Legal

Author Agreement

Last updated: September 25, 2026

Tellura Author Agreement

Version 1.5 — effective 25 September 2026

This Agreement is between Septem Montes, Inc., a Delaware corporation with its business address at 1111B S Governors Ave, Suite 43135, Dover, DE 19904, United States, trading as Tellura ("Tellura", "we", "us"), and you, the author.

It applies when you publish a work on Tellura. It sits alongside the Terms of Service; where the two conflict about your work, this Agreement wins.

1. The short version

We think you should be able to understand a publishing contract without a lawyer, so here is the whole deal in ten lines. Everything below is the detail, and nothing below contradicts this.

You own your work. We never own it, and we never take a share of your copyright.
This is not exclusive. Publish the same work anywhere else, at the same time, without asking us.
You can leave whenever you want. You do not need our permission, a reason, or a notice period before you may publish elsewhere.
We take no film, TV, game, audio, print or merchandising rights. No right of first refusal, no right to match, no option.
You get a share of the revenue your work earns — not after unspecified deductions. Section 6 lists every deduction, and the list is closed.
We will not cut your share without 30 days' notice, and if we do, you can take your work and go immediately.
Translations belong to you, because you pay for them.
We do not train AI models on your writing and will not without asking you separately.
You may say whatever you like about us, publicly. There is no gag clause in this agreement, and there never will be.
We cannot pay everywhere, we tell you before you earn, and right now payouts are paused. We are changing the route by which earnings reach authors, so no payout is being sent today. We intend the pause to end and we will not name a date we cannot keep; however long it lasts it takes nothing away from you. Your earnings accrue, are never forfeited and never expire, and while it lasts we are not opening new paid publishing. Separately and permanently, there are countries we cannot reach at all; your minimum payout and any corridor fee depend on where you live and are shown on your payout settings page. If your country is one we cannot reach, we say so before you earn and we do not take a licence to sell your work. The pause is not that: it does not release the licence for anyone.

2. What you are giving us permission to do

2.1 The licence

You grant Tellura a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, revocable licence to host, store, reproduce, display, transmit, and communicate your work to the public, solely for the purpose of operating and promoting the Tellura Services.

That is the whole grant. In particular:

it is limited to the Services. It does not extend to our "business" generally, and we may not use your work outside the Services;
it is revocable. Section 5 tells you how, and there is nothing you need our agreement for;
we may not sublicense it to any third party, except to the technical providers who host, deliver or translate the work at our instruction, and only so that they can do that;
it does not let us sell, option or license your work to anyone for any purpose.

2.2 What we may change

We may make formatting and technical changes needed to display and deliver your work: reflowing text, generating covers and thumbnails at different sizes, producing reading formats, indexing for search.

We do not edit your prose. If we ever want to propose a substantive editorial change, we will ask you, and you may say no with no consequence.

2.3 Promotion

We may use your title, cover, author name, and short extracts to promote the work and the Services — in the catalogue, in recommendations, on our own social accounts, and in editorial features.

We will never open, operate, or post from an account in your name, and we will not present anything as written by you that you did not write.

2.4 Rights we are not taking

For the avoidance of any doubt, this Agreement grants us no rights in:

print, audio, film, television, streaming, stage, game or merchandising adaptations;
sequels, prequels, spin-offs, other works set in the same world, or any future work of yours;
translations, except as set out in Section 4;
your name, likeness or persona, beyond the promotion described in 2.3.

We have no right of first refusal, no right to match, and no option over any of it. If someone offers to adapt your work, that is entirely your business and you do not have to tell us.

2.5 AI training

We do not use your work to train generative AI models, and we will not license or sell it to anyone else for that purpose.

If we ever want to, we will ask you as a separate, specific question, you will be free to refuse, and refusing will cost you nothing — not your placement, not your revenue share, not your standing on the platform. We will not bundle that request into an update to this Agreement, and we will not treat silence as agreement.

This does not stop us sending your text to a third-party AI provider to carry out a task you asked for, which today means translation (Section 4) and search indexing. Those providers are named in the Privacy Policy.

3. What you promise us

You confirm that:

the work is yours, and you wrote it;
you have the right to publish it on Tellura, and doing so breaches no other agreement you have signed;
it does not infringe anyone's copyright, trade marks, privacy or publicity rights, and is not defamatory;
it is not plagiarised, and the prose is not machine-generated and passed off as your writing;
you will tag it accurately, including maturity and content warnings.

If a claim is brought against us because one of these was untrue, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and reasonable legal costs — but only to the extent the claim results from your breach, only where you acted deliberately or negligently, and never for anything we caused. We will tell you about any such claim promptly and will not settle it in a way that binds you without asking you first.

4. Translations

4.1 You decide, work by work and language by language

Tellura can machine-translate your work. Nothing is translated unless you choose it, for that specific work and that specific language. There is no default setting, no bulk toggle, and no automatic translation of works whose authors have not asked for it.

4.2 You pay for it, from your Studio Credits balance

Translation is a service we sell you. Before anything runs we quote a price ceiling in Studio Credits. If you accept, that amount is debited; when the job settles, anything unused is refunded to your Studio Credits balance. You are never charged more than the quoted ceiling.

If you are a consumer where you live, you may have a statutory right to cancel this purchase. That right is not affected by this Agreement, and we will tell you about it at the point of purchase.

4.3 The translation is yours

Because you commissioned and paid for it, the translated text is yours. You may download it, use it anywhere, and publish it on any other platform.

We should be straight with you about the legal position, because it is unusual and it is in your favour to understand it. An unedited machine translation probably has no copyright at all in the United States, because there is no human author — the Copyright Office has said so and the Supreme Court declined to revisit it in March 2026. So "ownership" of the raw output may be an empty idea. What is not empty is this: a translation is a derivative of your work, so your copyright controls whether it may exist or be distributed at all, whoever produced it. That is why we need your permission, and why the permission ends when you say it does.

4.4 The permission you give us for translations

You grant us the same licence as in Section 2.1 over each translation you commission — non-exclusive, revocable, limited to operating and promoting the Services — for the languages you selected, for as long as the work is on Tellura, and no longer.

We list the languages on each translation order, and that list is the limit of what you have granted. We take nothing for languages you did not choose.

4.5 Labelling, correction and takedown

Every machine-translated page is labelled as machine-translated, visibly, to readers.

At any time you may: have a translation taken down without taking down the original; correct it; or replace it with a human-edited version, which we will publish in place of the machine output.

4.6 When you leave

Translations come down when the work does (Section 5). We will not keep distributing a translation of a work you have withdrawn — we could not lawfully do so, and we would not want to.

5. Leaving

5.1 You may leave at any time

You do not need our permission and you do not have to give a reason.

Nothing in this Agreement restricts where else you publish, at any time, with or without notice to us. There is no exclusivity, no consent requirement, and no waiting period before you may publish the same work elsewhere.

5.2 What happens when you ask us to remove a work

On your request:

immediately: the work is removed from the catalogue, search, recommendations and all discovery surfaces, and subscriptions to it stop renewing;
within 30 days: the work and its translations are removed from the Service.

The 30 days exist for one reason, and it is not to keep you: readers who have already paid to unlock chapters need a window to read what they bought, and subscribers need their current period to end cleanly. If you want it gone faster, tell us and we will do it — we will refund affected readers rather than hold your work.

5.3 What survives removal, and nothing else does

After removal we retain only:

backup copies, until they are overwritten in the ordinary cycle;
access for readers who already paid for specific chapters, as described in the Terms of Service;
transaction and tax records we are required by law to keep;
reviews, ratings, comments and reading statistics written by other users about the work. Those are their words, not yours, and they stay — but they are detached from the work and we will not use them to promote Tellura after you have gone.

We keep no other rights of any kind.

5.4 If we remove your work

We may remove a work if it breaches the Terms of Service, this Agreement, or the law, or if we are required to. We will tell you why, and you can challenge it under the Terms of Service. Except where the law requires immediate action, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem.

5.5 We will not continue your story

If you stop updating a work, nothing happens. We will not commission anyone to continue it, will not reassign it, and will not claim it. It stays yours, whether you finish it or not. If your account becomes inactive we may delist an unfinished work from active discovery surfaces, but it remains yours and we will restore it on request.

6. Money

6.1 Your share is a share of the revenue from your work

You receive a percentage of the revenue your work earns — from coin unlocks and subscriptions — after the deductions in section 6.2, and nothing else. The five items in 6.2 are the only things taken out before your share is worked out, and that list is closed.

Your percentage is set out in the Author Earnings Schedule, which forms part of this Agreement and is published, versioned and dated. It starts at 60% and rises with output; the current tiers, thresholds and rates are in the Schedule.

We set the price, not you — and you should know that before you publish. The coin price of a chapter is calculated by us from its word count, on a published scale. You decide whether a chapter is free or paid; you do not choose the number of coins, and there is no field anywhere that lets you.

As at version 1.5 of this Agreement the scale is:

Chapter length	Price to the reader
up to 1,000 words	1 coin
1,001 to 2,500 words	2 coins
2,501 to 4,000 words	3 coins
4,001 to 6,000 words	4 coins
more than 6,000 words	6 coins

We can change that scale, and a change to it changes what readers pay and therefore what you earn. So we treat a change that lowers what a reader pays for your work the same way section 6.7 treats a cut to your share: at least 30 days' notice, by email and in your dashboard, and you may withdraw your works immediately during that period with no penalty.

Your percentage applies to the revenue remaining after those deductions. Nothing in this section lets us take more than the Earnings Schedule says.

6.2 The only deductions — this list is closed

We deduct from gross only:

payment-processor fees charged by Stripe on the transaction. Under Managed Payments Stripe is the merchant of record and bills its fee as a daily total across that day's transactions rather than one fee per transaction, so we apply the published rates to each transaction and reconcile the difference daily;
transaction taxes (VAT, GST, sales tax) we are legally required to collect and remit — this is never our money;
refunds and chargebacks on that reader's purchase, under Section 6.6;
withholding tax we are legally required to deduct and remit, under Section 6.5;
the payout corridor fee, and only on a payout actually sent to you, and only where we have told you the amount before you publish anything paid. This is what the payout processor charges to move money into your country, not a platform fee. We pass it through at cost and take no margin on it, the exact amount for your country is shown on your payout settings page, and you are told it before you publish anything paid. No corridor fee is ever charged while no payout is sent, and where no corridor fee applies to your country nothing is charged under this item.

There is nothing else. No marketing recoupment, no "operating costs", no platform fee beyond our stated share, no unspecified deductions. If it is not on this list, it does not come out of your money.

6.3 Payouts

Payouts are paused. We are changing the route by which earnings reach authors, and until that work is finished there is no live payout route at all: no author can be paid, in any country, whatever their balance. We are not going to describe payouts as though money is moving when it is not.

The pause takes nothing away from you. Everything you earn is recorded as a debt we owe you. It is never forfeited and never expires. Section 6.2's list stays closed throughout: nothing is deducted for the pause, no holding charge and no administration fee. What you are owed is not a wallet: it is not a stored balance you can spend, transfer or send to anyone, and we are not holding money on your behalf as an intermediary. We are your debtor, and the debt is discharged by paying you.

While payouts are paused we are not opening new paid publishing. We are not going to open a way to earn money we currently have no way to send. Everything already earned keeps accruing.

We are not naming a date. We would rather say we do not know than give you one and miss it. When the route changes, the Earnings Schedule is republished, and you are notified.

When payouts resume, the route or routes available to you, your minimum payout, and your corridor fee if you have one are all shown on your payout settings page, and we tell you all three before you publish anything paid. No route reaches everywhere. You will need to complete the processor's onboarding, which includes identity checks.

We tell you before you earn, not after. Before you publish anything paid, we tell you whether we can pay you at all, which route applies to you, what your minimum payout is, and what the corridor fee is. You will not discover that a payout costs $25 after the money is already sitting there. This promise does not depend on a route being live today.
If your country is one no route reaches, we say so and we do not take a licence to sell your work. You are welcome to publish for free. What we will not do is sell your chapters while telling you we can pay you when we cannot. This is about your country, not about the pause: the pause is temporary, applies to everyone, and does not release our licence over anyone's work.
If your route stops reaching you after you have earned, what you are owed is not forfeited and does not expire, and we will find another way to pay you. Section 6.2's list stays closed throughout: nothing is deducted for the inconvenience.
Earnings for a calendar month are finalised in the following month, on the date stated in the Earnings Schedule. Finalising is the calculation; releasing the money is the part that is paused.
The minimum payout threshold is shown on your payout settings page. Balances below it accrue and roll forward — they are never forfeited and never expire — and are paid as soon as the threshold is met.
Closing your account does not forfeit what you are owed. The debt survives closure and the threshold does not apply to it: we pay it in full. If no payout route is open when you close, we settle it another way — tell us where to send it and we will. We will not use your own account closure, or a pause of our own making, as a reason not to pay you.
Currency conversion, where it applies, is done by the processor at its rates, which we do not set and do not take a margin on.

6.4 What you can see

You get a dashboard showing, per work and per language: reads, unlocks, subscriptions, gross revenue, each deduction itemised, and your net.

At least once a year we will give you a statement covering all modes of exploitation and all revenues worldwide relating to your work, including anything received by anyone we have sublicensed to under 2.1. If you think your share has become disproportionately low compared with the revenue your work generates, you may ask us to revisit it, and we will engage with that request in good faith.

6.5 Tax

Percentages in the Earnings Schedule are before tax withholding. Where the law requires us to withhold, we withhold from your payment and remit it.
Valid tax documentation is a condition of payment. Without a current W-8BEN (or W-9 if you are a US person) we must withhold at the statutory default rate, or hold the payment.
Treaty benefits are yours to claim, and require valid documentation on file before the payment date. We cannot apply a treaty rate retroactively; a late claim goes to the tax authority through your own return.
Only the portion of your earnings attributable to readers in the United States is US-source. We apply a consistent method to work that out and will explain it on request.
You are an independent licensor, not an employee, and you are responsible for your own taxes where you live.

6.6 Refunds and chargebacks

If a reader's purchase is refunded or charged back, we reverse your share of that purchase. Where you have not been paid for it yet, we deduct it from the earnings it was counted in; where you have already been paid, we record it as an offset against your future earnings. We show you every reversal, with the transaction it relates to, on whichever of those two paths it was taken.

If the reversal is later resolved in your favour, we restore the earnings. Where the original period has already been paid, the restored amount is credited to your current period rather than reopening a closed one, so it reaches you in that month's statement.

Apart from your share of the reversed purchase, and any processor fee under 6.2 item 1 that the processor actually charges us on the reversal itself, a refund takes nothing else from you.

6.7 If we change your share

We may change the Earnings Schedule. If a change reduces your share:

we give you at least 30 days' notice, by email and in your dashboard;
during that period you may withdraw any or all of your works immediately, without waiting out the removal window in Section 5.2 and with no penalty;
it never applies retroactively. Everything you earned before it takes effect is calculated at the old rate, including money not yet paid out.

Increases take effect as soon as we say they do.

7. You may talk about us

There is no confidentiality obligation on you in this Agreement, and no non-disparagement clause.

You may publish your earnings, publish this Agreement, discuss your experience publicly, complain about us by name, warn other authors, and organise with them. We will not retaliate against your account, your placement, or your revenue for anything you say about us.

We ask one thing, which is not a legal obligation: if something is wrong, tell us first, so we get a chance to fix it.

8. Your moral rights

We recognise that in many countries — including France, Germany and Turkey — authors hold moral rights of attribution and integrity that cannot be sold, waived, or signed away, whatever a contract says.

This Agreement does not ask you to waive them, and we would not ask. You will always be credited as the author. If you believe something we have done to your work — a translation, a formatting change, the way it is presented — damages the integrity of the work or your reputation, tell us and we will fix or remove it.

9. Changes to this Agreement

This is a versioned document with a public changelog. We do not edit it silently.

For material changes we give at least 30 days' notice, tell you plainly what changed, and ask you to accept the new version. Continuing to publish is not acceptance. If you do not accept, your existing works stay published on the version you agreed to while you decide, and you may withdraw them at any time under Section 5.

Changes never apply retroactively to earnings already accrued or to translations already commissioned.

10. Term, and the rest

Term. This Agreement runs while you have a work on Tellura, and ends when your last work is removed — except for Sections 3 (your promises, as to claims already arising), 5.3 (what survives), 6.2 (the closed list of deductions), 6.3 (what we owe you and how it is paid), 6.5 and 6.6 (tax and reversals), and 8.

6.2 survives for as long as anything that deducts under it survives. Where 6.5 and 6.6 outlive this Agreement, so does the list that limits them and the sentence that closes it. Nothing may be taken from a balance after termination that could not have been taken before it.

Removing your work never cancels a debt, and never strands it. Section 6.3 survives the end of this Agreement precisely so that earnings you have not been paid yet remain owed, and remain payable, after your last work comes down. You do not have to keep a work published in order to be paid for one. When this Agreement ends the minimum payout threshold stops applying to you: you cannot earn any more, so a balance below it could never grow to meet it, and we are not going to hold your money against a target you have no way to reach. Tell us where to send it and we pay it in full.

Governing law. Delaware law governs this Agreement. If you live outside the United States, this does not deprive you of the mandatory protections of the law where you live, including author-protection rules that apply regardless of choice of law — and we will not argue otherwise. If you are in the EU, that expressly includes your rights to transparency, contract adjustment and dispute resolution under Articles 19 to 21 of Directive (EU) 2019/790, which we do not seek to exclude and could not.

Disputes. Section 16 of the Terms of Service applies, including the carve-out for consumers outside the United States and the arbitration opt-out.

Assignment. You may not transfer this Agreement without our consent, which we will not unreasonably withhold. We may transfer it to a company acquiring our business, provided your rights are not reduced; we will tell you before that happens, and you may withdraw your works immediately if you object.

If Tellura shuts down. We will give you at least 90 days' notice, let you export your works, translations and earnings data, and pay out accrued earnings regardless of the minimum threshold. Your licence to us ends on closure. We will not sell your work as part of any wind-down.

Severability. If a provision is unenforceable it is narrowed to the minimum extent needed, or removed, and the rest stands.

Language. English governs, except where the law where you live requires otherwise.

11. Contact

Authors: authors@tellura.ink · Legal: legal@tellura.ink Septem Montes, Inc., 1111B S Governors Ave, Suite 43135, Dover, DE 19904, USA

12. Version history

Version	Effective	What changed
1.5	25 September 2026	Chapter scale. A 4,001 to 6,000-word chapter now costs 4 coins (was 5), and a chapter over 6,000 words costs 6 coins (was 7); shorter chapters are unchanged. This lowers what readers pay for long chapters and the coins those chapters spend. Your share, the 60/65/70 tiers, the chapter and word thresholds, withholding and every payout term are unchanged. No paid chapter has ever been unlocked and no author has accrued earnings, so no author's balance moves.
1.4	24 September 2026	Revenue wording and Studio Credits. Your share is now stated as a share of the revenue remaining after section 6.2's five deductions, rather than as a share of "gross" revenue before our costs; that is what the code has always done and what 6.2's closed list already said, and no money moves. Machine translation is now described as paid with Studio Credits rather than Coins, matching what the product charges. No share, tier, threshold, withholding or payout term changes.
1.3	21 September 2026	Where the payout figures are published. The Earnings Schedule no longer prints the per-country minimum payout and corridor fee, because those figures belong to our payment partner and change when the partner's do, and a contract that restates them is wrong the day they change. The corridor fee is now authorised by being disclosed to you before you publish anything paid and shown on your payout settings page, rather than by being printed in the Schedule. Nothing else changes: your share, the tiers, the thresholds and the withholding are untouched, the fee is still passed through at cost with no margin, still charged only on a payout actually sent to you, and the payout pause is unchanged.
1.2	25 September 2026	Payouts. Removes Stripe Connect, which is no longer a payout route, and says plainly that payouts are paused while the route is changed and that new paid publishing is not being opened during the pause. Your share does not change, and the deduction list in 6.2 is still closed with the same five items — item 5 is now limited to a payout actually sent to you, so no corridor fee can be charged while nothing is being sent. In your favour: 6.2 and 6.3 now survive the end of this Agreement, so removing your work neither cancels a debt nor lifts the cap on what may be taken from it; the minimum payout threshold stops applying once you can no longer earn, whether you close your account or simply take your last work down; and if no route is open we settle what you are owed another way. Against you, and you should read these twice: 6.6 now expressly reaches refunds on earnings you have not been paid yet, which 1.1 did not clearly authorise; 1.1 said earnings were "calculated and released" each month and this version says "finalised", because releasing is what has stopped, so the only dated release promise in the contract is gone for the duration of the pause; and the pause does not release our licence to keep selling chapters you have already published. Also deletes a sentence saying we do not hold your earnings as a balance, which stopped being true when payouts paused, and replaces it with what is actually true: we owe you a debt, and it is not a wallet. Corrects the version line, which 1.0 and 1.1 both printed as "Version 1.0 — effective 5 September 2026" even after 1.0 was withdrawn, corrects a reference to a Terms section that does not exist, and adds this version history.
1.1	10 September 2026	Stated what 1.0 left unsaid: Tellura sets the coin price of a chapter from its word count, on the scale printed in section 6.1.
1.0	Withdrawn	Never took effect.

Version 1.5. Changelog at tellura.ink/legal/author-agreement/changelog.