails, or promotional opportunities are offered at our discretion and may change over time.
You are responsible for checking that the information you submit is accurate, lawful, and not misleading. This includes book details, author names, pricing, promotional dates, retailer links, claims, review information, rights permissions, and any statements about your book or background.
If you notice an error in a published page or submitted promotion, please contact us as soon as possible.
We may edit, move, archive, remove, noindex, redirect, or otherwise change pages, features, listings, collections, links, or other published material at our discretion. We may do this for editorial, legal, technical, quality, commercial, SEO, reader-experience, or brand reasons.
If you have questions about these terms, please contact us via our contact form.