Your writing

It stays yours. This page says exactly what you keep, what you give us permission to do, and what you get if the story you wrote in becomes a book.

You keep the copyright

You keep the copyright in every word you write here. That does not change when you enter a round, when you win one, or when the story is printed.

When you enter a round you give us — Novara Solutions, who run Crowd Forge — a permanent, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to publish that writing in editions of the story it was written for — the site, the printed book, and any later edition of that same story. Nothing else. Non-exclusive is the important word: you can still publish or post your own words anywhere else you like, at the same time, without asking us.

Your name on it

Every chapter is credited to the handle that wrote it, on the site and in the printed book. The credit does not expire and is not for sale.

If it becomes a book

When a story finishes, it is printed as a real book with everyone who wrote a chapter credited in it.

If you wrote a chapter in it, you get a substantial discount on copies you buy directly from us. That discount cannot follow the book into a shop: shops and Amazon have no way to apply it, so a copy bought there is the full price. Buy it from us and the discount is yours.

There is no royalty. Nobody is paid for a chapter, and no share of a sale comes back to the people who wrote it. We would rather say that here, before you write, than leave you to find it out later.

Fan fiction

Fan fiction is welcome here and always has a home. It just cannot be printed: a story set in somebody else's world is not ours to sell. Those stories are run as their own kind, labelled from the day they open, so nobody writes seventeen chapters expecting a book at the end of it.

Changing your mind

You can edit your passage until submissions close and withdraw it until voting opens, and a withdrawn passage is out of the round entirely.

A chapter that is already part of a story stays in it, and stays credited to the handle that wrote it. That is not us keeping something of yours: other people wrote the next chapters around it, and pulling it out later would take their work apart too. So the moment to change your mind is before voting opens.

Leaving altogether

You can have your account removed whenever you want. We are building the button; until it is there, write to hello@novarasolutions.com.au from the address you signed in with and we will do it. What goes and what stays is set out on what we hold about you.