Stories Program Terms

You can write if you are 18 or older, live in India, and have an IndianBL account that is at least a few days old (the exact age is shown when you try to join). One account per person. IndianBL staff — editors and admins — can't write for the program, because they review the stories.

You write under a pen name. Your email address and account name are never shown with your stories. A pen name must be your own invention — not a real person's name, a creator's name or someone else's pen name — and one that is abusive or misleading may be reset.

IndianBL Stories is for true stories from your own life, or ones you have the permission of the person they belong to to tell. Every story is read by an editor before it goes live, and so is every edit to a published story. Editors may approve a story, ask for changes, or decline it, at their discretion; we never promise that a story will be published.

A story can't:

• identify anyone who hasn't agreed to be in it — real names, workplaces, schools, addresses or details people would recognise;
• include contact details of any kind — phone numbers, emails, UPI IDs, links or social media handles;
• be sexually explicit, or describe anyone under 18 in a romantic or sexual situation, in any form;
• attack, demean or harass anyone, or any group of people;
• promote a product, a page or a channel, or be copied from somewhere else.

When you send a story for review you confirm that it is true, yours to tell, and follows these rules. A story found to break them later can be removed.

You keep the copyright in everything you write. By publishing on IndianBL Stories you give IndianBL a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, display and distribute your story on IndianBL.com, and to show its title, pen name and a short excerpt when promoting it — for as long as it is published here.

You can unpublish or delete a story at any time. Deleting it removes its text from our systems straight away; copies that other people saved, or that search engines cached, are outside our control. What the story had already earned stays yours.

Readers' engagement with your published stories earns you money at the rates shown on /stories: a like, a comment long enough to count, and a share. Each reader earns you each of these once per story. A share counts only when someone else opens the link that was shared.

Engagement doesn't earn when it is your own, when it comes from IndianBL staff, or from an account that is too new — it still shows on your story, it just earns nothing. A story can earn up to its cap, you can earn up to the monthly cap across all your stories, and the program has a monthly budget; when one of these is reached, engagement stops earning until it resets. Rates, caps and the budget can change; a change applies from then on, and engagement already counted keeps the value it had.

Earnings are added to your balance overnight and stay pending for the hold period shown on /stories before you can withdraw them. During the hold, earnings from engagement that turns out not to be genuine — or from a story or comment removed for breaking the rules — can be taken back. Earnings are not wages, and writing for the program is not employment.

Your earnings go into the same IndianBL earnings account as IndianBL Scouts rewards, and are paid the same way: once your available balance reaches the minimum, you request a withdrawal to a UPI ID in your own name, and the IndianBL team pays requests on the weekly payout day. The minimum, the payout day and how payouts work are set out in the Scout Program Terms and shown on your Earnings page.

Earnings are your income and may be taxable; you are responsible for your own taxes. Until tax deduction and PAN collection are in place, earnings are limited by the monthly cap.

Earnings must come from real readers. Buying or trading likes, comments or shares, using more than one account, bots or scripts, asking people to engage in return for money or favours, and opening your own share links on other devices are all against these terms.

When we find engagement that isn't genuine we void it — even after the hold, in which case your balance can go below zero and new earnings offset it first. We can also suspend a writer while we look into it, or ban them. Forfeiting a balance is reserved for established fraud, and you'll always be told what happened and why.

Readers can comment on and report stories. Enough reports that a story identifies someone, involves a minor or is sexually explicit hide it until an editor looks; other reports wait for review. You can hide comments on your own stories. Staff can remove stories and comments that break the rules, and we tell you why.

If you think a decision was wrong, write to hello@indianbl.com within 30 days and a different member of the team will look at it again.

We keep your pen name, bio, stories and their versions, the attestations you gave when joining and submitting, and what your stories earned. Readers who comment without a pen name appear as an anonymous “Reader” with a number. To keep engagement fair we store hashed network addresses and a random browser identifier — never the address itself — and delete them after 90 days.

You can download your stories data from your writer profile at any time. Money records are kept for the period the law requires, even after you leave. More in our Privacy Policy.

You can leave the program whenever you like. Your published stories are unpublished (not deleted — if you return, you can publish them again), anything waiting for review is withdrawn, and your balance stays yours to withdraw. Deleting your IndianBL account deletes your stories' text.

We may pause the program, close it to new writers, or change these terms. A material change raises the version at the top of this page, and you'll be asked to accept it before your next story or withdrawal. If the program ends, earnings that have finished their hold will still be paid.

Write to hello@indianbl.com. We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within 15 days. To report a story or a comment, use Report on the story page.