For Authors

Register for an account, then choose Become an author and we'll review the request. If you're approved, set up your author profile — pen name, bio, and links. Once it's created you'll have an author dashboard for submitting and managing books.

From your author dashboard, start a new book and work through the steps: details, genres, content ratings, cover image, and purchase links. Submit it for review and you'll be notified by email when it goes live.

To add picture to your author profile, login and go to your Author Dashboard. Click on the menu item for your profile there. The top item is where you'll add your picture. It displays as a circle on the homepage and as a square on your author profile page, so you may want check how it looks in both places.

You choose a level (0–4, or Not rated) for each content category for your book. Honest ratings are the heart of Spotlight on Indie — they help the readers who want your kind of book to find it.

If your titles were imported from elsewhere, you can claim your author profile. Set up an account, go to Claim author, find your name, and confirm by email to take over managing your listings.

Yes. Set up your series first in the Author Dashboard. Then, in each book's details, select that series and the number order in the series.

Submissions are checked against our guidelines before publishing. You'll get an email when your book is published or if we need more details.

No. If you are a debut author, your book will remain in review until we can find enough details to satisfactorily determine whether it is a fit for our catalog. This may take some time after the publication date.

In the Account menu, go to the Author Dashboard. On the left side menu of the Author Dashboard, go to the Books item. There, you'll see a list of your books. Click the "Edit" link to update that book's details, content ratings, cover, or buy links whenever you need to.

Those spots are available as paid advertising. Contact us to inquire about scheduling a featured spot for your book!

This is assigned by the site administrator when we're sure that an author account is an actual author.

One page visit can create several buy clicks. A page view is counted once when someone opens a book's page. But that same page shows multiple "Buy" buttons (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.). If a visitor opens the page once and clicks two or three of those buttons, that's one page view but several buy clicks. Clicking the same button more than once counts each time too.

Authors testing their own links. We intentionally don't count an author viewing their own book page (so they can't inflate their own view numbers). But if that author clicks their own "Buy" buttons to check the links work, those clicks do get counted. So an author checking their own links added buy clicks without adding any views. On a newer book with light traffic, even a little of this flipped the ratio. As of July 27, 2026, this was updated so that authors clicking these links on their books will no longer have those clicks counted and inflating the numbers.

Revisited or shared buy links. Once someone has clicked through to a store, returning to that link later (from a bookmark, browser history, or a link shared in an email) counts as another buy click, but there's no fresh page view to go with it.

If your book was accepted, it is listed in the catalog. However, covers that might be considered inappropriate for a general audience are flagged to not be eligible to appear on the homepage. The standards for the homepage are no profanity, no sexual imagery/poses, no nudity, no occult symbols, and no dark, demonic imagery.

The featured video only embeds YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook video links at this time. Also, make sure the video on YT is set to public or unlisted and that the link you've entered in the featured video field of your book details is complete, including the https:// in front of it.

At this time, only videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or Facebook links embed in the listing pages.

As for what you can use, we suggest book trailers or author interviews. However, you might want to feature a sample of your audiobook, if you have one.

Our YouTube channel is available for hosting short author videos, such as book trailers, along with any that we create for the site. Let us know if you'd like us to host your video to embed it in your book's listing.

The 99c and Free tags are tags that will tell the filters for deals to show your book, as well as add the tag to the book throughout the platform.

To change it, go to the Author Dashboard -> Books and edit your book. Find the Pricing field and you'll see three options: Regular Price, 99c, and Free. This is where you change the deal tags on your book.

If you've been waiting on approval, be sure you complete the submission process by going through every section of the book details and clicking the submit at the final section. Rejections will show up in your Books section under "Rejected"; be sure to look at the reasoning.

For existing authors, you can check the status of your books in the Books section of your author dashboard. If you see your book as "draft" under status, you haven't finished the process.

If your cover image is an issue, make sure your filename has no spaces in it. The system is fussy about filenames. If that's not the problem, check that the size and format match the fine print under the cover area of the book submission/update form.