Terms of Use

You upload a manuscript you own. We generate marketing assets from it — a logline, blurbs, taglines, comparable titles, a category recommendation, quotes taken from your text, social copy, an editorial review and a positioning brief — and deliver them as a web page, a Markdown file and a PDF.

It is a brainstorming and drafting tool. It is not a publisher, an agent, a lawyer, or a marketing agency, and it does not guarantee sales.

Using ShelfCrunch means agreeing to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, which forms part of them. If you do not agree, please do not use it.

By using ShelfCrunch you confirm that:

• you are 18 or older, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher, and can enter into a contract;
• if you are using it for a company or other organisation, you are authorised to commit that organisation to these Terms;
• the details you give us are accurate, and you keep them accurate; and
• you are not in a country subject to comprehensive sanctions, and you are not a person we are barred from dealing with under sanctions or export-control law.

We do not currently offer ShelfCrunch in the United Kingdom, the European Union or the wider European Economic Area, and visitors from those countries are turned away rather than served. The Privacy Policy explains why.

You must hold the rights to what you upload. When you generate a pack you confirm:

I am the author of this manuscript, or I'm authorized by the rights holder to use it here.

You keep all rights in your manuscript. We claim no ownership of it and acquire no licence to it beyond what is needed to generate and deliver your pack.

To be precise about what that licence is: you give us permission to store your manuscript, send it to our AI provider under the Zero Data Retention terms described in the Privacy Policy, and process it for the sole purpose of producing and delivering your pack to you. That permission lasts as long as the job does, or as long as the retention window you opted into, and no longer. It is not transferable, we do not sub-licence it, and it does not include publishing, displaying, distributing, selling or training on your manuscript. Nothing you upload is posted anywhere.

The generated pack is yours. You may use it commercially, edit it, adapt it, and publish it under your own name, without crediting us and without asking permission. That is the point of the product.

Because it is produced by an AI model, its copyright status may differ by jurisdiction and we make no representation about it.

You may say truthfully that you used ShelfCrunch, but please do not use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorsed, edited or vouched for your book.

Quotes are verified. Every quote in your pack is string-matched against your manuscript, and anything that does not match exactly is discarded rather than shipped to you.

Comparable titles are checked for existence against live marketplace data, with the retrieval date stamped in the pack. Sales figures move; the date tells you how fresh they were.

Everything else is generated, and you should read it before using it. Blurbs, taglines, the reader profile, the review and the positioning brief are written by an AI model from a summary of your book, and can contain mistakes — including details that are not in your manuscript. Keywords are explicitly labelled as untested hypotheses, not researched search-volume data.

AI output is probabilistic. We do not warrant that it is accurate, complete or suitable for any particular purpose, and checking it before you rely on it is your responsibility. Some of it is produced with the help of third-party providers, in which case the third-party section below also applies.

The external positioning brief is author-supplied media-kit material. It must not be presented as a review, an endorsement, or a third-party quote. Doing so may breach retailer policies and consumer-protection rules, and that is your responsibility.

We delete your manuscript after delivering your pack, unless you opt in to 15-day retention so we can investigate feedback you send. Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

Prices are shown in US dollars and exclude sales tax where it applies. The total shown at checkout before you confirm is the full amount you pay us; we do not add anything afterwards unless the law requires it. Packs are a one-time purchase per manuscript — there is no subscription and nothing recurring, so we never charge a saved card again without a new purchase.

Payment is handled by Stripe. Checkout happens on Stripe's own site, so your card details go to them directly and never reach our servers. Their terms apply to that part of the transaction, but our obligations to you remain ours.

If we spot an obvious pricing error before accepting your order, we will tell you the correct price and you can go ahead or cancel. If we find a clear billing mistake in our favour, we will tell you before charging anything further. If you think you have been charged wrongly, contact us.

If generation fails, you are not charged for a pack you did not receive. This is automatic: a failed job triggers a refund without you having to ask, and a reconciliation sweep catches anything the immediate path missed.

If a pack is delivered but materially wrong, contact us — tell us what was wrong and we will make it right, by correcting it or refunding it.

Do not upload material you do not have the rights to, and do not use the service to generate marketing for content that is unlawful. Beyond that, please do not:

• attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the service, or to anyone else's job, pack or account;
• scrape, spider or use automated tools against the service, or work around rate limits, paywalls or region restrictions;
• reverse engineer, decompile or copy the service itself, or remove our copyright and trademark notices from our own pages;
• disrupt or overload the service, or use it to send spam or unlawful, harassing or deceptive material;
• exploit a bug, pricing error or omission that a reasonable person would recognise as a mistake; or
• misrepresent who you are, or your status under sanctions or export-control law.

None of this restricts what you do with your own material. Your manuscript is yours and your pack is yours — copy them, change them, publish them, share them with your editor or cover designer. This section is about the service, not about your work.

We may refuse or stop service for a breach of this section.

We own the ShelfCrunch software, site, design, brand and written content — which does not include your manuscript or your pack. Those are yours, as set out above. Using the service gives you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use it for your own purposes, and nothing more.

We respect other people's copyright and expect the same from everyone using ShelfCrunch. Nothing you upload is published, so material on this service is rarely visible to anyone but you — but if you believe something here infringes your copyright, tell us.

Send a notice containing:

• your signature, or that of someone authorised to act for the copyright owner;
• a description of the work you say has been infringed;
• where the material you object to is located;
• your address, telephone number and email address;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent or the law; and
• a statement, made under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for them.

Under section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, knowingly misrepresenting that something is infringing can make you liable for damages. If you are not sure, take advice first.

Designated agent for copyright notices
Ray Calloway
[email protected]
1309 Coffeen Avenue, Ste 1200
Sheridan, WY 82801
United States

If we removed something of yours by mistake, send a counter-notice with your signature, what was removed and where it was, a statement made in good faith that it was removed by mistake or misidentification, your contact details, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for your address — or, if you are outside the United States, for the district where we are located. We will normally restore the material within 10 to 14 business days unless the person who complained goes to court. US copyright law is explained at copyright.gov.

ShelfCrunch depends on services run by other companies — an AI provider, a marketplace data provider, an email provider, a payment processor, and our host. They are named in the Privacy Policy. We choose them carefully, but we do not control them.

If one of them fails, changes, or stops working with us, we will make commercially reasonable efforts to limit the effect on you, and we may have to discontinue a feature that depended on them. Beyond that, and except where the law says otherwise, we are not responsible for their acts or omissions.

We may update, change or remove features, and we may suspend or discontinue part or all of the service for legal, security, operational or business reasons. Where it is practical, we will give reasonable notice first.

The service may sometimes be unavailable — maintenance, faults, or things outside our control. We aim to keep it running and we do not promise it will never break.

We want ShelfCrunch to be usable by everyone, and we work towards the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 as a target rather than claiming a certification we have not been audited against. If you hit a barrier, tell us what happened, which page it was on, and what you were using to browse — we will fix what we can and tell you honestly if something will take a while.

We are not liable for failures or delays caused by events beyond our reasonable control — natural disasters, war, industrial action, internet or power outages, cyberattacks, or the failure of a third-party service. Our obligations pause for as long as such an event lasts, and we will tell you what is happening when we reasonably can.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not promise that the service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that it will meet your expectations, or that generated content will be accurate.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, goodwill, opportunity or data, however the claim is framed and even if we were warned it was possible.

Our total liability to you for any claim is capped at what you paid us for the pack the claim is about. Any claim must be brought within one year of when it arose.

Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Some places do not allow these limits, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law permits.

If someone brings a claim against us because of what you uploaded, what you did with your pack, or because you broke these Terms or the law, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and legal costs arising from it. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, and we may take over its defence, in which case you agree to help. Neither of us will settle a claim in a way that binds the other without their agreement.

Nothing in these Terms takes away rights you have under consumer-protection, data- protection or other mandatory law. Where a clause here conflicts with such a right, the right wins and the rest of these Terms carry on.

Sundial Forge, LLC is organized under the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States. These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of ShelfCrunch, are governed by the laws of Wyoming, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Before going to court, please write to us at [email protected] describing the problem and what you want. We will try to settle it with you within 30 days. Most things are fixable that way and it costs neither of us anything.

Any dispute we cannot settle between us belongs in the state or federal courts located in Wyoming, and both you and we consent to those courts. To the extent the law allows, claims are brought individually rather than as part of a class or representative action. We may go straight to court for an injunction to stop misuse of the service or infringement of our intellectual property.

If you are a consumer somewhere whose law gives you rights that cannot be waived by agreement, nothing here takes those rights away.

We may change these Terms. Each version carries the version number at the top of this page, and the version you agreed to is recorded against your job — so what you accepted always resolves to a specific text rather than to whatever is on this page today. Minor changes take effect when posted. For material changes we will give reasonable notice, and where it matters we will ask you to accept them again rather than assume.

Severability. If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, it is cut back to what is enforceable, or removed, and the rest stands.

Waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about ShelfCrunch, and replace earlier discussions on the same subject.

Assignment. You cannot transfer your rights under these Terms without our written consent. We may transfer ours as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of the business, and will not reduce your rights by doing so.

Notices. Email is enough, both ways, unless the law demands otherwise.

Interpretation. “Including” means “including but not limited to”. Headings are for convenience. The English version of these Terms is the authoritative one.

Survival. Clauses that ought to outlast the agreement — liability, indemnity, intellectual property, governing law — do.

Questions about these Terms go to:

Ray Calloway, Sundial Forge, LLC
[email protected]
1309 Coffeen Avenue, Ste 1200
Sheridan, WY 82801
United States