Acceptable use and content rules

1. Who these rules apply to

These rules are part of the Terms of use. They apply to everyone who uses Hamsterra: authors who publish profiles, books, campaigns and free book pages, readers who apply, with or without an account, and receive advance review copies (“ARCs”), and readers who request an author's free book.

2. Rules for authors

Your author account

• Use one author account for yourself or your business. Writing under several pen names, with co-authors or through an agent or publisher is normal. Add your pen names to your one account, as many as your plan allows, rather than opening another account. If you need a separate account, for example for a publisher's list, ask us first at support@hamsterra.com.
• Do not use several accounts, or accounts run for you by others, to get round limits, approval for invitations, or any other rule. If we have restricted or closed your account, or restricted or suspended one of your pen names, do not use another account, email address, pen name or another person to carry on without our permission.

Books and other content

• Upload, paste or import only books, covers, images and text that you have the rights and permissions to use in the ways you choose on Hamsterra, including advance review copies, free copies and public excerpts, for example as the author with the publication rights or with the publisher's permission.
• Do not upload material that is unlawful, infringes someone else's rights or contains malware. Never upload sexual content involving anyone under 18, real or fictional, or material that promotes terrorism, incites violence or hatred against people because of a protected characteristic, or shares someone's private information without their consent.
• Books with sexual, violent or other mature content are allowed. Describe them clearly with the book's content warnings and description, so readers know what they are applying for or about to read. A public excerpt must follow these rules like any other public text. Covers, profile pictures and other images on public pages must not show nudity or sexually explicit scenes.
• Describe your books and campaigns honestly, including the formats and dates readers will get and whether AI was used to create the book, as explained on the book form. Do not give a false or misleading AI use answer.

Reviews

• Ask for honest reviews. Do not make access to a copy, or anything else, depend on a positive review or rating, and do not offer payment or rewards for reviews. Fake or incentivised reviews are unlawful in the UK under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.
• Readers may need to disclose that they received a free copy when they review it. Do not ask them to hide it. Review sites and shops have their own rules, which you must follow.

Readers' details and email

• Your contact list is built only from readers who ask, on your application forms or your free book page, to receive your ARC invitations or to join your reader list. Do not try to add anyone else, for example by asking readers to send you addresses, by creating applications for other people or by using bought, rented, scraped or borrowed lists.
• Hamsterra sends your ARC invitations on your behalf. Use contacts who asked only for invitations for nothing else, and do not try to send to people who unsubscribed, complained or whose address bounced. Hamsterra blocks these sends, and you cannot mark someone as subscribed again.
• Add a reader to your own mailing list only if they joined your reader list, by ticking the box on one of your forms or by joining from your author page. If you export your reader list and email readers from your own email service, you are responsible for that mailing: include an unsubscribe link, honour unsubscribes, stop emailing readers who leave your reader list on Hamsterra (they no longer appear in your exports), and follow the email marketing law that applies to you.
• Hamsterra may pause your invitations automatically after a spam complaint or a high bounce rate, until we have reviewed it. Sign-in and security email are never used to get around a pause.
• Use participants' details, including application answers, email addresses you see in your workspace and campaign exports, only to run the campaign they applied to. Keep them secure and do not sell or publish them. Use the result of a copy check only to protect your rights in that book. You are responsible for them under data protection law as a separate controller, as section 5 of the Terms of use explains. We may suspend an author who uses readers' details in a way the reader did not agree to.

3. Rules for readers

These rules apply to advance review copies and to free books you request from an author's free book page. You accept them when you apply or request a free book.

• Your copy is for you alone. Do not share, upload, sell, lend or forward it, in whole or in part, and do not share your access or download link or let others use your account.
• Follow the campaign's terms, including any confidentiality until the publication date.
• Do not upload, share or provide the copy, in whole or in part, to AI tools or services for reading, analysis or model training. You agree to this when you apply or request a free book.
• Give honest reviews, disclose that you received a free copy where the review site requires it, and report only reviews you have actually published.
• Apply with accurate information, once per campaign, and do not create several accounts or use several email addresses to get extra copies or free books.

4. Personalised copies and leak checks

Every EPUB and PDF issued through Hamsterra is personalised: it carries a visible line with the name you gave and a random copy ID (“Advance review copy • Issued to: name • Copy ID: … • Not for redistribution”), and the copy ID is also stored in the file's metadata. Your email address is not printed on campaign copies. A copy of an author's free book carries your email address instead of your name (“Free copy • Made for: email address • Copy ID: … • Not for redistribution”). This is a personalisation mark, not DRM.

If an author finds a copy of their book outside Hamsterra, they can upload it, or enter its visible copy ID, in a private copy check. The check reads only Hamsterra's own marks and tells the author whether the copy ID belongs to a copy issued in one of their campaigns and, if so, to which participant, while that participant's details remain. After a reader's data is deleted, it shows only a limited record labelled “Deleted reader”, without their name, email address or a link to them, and that record is deleted six calendar months later (see the Privacy policy). It never reveals a participant of another author's campaign. The uploaded file is deleted after the check; a short result is kept.

Marks can be removed, changed or lost (for example by format conversion or Send to Kindle), and a copy can be passed on without its reader's knowledge. A match therefore links a file to an issued copy but does not prove who distributed it. Hamsterra does not ban anyone automatically on the basis of a check. An author may end a participant's access to their campaign, and we may act under section 6.

5. Rules for everyone

• Do not harass, threaten or impersonate anyone, including in feedback or support messages.
• Do not probe, scan or test Hamsterra's security except as allowed by the vulnerability disclosure policy, and do not interfere with the service, bypass limits or security checks, or access data that is not yours.
• Do not scrape Hamsterra or access it with automated tools beyond public pages and the sitemap.
• Do not use Hamsterra for anything unlawful.

6. Reports and what we may do

To report content or behaviour, use the help form or email support@hamsterra.com. For copyright, follow the copyright complaints process. You can also report a book's AI use answer that you believe is wrong.

If someone breaks these rules we may, depending on how serious it is: remove or unpublish content, pause a campaign or its email, end a participant's access to copies, suspend an account, end its author services or close it, and report unlawful activity to the authorities. Section 9 of the Terms of use explains how we choose and when we warn you first.

How we moderate: a person at Hamsterra reviews reports and decides on restrictions. Automatic checks are limited to these: invitations pause after a spam complaint or a high bounce rate (section 2) until a person reviews them; uploaded files that are unsafe or cannot be processed are rejected; and disposable email addresses cannot be used to sign up, apply or request a free book. Copy checks never restrict anyone by themselves (section 4).

On its own, none of these shows that someone broke these rules: the same or a similar pen name, a shared IP address, the same publisher or agent, or a refund or payment dispute. We look at the whole picture and check for co-authors, agents, transferred rights and honest mistakes before we act.

When we restrict an account, an author's email sending, an author page, a campaign or a book, we email the person concerned the reason, how long it lasts or what lifts it, and how to ask for a human review, as section 9 of the Terms of use describes. We tell whoever reported it what we decided.