Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy covers your use of the Novel Maestro platform and services. We are a team dedicated to building the world's best developmental editor, and a core part of that mission is ensuring you maintain complete trust in how we handle your work.

The data controller for your personal information is Large & Stoker Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17448669, whose registered office is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Novel Maestro is the name we trade under. In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean Large & Stoker Ltd.

2. Information We Collect

We collect information to provide and improve our services. This includes:

• Account Information: Your name, email address, hashed password, and preferences (such as your dialect, theme, and colour palette).
• Manuscript Content & Analysis: The text of the novels or stories you upload, along with your notes, character profiles, story foundations, and everything derived from it by AI (including read results, developmental reports, recommendations, and your own corrections).
• Product Usage Analytics: We record a small set of product events on our own servers (such as account creation, manuscript uploads, read completions or failures, report generation, workshop sessions started, upgrade redemptions, and account deletions). These records contain only an account or project reference and non-identifying facts (such as a word-count band or plan tier). They never contain manuscript text, titles, or message content.
• Purchase Records: When you buy access, we store a record of the purchase — what was bought, the amount, the currency, and the reference our payment provider gives the transaction. We never see or store your card details; those go directly to our payment provider.
• Gift Purchases: If you buy Novel Maestro as a gift, we store your name and email address so we can send you the code and help if anything goes wrong, together with the recipient's name and email address and any message you write for them. You do not need an account to buy a gift — where you buy as a guest, the email address you give us is the only identifier we hold for you. If you are the recipient of a gift, the details above were supplied by whoever bought it.
• Newsletter Records: If you subscribe, we store your subscription record, including the consent timestamp and the IP address from which the consent came, to maintain a compliant audit trail.
• Security & Abuse Prevention: IP addresses are used briefly to rate-limit registration and login attempts.
• Support Correspondence: Feedback submissions (which include your display name, email, user agent, and the page URL you were on) and inbound emails to our support address are stored so we can assist you.
• Error Logs: We record failures and errors, which may reference your user or project ID, to help us investigate and resolve platform issues.

3. Legal Bases for Processing

Under UK and EU data protection law, we rely on the following legal bases to process your data:

• Performance of a Contract: To provide the core service (analysing manuscripts and delivering feedback) as outlined in our Terms of Service.
• Consent: For our newsletter, which you can withdraw at any time.
• Legitimate Interests: For platform security, abuse prevention, error logging, providing customer support, and measuring visits to our website. This also covers the occasional email about Novel Maestro itself to writers who registered and uploaded a manuscript, where we offered you the choice to decline it when you signed up and you did not. You can stop those at any time by replying to say so, or by using the unsubscribe link they carry.

4. How We Use Your Information

Your data is used strictly to deliver and improve Novel Maestro. Specifically, we use it to:

• Deliver our core service: running deep diagnostics and generating developmental feedback.
• Analyse manuscripts using third-party AI models to power Maestro's tools.
• Understand how the product is used and where it helps or fails writers (our legitimate interests in improving the service).
• Communicate with you regarding your account, security updates, or billing.
• Write to you occasionally about Novel Maestro itself, if you uploaded a manuscript and did not decline this when you registered. Rarely, and you can stop it at any time.
• Investigate faults and answer your support requests.

5. Manuscript Data & Staff Access

Your manuscript is private by default. It is encrypted in transit and stored on managed, access-controlled infrastructure.No other user can see your work, and we do not share your manuscript with the public or unauthorized third parties. Most importantly, your manuscript is never used to train AI models.

A small number of authorised staff may access account and project metadata—and, where necessary to investigate a fault or answer a support request, the content itself.

6. Data Sharing & Sub-Processors

We do not sell your personal data or your manuscripts to advertisers or anyone else. We only share information with trusted sub-processors required to deliver the service:

• Floot: Provides our platform framework, database, file storage, and email delivery via Amazon SES. (Location: US)
• Anthropic: Analyses manuscript text using the Claude models. (Location: US)
• Google: Analyses manuscript text using the Gemini models. (Location: US)
• Plausible Analytics: Counts visits to our website — which pages are viewed, where visitors arrived from, and their browser, device type and country. It uses no cookies and stores nothing on your device, does not identify individual visitors, and does not track you across other websites. (Location: EU)
• Paddle: Takes payments and is the merchant of record for every purchase, which means Paddle is the seller on your receipt and handles billing, tax and refunds. Paddle collects your payment details and billing country directly; we receive only the transaction record. (Location: US)

Paddle is an independent controller of the payment information you give it. Its own privacy notice governs that data, and a request about your card or billing details is one only Paddle can answer.

Manuscript content is sent to Anthropic and Google purely to produce your analysis. Under the paid API terms we use, they do not use your data to train their models.

7. International Transfers

Some of our sub-processors are located outside the UK and European Economic Area (EEA). When transferring your data to these providers, we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or EU Standard Contractual Clauses, to ensure your information remains protected.

8. Data Retention

We retain your data for specific periods depending on its purpose:

• Account & Project Content: Kept until you explicitly delete the project or your account.
• Deleted Content: A novel you delete comes off your shelf immediately and is kept recoverable for 30 days, so that a deletion made by mistake can be undone on request; after that it is permanently purged along with everything attached to it. Deleted chapters, scenes, notes, and characters are purged on the same 30-day basis. Deleting your account erases everything at once, with no recovery window.
• Authentication Data: Sessions, OAuth states, and login-attempt records are cleared after 30 days.
• Analytics Records: Product usage events are covered by the same retention and deletion rights as the rest of your account data.
• Support & Errors: Support correspondence and error logs are kept for a limited period and then purged.
• Newsletters: Unsubscribing removes your record, leaving only a minimal suppression list to ensure we don't email you again by mistake.
• Purchases & Gifts: Kept as long as we are required to keep a record of the sale. Deleting your account removes your name and email address from any gift you bought, but not the record that the purchase happened — and it never cancels a gift code somebody is still holding. Where you were the recipient, your details are removed once the code has been claimed.

9. Cookies & Local Storage

Novel Maestro uses strictly necessary HTTP-only session cookies to authenticate you and keep you logged in. We also use your browser's local storage to remember your interface preferences (such as your theme, sidebar state, and view settings).

We do not use advertising, tracking cookies, or cross-site tracking. To understand how many people visit the site and where they come from, we use Plausible Analytics and our hosting platform's built-in visitor statistics. Both are cookieless: they store nothing on your device and do not identify you personally. Because nothing we store on your device is used for tracking, we do not display a cookie consent banner.

10. Security

We protect your data using industry-standard practices, including encryption in transit, hashed passwords, least-privilege staff access policies, and hosting on access-controlled managed infrastructure.

11. Your Rights

Under data protection law, you have extensive rights over your personal information. You have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict, object to the processing of, or port your data, as well as the right to withdraw your consent at any time.

You can exercise many of these rights directly using the in-app export and delete tools. For all other requests, email us at support@novelmaestro.com, and we will respond within one month.

If you bought a gift without creating an account, those tools are not available to you, because there is no account for them to act on. Email us instead from the address you used and we will deal with your request by hand. We deliberately do not offer a self-serve route here: an unauthenticated one would let anybody look up whether a given email address had bought something.

12. Complaints

If you have a concern about how we handle your data, please contact us first so we can try to resolve it. If you remain dissatisfied, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

13. Children's Privacy

Novel Maestro is not intended for users under the age of 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we become aware that we have inadvertently collected such data, we will take immediate steps to delete it.

14. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as our service evolves. If we make material changes, we will notify you via email or through a prominent notice on the platform before the changes take effect.