Creator Agreement
Last updated 25 October 2026 · All amounts in US dollars (USD)
This is the deal between you and K2MStudios, which operates Indiewright. It sits alongside the Terms of Service and is written to be read, not skimmed past.
The short version
- You own your work. We never claim it.
- You set your prices. You keep 90%. We keep 10%.
- Publishing a work costs a one-off fee — $20, the same for every work. If you choose to give a work away free it is $50, because a free work still costs storage and bandwidth and no sale covers that. Charged to your card once the work has been accepted, never taken out of your sales.
- Nothing comes off the sale itself — not processing, not a monthly fee. Buyers pay a $1.00 service fee on top of your price; it is theirs to pay and ours to keep, and it never comes out of your share.
- Payouts are requested, not automatic. From $50 withdrawing is free. Below that you can still take it and a flat $5.00 comes off. Money lands within 3 business days of the request.
- A refund or a dispute comes out of your earnings — that sale's share, and the bank's fee for a dispute. Your balance can go below zero until later sales cover it. We never take it from your bank account and we never send it to collections.
- Uploading is free and unlimited once a work is published — the fee is once per work, never per episode. Each episode is read before it goes out, and you can book a release date weeks ahead so that reading happens well before your date.
- A work that sells nothing for a year is rested — hidden from the catalogue, never deleted. Everyone who bought it keeps it.
- You can leave whenever you want and take your work with you.
0. The Code of Conduct is part of this
The Code of Conduct binds you as a creator, and section 4 is written specifically for you. The three rules that end accounts rather than earn warnings are worth stating here:
- Plagiarism results in a ban. Everything in what you upload must be yours or licensed to you — writing, narration, music, artwork.
- Mature content must be labelled. Mature work is welcome; unlabelled mature work is a violation.
- No misleading content. The title, cover, description and length must match what a listener actually receives.
Every work and every episode is reviewed before it goes on sale. Sometimes that review is a person reading it; sometimes it is automatic, and we do not promise which yours will be. Either way the check is narrow and the same for everybody: that the audio is what the title says it is, that the cover art is yours, and that anything mature carries its label. We are not judging whether your work is good, and we do not reject work for being niche, strange, difficult or unpopular.
It happens per file rather than once per account, because those three things are properties of the recording, not of you. An approved work is not a standing permission to upload anything afterwards — for anyone, including creators we have published many times.
Reading it does not make it ours and does not make us its author. The rights, and the responsibility for what is in it, remain yours — that is the other side of owning it.
1. Your work stays yours
You keep every right in what you upload. You grant Indiewright a non-exclusive licence to host, encode, stream and display it, and to use short excerpts and cover art to promote it on the platform. That is all.
Non-exclusive means you may publish the same work anywhere else at the same time. We do not ask for exclusivity and will not.
The licence ends when you remove the work, except for copies already bought by listeners — they paid for access and keep it — and for records we must retain by law.
2. What you promise us
- You hold the rights to everything in what you upload: the writing, the narration, any music, and the artwork.
- If you narrate someone else's writing, you have permission.
- Your work does not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark, or privacy.
- You will respond if a rights complaint is made about your work.
3. Money
The publishing fee
Publishing a work costs a one-off fee, charged to your card at the moment you publish it:
| Work | Cost to publish |
|---|---|
| Any work, your first or your fortieth | $20.00 |
| … and if you give it away free | $50.00 |
Card processing is added on top, and the exact total is shown to you and confirmed by you before your card is charged. The count is of works you have published, over the life of your account; it does not reset.
Nothing is charged while you are making a work. You can upload everything, set your prices, change your mind and delete it, without paying anything. The fee is charged at publication and only at publication.
It is not a subscription and it is not taken out of your sales. Nothing recurs. You keep 90% of every purchase regardless.
The buyer's service fee, and why it does not touch your 90%
Buyers pay a $1.00 service fee on every purchase, on top of your price and alongside card processing. It is charged to them, it is ours, and it is shown to them as its own line with both halves broken out before they pay.
It is not deducted from your share. On a $4.99 edition you receive $4.50 — 90% of your listing price, with the half-cent rounding to you — whether the service fee exists or not. Our 10% is still 10% of what you listed.
We are telling you because it affects the number a buyer sees, not the number you get. A $4.99 edition costs a buyer $6.48. That is worth knowing when you set a price, and it weighs hardest at the bottom of the range: a $0.99 edition costs a buyer $2.36. If you are pricing low to be accessible, price with that in mind.
A published work can be unpublished, but the fee for it is not refunded — it paid for putting the work live, which happened.
Resting a work that earns nothing
If a published work earns nothing at all for twelve months, we may rest it: take it out of the catalogue and out of search. We will email you when that happens.
Resting is not removal, and nothing is taken from anyone. Specifically:
- Everyone who bought it keeps it and can still play all of it, exactly as before. Resting changes nothing for a single person who paid you.
- Your files are untouched. Nothing is deleted.
- You can bring it back in one click, as often as you like, and there is no penalty for doing so. Adding a new episode wakes it on its own, and so does a single sale.
- The twelve months are counted from the last time it earned, so a work that sells once a year is never rested.
Why this exists: a work on sale costs storage and bandwidth every month whether or not anybody buys it. Resting the silent ones is part of how the publishing fee stays $20 once instead of becoming a monthly charge. We would rather rest a quiet work than bill you for keeping it.
Booking a release
You can upload an episode and book it for a date — weeks ahead if you like — and set an earlier date on which its title and cover become visible, so you can announce a chapter before anyone can hear it.
The reading happens in that lead time. Book three weeks out and it will have been read long before the day. If an episode is somehow still unread when its date arrives, it publishes late rather than unread — we are not going to skip the check to make a deadline — and we email you rather than leaving you to notice.
The 10%
Indiewright keeps 10% of the price of each sale. You keep 90%. On a $10.00 work you receive $9.00.
The listener pays a service fee on top of your price, not out of it. That fee is two things: card processing, which goes to the card networks, and a $1.00 fee that Indiewright keeps for running the store. Neither comes out of your 90%, and neither is counted as part of the 10% — the 10% is taken from your listing price and nothing else. So a $10.00 work still pays you $9.00, whatever the fee on top happens to be.
We say this plainly because it does mean your work costs a listener more than your price. On a $10.00 work they pay $11.64. Payout transfer fees, monthly payout account fees, annual 1099 filing, storage and bandwidth all come out of our share rather than yours.
Where a split produces a fraction of a cent, it rounds in your favour.
Payouts
- Earnings accrue as sales happen, edition by edition. Your earnings are visible at all times, broken down by book.
- An earning clears seven days after the sale. Until then it shows on your earnings screen as still clearing, and cannot be withdrawn.
- Payouts are requested, not automatic. Nothing is sent until you ask for it from your Earnings screen. We will email you when your cleared earnings pass $50.00 so you know it is there to take.
- Once requested, money lands within 3 business days.
- Withdrawing $50.00 or more costs nothing. Below that the minimum withdrawal is $10.00 and a flat $5.00 comes off whatever the amount — so at $10.00 the fee is half of it. Your Earnings screen shows the fee and what you will receive before you ask.
- You must complete identity verification with Stripe, our payment provider, before money can be sent. Financial regulation requires this.
- Payouts go to your own connected account. Indiewright never holds your bank details.
- If you close your account, you are paid out in full, including amounts below $50.00, with no early withdrawal fee.
Why earnings clear for seven days
A card charge can be disputed by the cardholder's bank days after it is made. If you withdrew an earning the same day and the purchase behind it later turned out to be fraudulent, the money would already be gone — and it would be recovered from your future earnings, leaving your balance negative. The seven days exist to stop that happening to you.
Seven days is short enough that it barely changes when you get paid, and long enough to catch the obvious fraud. It applies to every creator equally, and the window is not extended as a penalty. Your earnings screen always shows the two figures separately, so you can see exactly what has cleared and what has not.
Why $50, and why the early withdrawal costs something
Our payment provider charges a flat monthly fee for every account that receives a payout, plus a per-transfer fee. Paying out a creator earning $20 a month every month costs more in fees than that creator generates in commission for us, so frequent small payouts would make small creators unprofitable to serve — which is the opposite of the point. Batching to $50 means that flat fee is charged once instead of three times.
The $5.00 early withdrawal fee is a price, not a pass-through: it is more than the transfer costs us. We would rather say that than describe it as cost recovery. It exists to make the $50 threshold mean something, and you are never obliged to pay it — waiting is always free, and your earnings keep accruing while you wait.
Refunds, disputes and chargebacks
These come out of the author. That is a change from how this agreement read before 25 October 2026, when Indiewright absorbed the bank's dispute fee, and it is stated plainly here because it is the term most likely to cost you money unexpectedly.
- If a listener is refunded, the corresponding earning is reversed.
- If a listener disputes a charge with their bank, that sale's share is reversed and the bank's fee for the dispute is charged to you. On a $20.00 sale that is $18.00 of share and a $15.00 fee: $33.00.
- If a work is removed for infringement, buyers are refunded and the related earnings are reversed.
- Your balance can go below zero. When it does, withdrawals stop until later earnings bring it back up. You can see every refund and dispute, and what each one cost you, on the Disputes screen in your creator hub.
- What we will never do: take it from your bank account, charge a card, send you an invoice, or pass it to a debt collector. Recovery is from your future earnings and nothing else. If you close your account while your balance is negative, the balance is written off and you owe us nothing.
Why it works this way: a dispute is the buyer's bank reversing a sale we did not make and cannot contest on your behalf. The money leaves our account on their schedule. We can either take it out of the sale it belonged to or spread it across every other creator through the 10%, and we have chosen the first.
Taxes
You are an independent creator, not an employee. You are responsible for your own taxes. Where US law requires it, a 1099 is filed for you at our cost. You may need to provide a W-9 or equivalent before payouts can be released.
4. What carries no further charge
Once a work is published, none of the following costs you anything more:
- Unlimited audio uploads — no cap on episodes, length or streams, within the 20 GB of storage each creator has. Adding an episode to a published work never costs anything. A serialised novel with forty chapters pays the publishing fee once. Each new episode is read before it goes out, and that reading is free too
- Streaming bandwidth for audio
- Analytics, your creator page, branding, and community tools
- Payout processing
None of this is behind a plan, and we will not move it behind one.
5. Video, and where it is metered
Video costs us money per minute watched, so it is the one thing metered. Video files are capped at 10 minutes. Every creator gets a free monthly viewer-minute allowance that grows with earnings — every $1 you earn adds 100 viewer-minutes, on top of a free baseline of about 16 hours a month.
If your allowance runs out, your episode keeps playing as audio. We will not take your work offline over a bandwidth bill.
6. Moderation and takedowns
Listeners can report published work. Reports are reviewed by a person, not automatically actioned. We may remove a work or suspend an account where there is credible evidence of infringement or fraud.
If we act against your work, we will tell you why and you may respond. Every action is recorded in an append-only log. Repeat infringement ends an account.
6a. If your account is banned
A ban for a Code of Conduct violation forfeits any refund on purchases you made, as it does for any account. Your earnings are treated separately and honestly:
- Earnings that came from violating conduct — a plagiarised work, sales you manufactured, purchases made with stolen cards — are reversed and returned to the people they came from.
- Earnings from work you genuinely made and genuinely sold to real buyers are still paid out to you. We do not confiscate honest earnings as an extra punishment.
- Payouts may be withheld while a fraud question is open. You are told, and they are released if the evidence does not hold up.
Every ban can be appealed — see Appeals. Works, purchases and money are held rather than destroyed while an appeal is open, and are restored if it succeeds.
7. Leaving
You may remove any work, or close your account, at any time. Your accrued earnings are paid out in full. Anyone who already bought an edition keeps access to it. We do not hold work hostage and we do not keep money because someone left.
8. Changes to this agreement
For any material change — anything touching the 10%, your rights in your work, what we may do with it, how payouts work, or who bears a refund or a dispute — we tell you in the app, on your Earnings screen, with a summary of exactly what changed. If we hold an email address for you we email it too. If you do not accept a change, you may close your account and be paid out in full, with no early withdrawal fee and any negative balance written off.
While Indiewright is in beta, a change can take effect the day it is announced. Before this version, this clause promised 30 days' notice by email. The change of 25 October 2026 — payouts becoming manual, the $5 early withdrawal fee, and refunds and disputes moving onto the author — was made on in-app notice, during beta, to a small number of creators we are in direct contact with. Saying so here rather than quietly rewriting the clause is the point: a notice period you can remove without telling anyone is not a notice period, and you should be able to see that this one was removed.
We consider the 10% a promise rather than a starting price.
9. Contact
creators@indiewright.com for anything about earnings or payouts.