Legal

Author Agreement

Takes effect on September 10, 2026

Tellura Author Agreement

Version 1.0 — effective 5 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 gross revenue — not "net," 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, and we tell you before you earn. Payouts run through Stripe, which does not reach every country. Your minimum payout and any corridor fee depend on where you live and are in the Earnings Schedule. If we cannot pay you at all, we say so up front and we do not take a licence to sell your work.

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 the AI co-author. 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 coin balance

Translation is a service we sell you. Before anything runs we quote a price ceiling in coins. If you accept, that amount is debited; when the job settles, anything unused is refunded to your 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 GROSS revenue

You receive a percentage of the gross amount readers pay for your work — coin unlocks and subscriptions — before our costs, and before anything we choose to spend on running the platform.

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 1.1 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	5 coins
more than 6,000 words	7 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 whatever the reader actually paid. 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 actually charged by Stripe on the transaction;
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 where you are paid through Stripe Global Payouts rather than Stripe Connect. This is what Stripe charges to move money into your country. We pass it through at cost and take no margin on it, the exact amount for your country is published in the Earnings Schedule, and you are told it before you publish anything paid. Authors paid through Stripe Connect never see this fee, because it does not exist for them.

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 run on two rails: Stripe Connect where Stripe operates it, and Stripe Global Payouts for a further set of countries. Either way you will need to complete Stripe's onboarding, which includes identity checks. We do not hold your earnings as a balance on our own books beyond the accrual period needed to calculate and release them.

Between them, those two rails do not cover everywhere, and we will not pretend otherwise. Which rail applies to you, your minimum payout, and your corridor fee if you have one are all set out in the Earnings Schedule, and all three depend on where you live.

We tell you before you earn, not after. Before you publish anything paid, we tell you which rail 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.
If neither rail reaches your country, 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.
If a rail stops reaching you after you have earned, your balance is held. It is not forfeited, it does not expire, and we will work with you on another route. Section 6.2's list stays closed throughout: nothing is deducted for the inconvenience.
Earnings for a calendar month are calculated and released in the following month, on the date stated in the Earnings Schedule.
The minimum payout threshold is published in the Earnings Schedule. Balances below it accrue and roll forward — they are never forfeited, never expire, and are paid as soon as the threshold is met or when you close your account.
Currency conversion, where it applies, is done by Stripe 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 after you were paid for it, we offset that amount against your future earnings. We show you every offset, with the transaction it relates to. If the reversal is later resolved in your favour, we restore the earnings.

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), 6.5 and 6.6 (tax and reversals), and 8.

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 19 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

Version 1.0. Changelog at tellura.ink/legal/author-agreement/changelog.