1. Acceptance of these terms
These terms apply when you engage ebookwriting.ai — referred to throughout as the Studio, or simply "we" — to write, edit, format, illustrate, design or publish a book or piece of long-form work on your behalf. They sit alongside the individual proposal we send for your project, and where the two documents speak to the same point, the proposal wins.
You accept these terms by doing any one of the following:
- Booking a discovery call through our website or by email.
- Signing, counter-signing or otherwise approving a written proposal we have sent you.
- Paying a deposit or any other invoice issued by the Studio.
- Sending us a manuscript, brief, outline or source material with the clear intention that we begin work.
If something here does not sit well with you, tell us before you sign. We would rather rewrite a clause than discover halfway through a project that we read the same paragraph differently.
2. What the Studio does — and does not do
We are a small publishing house operating online since 2015. Our work falls into five quiet rooms: writing and ghostwriting, editing, formatting for digital and print, cover design and interior illustration, and long-form copywriting for authors and small publishers. Across these we offer twenty-five named services — each with its own page, its own scope and its own fixed-fee bands.
There are a handful of projects we politely turn down, even when the budget is generous. We do not write:
- Election-year political memoirs, campaign biographies or partisan polemics tied to a live race.
- Content-farm material — books written to game a marketplace algorithm rather than be read.
- Fake reviews, paid endorsements designed to look unpaid, or any book whose business model depends on misleading readers.
- Pure AI-generated books — manuscripts the client wants produced without a human writer on each line.
- Material that promotes hatred, glorifies violence against a protected group, or sexualises minors.
If we cannot take on a project we say so on the first call. We will, where we can, point you toward a studio or a freelancer who may be a better fit.
3. Proposals and pricing
Every engagement begins with a written proposal. We aim to send it within forty-eight working hours of the discovery call — sometimes sooner, occasionally a day longer if your project needs a specialist's input. The proposal sets out the scope, the deliverables, the milestones, the timeline and a single fixed fee for the work as described.
We do not bill by the hour. Fixed-fee pricing means you know the cost before you commit and we know the work before we begin. If, during a project, the scope shifts — a new chapter, a second cover concept, an extra round of illustration revisions — we will quote that change in writing and wait for your approval before starting it. No surprise invoices, no creeping totals at the end.
Quotes are valid for thirty days from the date we send them. After that we may need to re-issue, particularly if our schedule has filled in the meantime.
4. Payment terms
For most projects we use a simple fifty/fifty split — half on signing, half on final delivery. The deposit reserves your slot in our calendar and lets us assign the writer, editor or illustrator who will lead the work. The balance falls due when the final files are ready to hand over.
Larger engagements — anything above roughly fifteen thousand US dollars, or any commission stretching beyond three months — are usually broken into three installments: a third on signing, a third at a named midway milestone, and a third on completion. The exact structure is written into your proposal.
We accept payment by card and bank transfer through Stripe, and by direct wire for clients who prefer it. Default invoicing currency is US dollars; we will quote and bill in GBP, EUR or AED on request. Invoices are due within fourteen days of issue unless your proposal says otherwise. If a payment is more than seven days late we may pause work on un-started milestones until the account is brought current — work already underway is finished and delivered regardless.
5. Project timelines
Each service page gives an illustrative timing band — a children's picture book runs roughly four to six weeks, a full-length non-fiction manuscript ten to sixteen, an EPUB conversion seven to ten working days. These are honest averages, not promises. The contractual milestones for your project — the dates we are accountable to — are the ones written into your proposal.
We commit to those proposal dates. If we are running late, we tell you early, explain why, and propose a revised schedule with no additional fee for the time we have lost. If you are running late — material we have asked for is overdue, a round of feedback has stalled — we hold your slot for up to fourteen days at no cost, after which the pause clause in section 13 applies.
Force majeure events — serious illness, bereavement, infrastructure failure, regional emergencies — pause the clock on both sides without penalty.
6. Revisions and approvals
Every project includes a defined number of revision rounds at each milestone — usually two on a manuscript, three on a cover, two on a formatted file. The exact number, and what counts as a single round, is laid out in your proposal so neither side is guessing.
A revision is a change within the agreed brief — tightening prose, adjusting palette, recutting a layout to a new trim size we discussed at the outset. A new direction is not a revision; it is a new piece of work, and we will quote it before we start. We say this gently because most clients never run into it, but the distinction matters when they do.
At the end of each milestone we ask for a written sign-off — a reply by email is enough. Sign-off closes that stage and releases the next. If you need more time to read before signing off, that is fine; tell us and we will hold.
7. Intellectual property
You retain one hundred per cent of the copyright in every word, illustration, cover and layout we produce for you. On delivery of the final balance, all rights — economic and moral, where moral rights can be assigned — pass to you. Your name is on the cover. The ISBN, the KDP listing, the Apple Books record are registered in your name. We do not take a royalty, a publishing share or a hidden cut of downstream sales.
The one small right we keep for ourselves is the right to write a behind-the-scenes case study about the project — process, choices, the odd anonymised excerpt — for our journal or portfolio. If you would prefer we did not, sign the standard NDA referenced in section 9 and the case-study clause falls away.
Nothing of yours — manuscript, outline, brief, notes, voice memos, source interviews — is ever uploaded to a third-party AI service for the purpose of training a model. We are explicit about this because the question keeps coming up. Your work stays your work.
8. Use of AI in production
We use AI tools in the same way an architect uses CAD or a translator uses a terminology database — as a quiet instrument inside a craft, not a replacement for it. Concretely:
- Research and reference-gathering — fact-finding, source-checking, surfacing prior work in a field.
- Drafting scaffolds — outlines, chapter skeletons, alternative phrasings, prompt explorations on a cover concept.
- Validation passes — consistency checking, continuity sweeps, accessibility checks on formatted files.
Every line of finished prose, every published illustration and every cover that leaves the Studio has been written, drawn or directed by a human on our team. Your manuscript is never used as training data, never fed into a public model with retention enabled, and never stored outside the controlled environments we use for our own work. If you would like the technical detail of how we handle this, ask and we will send the internal note.
9. Confidentiality and non-disclosure
Everything you share with us is confidential by default — your manuscript, your outline, the personal history behind a memoir, the unannounced business behind a non-fiction book. We treat unpublished material the way we would treat our own.
For projects where confidentiality matters in writing — high-profile memoirs, pre-launch books, ghostwritten works whose authorship will not be disclosed — we provide a mutual non-disclosure agreement on request. Sign it before sending sensitive material and the protections begin on the date of signature.
Our confidentiality obligations survive the end of the project indefinitely. They do not cover information that was already public, was already known to us through unrelated work, or that we are required to disclose by a competent court.
10. Warranties
We warrant, in plain terms, that:
- The work we deliver is original to the Studio and to the people we have engaged to produce it.
- It has not been plagiarised, copied without permission, or generated wholesale by an AI tool passed off as human writing.
- It does not, to the best of our reasonable knowledge, infringe a third party's copyright, trademark or other intellectual-property right.
- It has been produced in good faith against the brief written into your proposal.
We do not warrant commercial outcomes — sales, reviews, list placements or awards. Those depend on factors well beyond the manuscript itself, and any studio that promises them is selling you something else.
11. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Studio's total liability under any single project — for any claim, in contract, in tort or otherwise — is capped at the fees you have actually paid to us for that project. We carry no liability for indirect or consequential loss: lost royalties, lost speaking fees, lost reputation, lost time.
This cap does not apply to liability that cannot be excluded by law — including liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for gross negligence or wilful misconduct on our part.
Nothing in these terms limits any rights you have as a consumer under the law of your home country.
12. Termination and refunds
Either side may withdraw from a project at any time, in writing, before the next milestone begins. We would rather have the conversation first — most things that look like reasons to cancel turn out to be reasons to adjust the brief — but the right is yours, unconditionally.
If you withdraw, you keep ownership of all completed and signed-off work to that point. Any unused portion of your deposit, less the value of work already in progress on the current milestone, is refunded within fourteen days. If we withdraw — which has happened twice in eleven years, both for reasons of capacity rather than client behaviour — the same pro-rata refund applies, and we help you transition the work to another studio.
We do not refund completed and accepted milestones. If a delivered piece falls short of the brief, the remedy is correction under section 6, not refund.
13. Cancellations, pauses and rush fees
Projects sometimes need to pause — a life event, a change of plan, a piece of research that turns into a longer trip than expected. The first fourteen days of any pause are free. Beyond that, we hold your slot for up to six weeks at a small monthly retainer (set out in your proposal) that covers the writer or illustrator we have reserved for you.
If a pause exceeds six weeks, the project is treated as suspended. Resuming after suspension may involve a re-onboarding fee — typically five to ten per cent of the remaining balance — to cover the time it takes a writer or designer to step back into your material.
Rush projects — where the agreed timeline is materially shorter than the band on the relevant service page — carry a rush fee of fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the project total, quoted in advance and never applied retroactively.
14. Disputes and governing law
If something goes wrong, we would rather fix it than litigate it. Our first step in any dispute is a conversation — by call or email — with whoever in the Studio is closest to the work. If that does not resolve matters within thirty days, both parties agree to attempt mediation through a mutually agreed mediator before any further step.
Where mediation fails, unresolved disputes are referred to binding arbitration under the rules of a recognised international arbitration body, seated in a neutral jurisdiction agreed between the parties. The language of any arbitration is English.
These terms are governed, by default, by the law of England and Wales. Where local consumer-protection law in your home country offers you stronger rights, those rights apply in addition.
15. Changes to these terms
We review these terms once a year and update them when the law shifts, when a clause has caused confusion, or when our own practice has moved on. Material changes — anything affecting payment, intellectual property, liability or termination — are notified to active clients by email at least thirty days before they take effect.
For prospective clients, the version of these terms in force is the one published on this page on the date you sign your proposal. We keep an archive of prior versions and will send any of them on request.
Non-material changes — typographical fixes, clearer phrasing, a reorganised section — are made quietly and noted in the changelog at the bottom of this page.
16. Contact
For any question about these terms — a clause that needs explaining, an NDA you would like to see, a particular point you would like negotiated before you sign — write to contact@ebookwriting.ai. We answer Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 18:00 UTC, usually within one working day.
For practical matters: the Studio operates remotely, with team members across several time zones. We do not maintain a public office address; correspondence is by email, and scheduled calls happen by video. If you need a postal address for an invoice or a legal notice, ask and we will provide one for the relevant entity at the time.