Terms of Service
Last updated: 20 April 2026
These terms govern your use of AuthorSHED, including our websites, digital products, courses, communities, and services. They are a legal agreement between you and Stargazing Turtle Ltd (Company No. 12985258, registered in England and Wales at Union House, 111 New Union Street, Coventry, England, CV1 2NT). AuthorSHED is a brand of Stargazing Turtle Ltd.
If you do not agree with these terms, please do not use our services.
If anything in these terms is unclear, email us at ###contact###@dotauthorshed.dottools###.
1. What AuthorSHED offers
AuthorSHED provides writing tools, workflows, frameworks, courses, and educational content for fiction authors. Our current and planned services include:
- Our main website at authorshed.tools, including landing pages, blog content, and resources
- Free digital gifts such as guides and downloadable resources
- Paid digital products sold through our sales platform (Payhip)
- Course interest registration pages and future live and recorded courses
- Free live webinars and online events
- Our web application at app.authorshed.tools
- Communication with us by email, WhatsApp, Instagram, and our social media presence
- Community spaces we may launch on platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Skool, or similar
Different services may have additional specific terms surfaced at the point of use. Where that happens, those specific terms apply in addition to these general terms.
2. Registering interest and signing up
You can register your interest in our courses and other future products without buying anything. When you register, we add you to our mailing list (via MailerLite) so we can send you updates about the course, occasional surveys that shape what we build, and other AuthorSHED communications.
Registering interest is not a purchase, not a booking, and does not guarantee a place on any course. We may decide not to launch a course. If we do launch, alpha pricing offered to early registrants is offered in good faith but may change before enrolment opens. We will communicate prices and enrolment terms clearly at the point of enrolment.
You can unsubscribe from our emails at any time using the link in any message.
3. Buying digital products
Our digital products are sold through Payhip, which acts as merchant of record for the sale. When you buy a product, you are entering a contract of sale with us on the terms presented at checkout, supplemented by these general terms.
Prices are shown in pounds sterling (GBP). Payhip handles payment processing and any applicable international VAT or sales tax. You will receive an order confirmation and a download link to your product.
Your contract of sale is formed when Payhip confirms your order.
4. Your right to cancel, and refunds
Under the UK Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, you normally have fourteen days to cancel a purchase made online. For digital downloads, this right is lost once you access or download the product, because the product cannot be returned.
By choosing to access or download a digital product immediately on purchase, you agree to waive your fourteen-day cancellation right and acknowledge that you will lose it. This is also presented to you at checkout.
We do not offer refunds on digital products once they have been accessed or downloaded.
If a product has a technical fault or does not match its description, contact us at ###support###@dotauthorshed.dottools### and we will put it right, including a refund where appropriate. This does not affect your statutory rights as a consumer.
5. Licence to use our digital products
When you buy one of our digital products, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide licence to use it for your personal reading and reference, for your own writing and author business, and for internal use within your own operation.
You may:
- Use the product, its prompts, and its principles in your own writing practice
- Use the prompts with AI tools to work on your own manuscripts
- Apply the frameworks, principles, and ideas in your own books, newsletters, and content
- Load the product into your own AI tools (such as ChatGPT Projects or custom GPTs) for your own personal or internal business use
- Quote or reference the product on social media or in your own content, with attribution to AuthorSHED
You may not:
- Resell, redistribute, or share the product itself (in whole or in part) with anyone else
- Rebrand, repackage, or adapt the product for distribution to third parties
- Use the product as the basis for paid courses, coaching programmes, workshops, or training materials that you offer to others
- Claim our frameworks or methodology (such as STARVED or the Narrator Fingerprint) as your own creation
- Share access to AI tools you have loaded with our content, with third parties
If you want to use our content in a way this licence does not allow, email us at ###contact###@dotauthorshed.dottools###. We are usually reasonable.
The licence ends if you breach these terms, in which case you must stop using the product and delete any copies you hold.
6. AI tools and outputs
Our products are designed to be used with AI tools. Copying our prompts into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google NotebookLM, or similar services for your own writing is exactly what we built them for, and we expect you to do it.
You are responsible for knowing the settings of the AI tools you use, including whether inputs are used by the provider to improve their models. We do not restrict this. Your use of free or paid AI tools is your choice and your responsibility.
What we do not allow:
- Deliberately submitting our products to AI model training processes that are not part of your normal use of an AI tool (for example, uploading our content to a dataset for AI training, or contributing it to a fine-tuning corpus)
- Using our products to train, fine-tune, or create AI tools, agents, or products that you then sell or distribute to others
- Building and distributing AI assistants, custom GPTs, or similar tools that replicate, embody, or substantially incorporate our frameworks for use by third parties
If you want to train or fine-tune a model on our content for a specific legitimate purpose, email us at ###contact###@dotauthorshed.dottools###.
AI outputs vary, can be wrong, and reflect the provider's training and your inputs. Every output should be reviewed by you. You are responsible for evaluating outputs and for deciding how to use them. You are also responsible for complying with the terms of any AI provider you use.
7. Our intellectual property
All content we create, including the STARVED framework, the Narrator Fingerprint, the ASSIST methodology, our courses, workflows, guides, written content, AuthorSHED branding, logos, visual identity, and any materials we publish, is owned by Stargazing Turtle Ltd or licensed to us.
Your purchase or use of our services grants you the licence described in section 5 (or, for free resources, a similar licence for personal and professional use). It does not transfer ownership of any intellectual property to you.
8. Your content and testimonials
You retain ownership of anything you write, send, or upload to our services, including your manuscripts, your survey responses, your messages to us, and any content you may submit to our web application in future.
By using our services, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to process your content only for the purposes of providing the service, responding to you, and improving our products through aggregated analysis. We do not claim ownership of your content, do not publish it without your permission, and do not sell or share it with third parties for their own purposes.
Testimonials and positive feedback. If you say something positive about our products in public (on social media, in reviews, in community spaces, or in reply to our emails), or if you send us feedback or testimonials that you share with us openly, you agree we may quote you to promote our products. We will attribute quotes by first name and last initial, pen name, or the name you have shared with us publicly. We will not use your full real name or image unless you have given us permission. We may lightly edit quotes for length or clarity without changing their meaning. If you later ask us to stop using a quote, we will remove it from our active marketing as soon as practical.
Our privacy policy explains what we do with personal data specifically.
9. Free resources
We offer free digital gifts (such as guides, sample workflows, and other downloadable resources) in exchange for your email address and consent to receive our emails. These resources are provided under a similar licence to our paid products (see section 5) for your personal and professional use.
Free resources are provided as-is and may be updated, replaced, or withdrawn at any time.
10. Courses and live sessions
We offer, and plan to offer, two kinds of courses:
Live group courses are delivered to a small group over several weeks, with scheduled sessions, group Q&A, and ongoing support. Specific terms for each live course will be provided at the point of enrolment, including session dates, group size, access duration, and refund terms.
Live sessions are recorded. By taking part in a live session, you agree to be recorded. Session recordings, including group Q&A, may be shared with other members of your group for the duration of the course so everyone can review the sessions, catch up on missed ones, and continue learning after the live phase ends.
Recorded courses are self-paced digital products created from edited and repackaged material. Recorded courses do not include identifiable contributions from previous live course members. They are licensed on similar terms to our other digital products (see section 5), with specific details provided on the product page.
Registering interest in a course (see section 2) is not the same as enrolling in one.
11. Webinars and live events
From time to time, we host live webinars and other free online events. These are typically used to teach, to give you a sample of our approach, and to promote our paid courses and products.
When you register for a webinar, we add your email to our mailing list (via MailerLite). You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in any email.
Live webinars are recorded. By registering, you agree that the session may be recorded, that any questions you ask in chat or Q&A may be heard or read by other attendees, and that the recording may be shared with registrants who could not attend live, used in our marketing, or repurposed as a recorded resource.
If you choose to turn on your camera or microphone during a webinar (where the format allows), anything you say or show is part of the recording. You are under no obligation to appear on camera or speak.
Recorded webinars are made available on the basis described above. If you have a specific concern about something you said or shared in a webinar, email us at ###contact###@dotauthorshed.dottools### and we will work with you in good faith.
12. Communities and group messaging
If we run a community space (on WhatsApp, Skool, Facebook, or another platform), participation is subject to the platform's own terms and privacy policy in addition to these terms.
When you join an AuthorSHED community space, you agree to:
- Be respectful to other members
- Keep group conversations private (what is shared in the group stays in the group)
- Not share other members' personal information outside the group
- Not use the space to promote unrelated products, services, or recruitment
- Not share our paid content or materials with non-buyers
We may remove any member who breaches these expectations or platform terms, and we may close a community space at any time.
Our use of group messaging and one-to-one messaging (for example, WhatsApp groups or direct support) is described in our privacy policy.
13. Acceptable use
When using any AuthorSHED service, you agree not to:
- Use the service unlawfully, or to do anything that would be unlawful
- Upload content that infringes intellectual property, privacy, or other rights
- Attempt to disrupt, probe, reverse engineer, or gain unauthorised access to our systems
- Use our services to send spam, malware, or harmful material
- Impersonate another person or misrepresent your identity
- Scrape, harvest, or use automated means to extract content beyond what a normal user would do
We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these terms or use our services in a way that harms us, other users, or third parties.
14. No guarantees and our liability to you
Our services are provided with reasonable care and skill, but we do not guarantee any specific result. You use our products, frameworks, and guidance at your own risk and on your own judgement. We do not guarantee that:
- A scene you revise using our workflow will be better than before
- A book using our frameworks will sell, get good reviews, or get published
- Your business outcomes will match anyone else's
- AI tools used alongside our prompts will produce accurate, useful, or appropriate output every time
Writing is a craft. What works for one author's manuscript may not work for another's. Our products give you tools and ways of thinking. How you use them, and what results you get, is yours.
Our liability. To the fullest extent allowed by law, our total liability to you for any claim, whether the claim is for breach of contract, negligence, or any other legal reason, is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
Things we cannot limit. Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for things the law does not allow us to limit. These include:
- Death or personal injury caused by our negligence
- Fraud or deliberately misleading you
- Anything else that cannot be limited by law
Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.
15. Third-party services
Our services rely on third parties (such as Payhip, MailerLite, Vercel, Cloudflare, Short.io, AI providers, and others listed in our privacy policy). We choose them carefully, but we are not responsible for their actions, availability, or terms. When you interact with their services directly (for example, when you buy through Payhip or message us on WhatsApp), their terms and privacy policies apply.
16. Affiliate and referral links
Some of our content may include links to third-party tools and services we use or recommend. Where those links are affiliate or referral links, we may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no additional cost to you. We only recommend tools we actually use or have tested, and the commission does not change our opinion of them. Where relevant, we will mark such links clearly.
We may operate our own affiliate programme in future, allowing others to promote AuthorSHED products in return for commission. If we do, separate affiliate terms will govern that programme.
17. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms as our services grow or as the law changes. The version shown on this page is always the current one, and the effective date appears at the top.
For material changes that affect your rights or obligations, we will notify current subscribers, customers, and community members at least fourteen days before the change takes effect, by email or in-platform message. For minor changes, we will update this page without separate notification.
Previous versions of these terms remain available for reference at /terms/v1, /terms/v2, and so on.
If you continue to use our services after a change takes effect, you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, you can stop using our services and, where appropriate, request deletion of your data as described in our privacy policy.
18. Termination
You can stop using our services at any time. You can unsubscribe from our emails, leave our communities, or ask us to delete your data (see our privacy policy for how).
We can terminate or suspend your access if you breach these terms or if we close a service. Where you have a paid product, you keep the licence to use what you have already bought unless your breach relates to the product itself.
19. Governing law and jurisdiction
These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, except that consumers based outside England and Wales retain the benefit of any mandatory protections available to them under their local law.
20. General
Entire agreement. These terms, together with any specific terms for particular services and our privacy policy, form the whole agreement between you and us about your use of our services.
Severability. If any clause is found to be unenforceable, the rest of the terms remain in force.
No waiver. If we do not enforce a right or clause, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
Assignment. You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms. We may transfer ours as part of a business sale or reorganisation, in which case we will notify you.
Language. The English (United Kingdom) version of these terms is the authoritative version. Translations into other languages or locales are provided for convenience.
Third parties. A person who is not a party to these terms has no right to enforce them under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
21. Contact
For questions about these terms, general enquiries, or legal matters: ###contact###@dotauthorshed.dottools###
For help with a product you have bought or downloaded: ###support###@dotauthorshed.dottools###