Terms of Service

What Pencil Pass is

Pencil Pass reads a finished or near-finished manuscript and produces a structured editorial and market-readiness report, with claims grounded in evidence from your pages. It is a software analysis tool. It is not a literary agent, a publisher, a developmental editor, or a guarantee of publication, sales, or any particular outcome.

Your account

You create a free account to use Pencil Pass, including the free snapshot — no credit card required. A credit card is only needed to purchase a paid report. You are responsible for the activity under your account and for keeping your login secure. You must provide accurate information and be old enough to form a binding contract in your jurisdiction.

Your manuscript and your content

You keep all rights to your manuscript. You retain ownership of everything you upload, and you own the reports we generate for you.

You grant us a limited license to store and process your manuscript solely to generate, deliver, and let you re-run your report, and to operate and support the service. How long we keep it, and what we never do with it, is covered in “Deleting your manuscript and AI training” below.

You confirm that you have the rights to the material you upload and that it does not infringe anyone else’s rights or violate the law.

Deleting your manuscript and AI training

We do not keep your manuscript. We delete it 24 hours after your last analysis — both the text we extracted and the original file you uploaded. If you upload a manuscript and never run an analysis, we delete it 24 hours after you upload it.

We never use your manuscript to train AI models — neither we nor, under our agreements, the model providers who process it on our behalf. We never sell, publish, or share your manuscript, or use it as a sample.

Because your report supports its findings with evidence from your pages, it quotes selected passages from your manuscript. Those quoted passages are part of the report you own and remain in it after the manuscript itself is deleted; we keep no other part of your manuscript. Your report stays in your account until you delete it, and once your manuscript is deleted, re-running or upgrading a report requires uploading it again. Our Privacy Policy explains all of this in full.

Purchases, pricing, and re-runs

• ▪Reports are priced per manuscript. There is no subscription.
• ▪You can upgrade a manuscript to a higher tier at any time and pay only the difference.
• ▪You can re-run and refine a report’s analysis for free while the manuscript is active. Because we delete your manuscript 24 hours after your last analysis, re-analyzing a revised draft means uploading it again as a new report. A different book is a new purchase.
• ▪Payments are processed by Stripe. By purchasing, you authorize the applicable charge.

Refunds

We want the report to be useful. If a report misses the mark or fails to support its conclusions with evidence from your pages, let us know within 14 days of purchase and we will work with you to make it right, which may include a refund. This does not limit any rights you have under applicable consumer law.

Generated materials

Pencil Pass may generate query letters, synopses, comparable-title language, positioning, and launch materials. Treat these as strong working drafts. You are responsible for reviewing, revising, and approving them in your own voice before sending anything to an agent, editor, publisher, or reader, and for ensuring they accurately represent your book.

Acceptable use

You agree not to misuse the service. In particular, you agree not to:

• ▪Upload content you do not have the rights to, or that is unlawful, infringing, or harmful.
• ▪Attempt to disrupt, reverse engineer, or gain unauthorized access to the service or its systems.
• ▪Use the service to build a competing product, or resell reports as your own analysis service.

Disclaimers

Pencil Pass is provided “as is.” A Pencil Pass report is a structured analysis and an informed opinion, not a guarantee about your book’s quality, marketability, or success. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim implied warranties and do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Pencil Pass will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits or opportunities, arising out of your use of the service. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service will not exceed the amount you paid us for the report giving rise to the claim.

Changes to the service and these Terms

We may update, change, or discontinue parts of the service, and we may update these Terms from time to time. When we make material changes to the Terms, we will update the date above and, where appropriate, notify you. Your continued use after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms.

Contact us

Questions about these Terms? Contact us at support@pencilpass.co.