Terms of use

These terms are between you and the operator of Inklings. Using Inklings — creating an account, putting a book on your shelf, sending pages to anyone — means you accept them. If you don’t, the site is not for you, and nothing about that is a problem.

They sit alongside the privacy policy, which covers what we hold and what we do with it. Where the two overlap, neither one is meant to surprise you.

You need to be at least 18 to hold an account, and the details on it need to be genuinely yours. One person, one account. Sign-in is handled by Clerk, and keeping those credentials to yourself is your side of it.

The age is checked rather than assumed: we ask for your date of birth once, before you can do anything else, and an account that doesn’t clear 18isn’t opened. We don’t keep the date of birth of anyone we turn away.

You can close your account at any time from Settings. It takes effect immediately and the erasure follows 30 days later — clause 7 of the privacy policy explains why there is a gap and how to shorten it.

Nothing you upload becomes ours. Not the manuscript, not the pitch, not the critique you write on somebody else’s chapter. You hold the copyright in everything you write, exactly as you did before you signed up, and posting it here is not publication.

What you give us is a narrow, practical permission — a licence to store your work, to show it to the specific people you send it to, and to display the parts you have chosen to make public, such as your pitch and sample scene. It exists so the site can function and it goes no further than that. It is non-exclusive, it earns us nothing, and it ends when you delete the work or your account.

This is the part to read slowly, because it is the one with consequences for you personally. Every time you upload a draft, a snippet, a sample scene or a comp title, you are telling us — and, in a real sense, telling the partner who is about to spend hours reading it — that you have the right to.

Specifically, you confirm that:

• The work is your own original writing, or you hold every right needed to upload it and to let someone else read and critique it.
• It is not copied from, or substantially derived from, anyone else’s copyrighted work. Being inspired by a book is not the same thing as reproducing one.
• You have not signed it away. If a publisher, agent, collaborator, co-author, ghostwriting client or employer holds rights in it — including exclusivity that a private swap would breach — it does not belong here until that is resolved.
• It is not fan fiction or licensed-universe writing that you lack permission to circulate, and sharing it does not break an agreement you are already in.
• It does not defame a real person, breach someone’s confidence or privacy, or infringe a trade mark.

We do not vet manuscripts for any of this, and we could not — we have no way to know what you have signed elsewhere. So the assurance has to be yours, and if it turns out to be wrong, the consequences are yours too: you are responsible for any claim that follows from work you uploaded without the right to. We will remove infringing work on credible notice and close accounts that make a habit of it.

A critique is writing too, so the same rule applies: the person who wrote the notes owns the notes. When someone critiques your chapter, they keep the copyright in what they wrote and you get to use it — that is the whole point of asking. Act on it, ignore it, quote it in your acknowledgements. What you shouldn’t do is republish someone’s critique publicly, or with their name on it, without asking them first.

Ideas are not covered by any of this, by us or by copyright law. If a partner suggests your second act needs a betrayal and you write one, you owe them nothing but thanks. Co-authorship is something people agree to deliberately; it does not happen by accident in a comment thread.

Pages sent to you are sent in confidence. Treat an unpublished manuscript the way you would want yours treated: read it, critique it, and stop there.

• Don’t forward it, post it, or show it to anyone else — including in a group chat, a writing class, or a screenshot.
• Don’t feed it to an AI tool. Pasting a partner’s chapter into a chatbot to generate feedback hands their unpublished novel to a third party they never agreed to, and it is a breach of these terms whether or not that tool trains on it.
• Don’t reuse their ideas, characters or prose in your own work.
• Don’t keep it after the swap ends. Authors can revoke access when a friendship closes, and copies you made locally should go the same way.

The gates on this site exist so nobody has to critique something they didn’t agree to read. Respect them. Content warnings, spice levels, hard-no tropes and AI declarations are honest disclosures, and mislabelling a manuscript to slip past someone’s limits is the one thing here that is hard to undo.

Beyond that: no harassment, no hate, no spam, no soliciting, no scraping, no attempts to reach data or accounts that aren’t yours. Be blunt about the writing if that’s the tone your partner asked for. Don’t be cruel to the writer.

Reports go to a human, who reads them and tells the reporter what they did. We can hide a review, end a friendship, suspend an account or remove one altogether. For anything short of the serious end, we’ll say what the problem was first.

Every book on the site carries a declared level of AI involvement, from none to substantially drafted, and every reader sets the most they will take on. It is a disclosure, not a judgement — nothing on that scale is banned. The only rule is that the declaration is honest, because a partner’s time is spent differently on prose a person wrote, and they are entitled to decide that up front rather than discover it at chapter three.

Understating it to reach readers who opted out is a straightforward breach of these terms.

Inklings is provided as it is. We don’t guarantee it will be available, that you will be matched with anyone, that a partner will finish your book, or that the critique you get will be any good. Matching is a set of filters and a score, not a judgement about your writing.

We are not a party to what happens between you and a partner, and we don’t mediate creative disputes. Keep your own backups of your work — this is a place to swap drafts, not the place to store the only copy.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost work or lost opportunities, or for what another member does with something you sent them. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited.

An account is free, and the free account is not a trial. Writing, drafting, versioning, reading what someone sends you, and writing critique on it are not limited and will not become limited — putting a meter on critique would penalise the writer waiting for it, who is not the one being charged. What a subscription buys is reach: how many of your books are open to matching at once, how many inklings you can spend in a day, whether you can see who has already said yes, and whether you can take back a swipe. The current figures are on the subscriptions page.

Payment is handled by our payment processors, not by us — we never see or store your card details. Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled. Cancelling stops the next renewal and leaves the subscription running until the period you have already paid for ends.

If we ever change what a subscription includes in a way that takes something away, that is a material change and clause 11 applies to it.

We may update these terms. For minor edits the date at the foot of the page changes. For anything that materially affects your rights we will tell you before it takes effect, and continuing to use the site after that is how you accept it. The commitment in clause 3 — that your work is never training data and never sold — is the exception: we will not change it by notice. It would take your explicit consent.

You can leave whenever you like. We can close an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms. Clauses 3, 4, 5 and 9 survive the ending.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, and a dispute that cannot be settled between us goes to the state and federal courts located in Monroe County, New York. Inklings is operated from there, which is the only reason it is named: a jurisdiction picked for our convenience rather than our address would be a decision about your rights made for ours.

If you live outside the United States, this does not take away protections you have at home. Consumer law in the UK, the EU and many other places applies to you wherever we are based and whatever this clause says, and nothing here is meant to argue otherwise.

If something in here reads as unfair or unclear, say so to privacy@inklings.example. These pages have been rewritten on that basis before.