Terms of service
The aim of this document is that you can read it and see exactly what is being claimed — and, more importantly, what is not. Nothing here is dressed up.
They are between you and Zedara LLC, the company that operates Shadow Writer AI.
Send legal notices tohello@shadowwriter-ai.com. A registered street address is not published yet. Until it is, notices go by email.
You must be 18 or older to create an account. The service can write a children’s book as output. It does not offer accounts for children.
You describe a book. The service plans it, writes it chapter by chapter, generates a cover, checks it, and — on a paid plan — produces files you can download. You can read every chapter in the browser as it is written, rewrite any sentence yourself, and send a whole chapter back to be written again.
What generates today is an English narrative novel or novella. Other families you may see on pricing or in the upgrade funnel — poetry, business and ideas, picture books — are shown so you can see what the product is built to write. They are not generators yet. Cookbooks are not offered and are not coming soon.
Two things follow from how it is built, and both are stated here because they change what you should expect:
The free tier is one book, ever. Not one a month. There is no credit balance on the free side and no way to earn a second free book.
You must verify your email address before the service will generate anything. Because the free tier is one book per person rather than per month, opening extra accounts to get extra free books is the abuse this rule exists to prevent.
Credits are the product. A credit is the unit of writing. Books are paid for in credits, not in seats and not per word. Credits cost$0.20 per 1,000, in whatever amount you want to buy.
A subscription is an optional discount lane, not a requirement.You can buy credits on their own and never hold a plan. If you do hold one, Author is $9 a month for 60,000 credits and Studio is $19 a month for 140,000 credits — the same credits bought outright would be $12 and $28. The plan is the discount.
You are shown the price of an action before you take it, on the button that takes it. A book that stops part-way is not charged for.
Cancelling stops the monthly top-up. Books you have already written stay in your library, your account stays open, and files you have already downloaded are yours — cancelling does not reach onto your hard drive and does not un-publish anything you have already put on a store. Once the remaining balance runs down you cannot start another book, export a new file or re-render a cover until you buy credits again or resubscribe.
Credits do not expire while your account is active.We do not say they never expire. After an account is closed, unused credits follow unclaimed-property rules in the customer’s last known state.
Digital goods are generally not refundable once generation has started. Unused prepaid credits can be refunded within 14 days if they are unused. If you cancel a subscription mid-period, any refund is for unused time only. Write tohello@shadowwriter-ai.com.
Soft launch is United States first. We do not take paid traffic from the EU or the UK until tax tooling is live and the displayed price is the price paid. In the US we register where we have nexus.
This is the section most likely to be oversold by products like this one, so read it carefully. We do not tell you that you own the copyright in your book, because for the machine-written parts there is probably no copyright for anyone to own.
Your own contribution. The premise you wrote, the intake answers you gave, the outline and reference images you approved, the choices you made when the book asked you a question mid-draft, and the sentences you rewrote by hand. Those are human creative decisions, and they are the part of the book that copyright can attach to.
Because that is where the protectable material lives, the service records every human decision as it happens — each edit you make, each approval you give, each prompt you rewrite, each reference sheet you accept or change. This record cannot be reconstructed after the fact, which is precisely why it is captured live rather than assembled later.
The book shows you your edit share as a percentage — how much of it you touched by hand. That figure is a description of the record, not a legal conclusion. It does not certify that any particular percentage makes a book protectable, and no threshold in it is a promise.
We keep the authorship record for the life of the account and for the same window after erasure as the credit ledger (seven years). We will export it on request. We do not warrant that it will satisfy a copyright office or a court.
A paid plan gives you a licence to publish and sell what you made, including commercially. That is a permission from us. It is not a transfer of copyright, because we cannot transfer something that may not exist. If the commercial future of a specific book matters to you, take it to a lawyer about that book rather than relying on this page.
If someone claims your book infringes their rights, we do not defend you and we do not pay. This is stated plainly because the alternative would be misleading: the model providers' own IP indemnities do not reach us, since our access runs through an aggregator whose terms run the other way, and a direct enterprise agreement of the kind that carries real indemnity is not available at our scale. Any promise of "indemnified output" here would be a promise we could not keep.
What we do instead is screen at intake and check the output. That is not a guarantee, and it is not insurance. We do not claim that commercial rights rest on insurance, and we do not say a policy is bound.
Everything you type is screened before it reaches a model, and screening is strictest on the free tier — the opposite of how most metered products work. The reason is simple: a free account is anonymous and has nothing to lose, while a paid account has an identity and a payment method attached to it.
Screening is not limited to the premise. Every field you can type into is treated as untrusted and screened: the dedication, the epigraph, the scenes you already picture, the things to avoid, your pen name, your comparison titles, and the cover prompt when you edit it. The cover prompt matters especially, because it produces an image that other people can see.
Your text is also treated as material for a book rather than as instructions to the system. Attempts to make the model ignore its instructions, reveal them, or bypass the intake screening are a misuse of the service.
These are refusals, not warnings. They are blocked at intake.
Rate limits apply per account and per IP address.
Breaking these rules can mean a warning, then suspension, then closure. If we close an account for abuse, unused credits on it are forfeited. Write tohello@shadowwriter-ai.comif you think we got that wrong. There is no promised appeal deadline.
One rule sits behind all of this: fiction cannot hurt anyone by being wrong. Non-fiction can. What ships is decided by that asymmetry, not by how hard it is to build.
AI-generated recipes have a documented harm record. A commercial meal-planning bot once returned an "aromatic water mix" made from bleach and ammonia, which produces chlorine gas. Research at Utah State found that readers cannot reliably tell AI-written recipes from dietitian-written ones on credibility. The output is confident, plausible, and occasionally lethal.
A better model does not fix this. A language model has no model of microbial growth, no concept of pH, no awareness of the temperature danger zone, and no idea that garlic in oil is a botulism risk. Training it on food-safety text would make the output sound more authoritative while leaving the invented recipe exactly as unverified — which makes a mistake harder to catch, not less likely.
This is a standing product rule, not a temporary hold. We do not plan to add cookbooks after launch unless we reverse that rule in writing. Food-safety conditions that would still apply (a deterministic validator, hard exclusions, a qualified reviewer, unit economics that can pay that reviewer, and bodily-injury insurance) are why the type stays closed — they are not a path to offering it.
Business and ideas books are shown in the upgrade funnel. They do not generate yet. When they do, most of what is in them is opinion — a framework, a model, an argument — where being wrong means being unpersuasive rather than dangerous. The narrow dangerous fraction is handled by rules rather than by disclaimers:
That report is a backstop and not a control. The same research shows that readers cannot distinguish AI-generated content from expert content on credibility, and that applies to the author as much as the reader — the author is often not a domain expert, which is frequently why they are using a generator at all. Books of this kind will carry a line stating that their claims are not independently verified.
There is no Amazon KDP publishing API — not for us and not for anyone. No tool can upload a title on your behalf. You download the files and upload them yourself.
Amazon requires you to disclose AI-generated text, images and translations when you publish. It is a field in their publishing form, internal to Amazon, and it is not printed in your book or shown on the product page. Editing the book heavily does not change the answer. Failing to disclose breaches Amazon's terms: books are blocked or removed, and repeated breaches close the account.
You fill those answers. We do not generate them, we do not tick Amazon’s boxes, and we do not upload a title. Guidance for a typical Shadow Writer book lives atHow to answer Amazon KDP’s AI questions. Amazon’s form is the authority. Submitting the answers, and every other statement you make to a store, remains yours to do and yours to stand behind.
Your book does not carry a printed AI notice. Nothing requires one, and most AI-assisted books do not have one. The copyright page carries the copyright line in your pen name, the standard fiction disclaimer, and — on free books — the personal-use licence line. That is all.
If you believe something on the service infringes your copyright, send a notice to dmca@shadowwriter-ai.com. That is the public copyright-complaint address. Mail sent there reaches the designated agent registered with the U.S. Copyright Office for Zedara LLC. A street address for that agent is not published here; notices go by email. Naming the address and the registration isnot a claim that DMCA safe harbour applies. We generate text rather than merely host it.
Say what work is yours, where it appears on the service, and how to reach you. If the notice is complete enough to act on, we will look at it, we may remove or disable the material, and when we can identify the account that posted it we will tell them we did. If you are that account and you believe the removal was a mistake, write to the same address and tell us why. We will consider that reply. We do not promise a statutory counter-notice process, a court deadline, or that a later complaint will be treated as safe-harbour paperwork.
Repeated copyright complaints about the same account can lead to a warning, suspension, or closure, as in section 6.
The service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that a book will be finished within any particular time, that the prose will be good, that a file will be accepted by any store, or that the same request will produce the same book twice.
Every cost, word count, page count and timing figure shown anywhere on this site is an estimate.
The quality report tells you what was checked and what was changed. It is not a statement that the book is accurate, original, publishable or good.
If we are liable to you, that liability is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, except where a mandatory consumer-protection law says we cannot limit it. We do not exclude liability that the law does not let us exclude.
These terms are governed by the law of the State of Delaware and applicable United States federal law, except where a mandatory consumer-protection law in your place of residence says otherwise. Courts in Delaware — state or federal — are the venue we name, subject to the same carve-out.
Soft launch is United States first. That choice of law does not open the EU or the UK.
If we make a material change, we will email the address on the account at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continued use after that date is acceptance. Prepaid credits keep the price they were bought at.
Last updated 20 September 2026. Working defaults; not counsel sign-off.