User Policy

What you can do with a Daastan account, what you cannot, and what happens either way. This is the plain-language version of the rules our systems actually apply — it is short because the rules are few.

The short version

• Your work stays yours. Publishing with us does not transfer the copyright in your book.
• Publish only what you have the right to publish.
• Your profile is not an advertising space. No links to other businesses, no promotional copy.
• Review honestly, and only what you have read.
• One account per person.
• If we get it wrong, we fix it by hand. Every automated refusal can be appealed to a person.

1. Your account

Sign up with a real name and an email address you can actually receive mail at. We send order updates, verification and royalty notices to it, so a disposable-mail address is refused at signup — not to be difficult, but because an account we cannot reach is an account we cannot serve.

Keep one account. If you have ended up with two, tell us and we will merge them rather than delete anything. You are responsible for what happens under your login, so do not share your password.

What we ask for and why: your city and country are used for delivery and for the city shelves; your phone number is for delivery and payout queries only and is never shown publicly; gender is optional and you may leave it unanswered.

2. Your profile and bio

Your bio is there to tell readers who you are. It is a public page on a bookshop, so it is not a place to advertise anything other than your own writing.

Not allowed in a name or bio:

• Links to unrelated businesses, and any link posted for search-ranking purposes.
• Promotional copy for pharmacy, gambling, adult, loan, crypto or essay-writing services.
• A web address or an email address in place of your name.
• Somebody else's name or photograph.

Linking to your own website, blog or Facebook page is fine, and deliberately so — our checks are built to allow it. A link on its own is never treated as a problem.

Profile pictures are re-encoded when you upload them, which is a security measure rather than an editorial one: it strips anything hidden inside an image file. If a picture is refused, it is because it could not be read as an image, not because of what it shows.

3. Your book

You keep the copyright. You are granting us the right to print, list and sell the edition we produce together, and you can see exactly what you earn on the royalty calculator before you commit to anything.

You must have the right to publish what you submit. That means:

• The manuscript is your own work, or you hold the rights to it.
• Quotations, images and cover art are yours or properly licensed. A picture found through a search engine is not licensed.
• Where you write about real people, you are responsible for what you say.

We do not publish material that is unlawful in Pakistan, incites violence against a person or group, or is plagiarised. We are a publisher of first-time authors and we read submissions before they go out; a rejection at that stage is an editorial decision and we will tell you the reason.

Drafts are free and private. Writing and uploading a manuscript costs nothing and nobody else can read it. Payment starts only when you submit for publishing.

4. Reading and buying

A paid e-book is licensed to you, to read on your own account. Re-uploading it, sharing the file, or passing your login to other people to read it is the one thing that most directly takes money from the author — it is not a technicality to us.

Free-to-read books can be added to your library freely and taken off again. Samples are open to everyone and need no account at all.

Orders, cancellations, returns and refunds are covered separately in the Refund & Cancellation Policy and the Shipping Policy. In short: you can cancel yourself before dispatch, and refusing a delivered parcel at the door carries a fee because the courier charges us for the round trip.

5. Reviews

Review books you have actually read, in your own words, and say what you think — a low rating written honestly is worth more to the next reader than a high one written to be kind.

Not allowed: reviewing your own book or arranging for others to do it; posting the same review repeatedly; personal abuse of an author; advertising inside a review. You can edit or delete your own review at any time, and only your own.

6. When something is refused

Some checks run automatically — on signup, on your profile and on uploads. When one of them stops you, we will tell you what kind of thing was wrong so you can fix it. We do not publish the exact rules, because the people those rules exist for would simply read them and adjust.

Automated checks get things wrong, and ours have. When we audited this platform we found rules that flagged genuine authors because their bio contained the word “specialist” or because they had linked their own Facebook page. Those rules were corrected before anything was acted on, and the lesson stuck: no account is ever removed by a script alone.

So if you are refused and you are a real person — tell us. Use the contact form, or reply to any email from us. A person reads it, and if a rule caught you wrongly we lift it by hand and fix the rule. You will not be asked to prove anything unreasonable.

An account we do remove is disabled, not erased. Your books, orders and royalties are untouched, and the account can be restored exactly as it was.

7. Changes to this policy

If we change what is allowed, this page changes with it. It is written to describe what our systems actually do, so it is updated whenever they are rather than on a schedule.

Questions about any of this? Get in touch — the same form reaches us whether you are an author, a reader or neither yet.