Private by design
AuthorAZ was built as a private author vault. Your books, manuscripts, metadata, notes, reviews, quotes, and publishing records stay on your device instead of being uploaded to an AuthorAZ account or stored in an AuthorAZ cloud.
This page is not the legal text — that is the AuthorAZ privacy policy. This is the mechanics: what actually happens to a file when you put it into the app.
The architecture
Most software privacy questions come down to one thing: how far your file travels. Here is the path a manuscript takes in AuthorAZ, and the path it takes in the conventional model.
The file is opened on the device, processed on the device, and stored on the device. There is no step in the middle where it leaves.
The file is transmitted, held, and processed somewhere you do not control, then sent back. This is a reasonable design for many products — it is simply a different set of trust assumptions.
What that buys you
Privacy claims are only useful when the consequence is stated. Each of these is a property of how the app is built, not a promise about how carefully we behave.
Normal use of the app requires no sign-up, no email address, and no sign-in. You open the app and start working.
There is no AuthorAZ profile holding your library, manuscripts, or publishing history — because there is no profile at all. Nothing to breach, subpoena, or hand over.
Books, manuscript snapshots, covers, metadata, quotes, reviews, and settings are written to a database on your device. AuthorAZ operates no servers that store your library.
Your phone or tablet may still be backed up by Apple or Google if you have that turned on. That is your device backup, run by your platform under your settings — not AuthorAZ infrastructure, and not something AuthorAZ controls or can read.
AuthorAZ does not use generative AI to read, rewrite, summarize, imitate, classify, or generate anything from your manuscripts. No author content is sent to a model by the app.
The manuscript tools are deterministic text processing: literal search, plain-text filters that surface candidate lines, and word/sentence counts. Nothing you write is used for AI training — by AuthorAZ or by anyone AuthorAZ passes it to, because it is not passed anywhere.
The mobile app ships without analytics, advertising, attribution, or crash-reporting SDKs. There is no event stream, no advertising identifier, and no behavioral profile of how you write or work.
AuthorAZ.com — this website — is an ordinary website and does use standard web analytics, described in the privacy policy. The app is a separate thing, built to a different standard.
The app database is encrypted on disk. It is not a plain file that another app, or anyone holding your powered-off device, can open and read.
The encryption key is generated on your device and kept in the operating system’s secure keystore, marked device-only. Technical detail is in the section below.
AuthorAZ is sold as a one-time purchase through the App Store or Google Play. There is no renewal date and no recurring AuthorAZ charge.
This is not an argument that subscriptions are bad. It is a specific promise: your locally stored author records do not sit behind a monthly payment to AuthorAZ, and no lapsed invoice can lock you out of your own book data.
Side by side
Cloud software is not a villain, and plenty of it is well built. The right-hand column describes what the architecture makes possible, not an accusation about any particular product. Read your tools’ terms and decide for yourself.
| AuthorAZ | Typical cloud software | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | On your device | May be uploaded to remote servers |
| Account | No AuthorAZ account | Commonly required |
| Library storage | No AuthorAZ cloud library | Provider-hosted library is common |
| Processing | On-device, deterministic | Server-side processing may occur |
| Generative AI | None | Varies by provider and product |
| AI training on your content | None | Depends on the provider’s terms |
| Behavioral tracking | None in the app | Depends on the provider’s architecture |
| Encryption | Local encrypted database | Typically in transit and at rest on the server |
| Continued access | One-time purchase; data stays local | May depend on the service continuing |
Follow the file
The honest version of a privacy page is a lifecycle, not a slogan. Here is every kind of thing you can put into AuthorAZ, and where it ends up.
Titles, subtitles, series, blurbs, keywords, BISAC categories, ASINs, ISBNs, pricing, page counts, and buy links. Copying a field puts it on your device clipboard so you can paste it into a retailer dashboard yourself. AuthorAZ does not submit anything to a retailer on your behalf.
The file is opened through the system document picker, parsed in the app, and reduced to plain text. Your original writing file is never modified and remains your working source. The snapshot is what powers local search, the line scanner, listening, and the health stats — all of it running on the device.
Search is literal text matching. The line scanner is a set of plain filters — short lines, dialogue, questions, chapter endings, emotional keywords, character names. Health stats are counts. None of it is a model, and none of it requires a network.
Reviews you paste in are your record of them. AuthorAZ does not fetch, monitor, or rewrite reviews from any retailer.
Quote cards, review cards, and carousel slides are deterministic templates — your content in your chosen layout, exported full-resolution and unwatermarked. The finished image is written to app storage, then you choose what happens: hand it to the system share sheet, or save it to your photo library. AuthorAZ asks for write-only photo access and does not read your existing photos.
The export is handed to the system share sheet, so the destination is your choice — a laptop, a drive, your own cloud storage, AirDrop. AuthorAZ has no involvement in where it lands and no copy of it. AuthorAZ cannot recover a forgotten backup password.
Under the hood
Everything above is a plain-language summary of the list below. Open whichever ones you care about.
The app stores everything in a single SQLite database inside its own sandboxed app storage: pen names, books, covers (including the image bytes), quotes, blurbs, reviews, retailer metadata, buy links, and manuscript snapshots. Screens read and write through a typed data layer rather than ad-hoc SQL, and the database is the only place app data lives.
The database is opened through SQLCipher, which applies AES-256 page-level encryption to the file on disk. Encryption is enabled in the app’s build configuration and applied as the first operation when the database is opened, so there is no window in which the file exists unencrypted.
On first launch the app generates a 256-bit key from the device’s cryptographic random source and stores it in the operating system’s secure keychain/keystore, scoped to this device only and excluded from cloud keychain sync and Android cloud backup. The key is never transmitted, never shown, and never written into the database file. A consequence worth understanding: a copy of the encrypted database moved to a different device will not open, which is why the supported way to move between devices is the encrypted backup export rather than a raw file copy.
A backup is a single .authoraz file: a small plaintext envelope (format version and key-derivation parameters) plus an encrypted payload holding the library. The payload is encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key derived from your password with Argon2id. A wrong password or any tampering fails authentication and the file is rejected. Restoring replaces the current library on that device, behind an explicit confirmation.
The app makes no API calls to AuthorAZ — there is no AuthorAZ server for it to call. Its source is checked against a rule that fails the build if network, AI, analytics, or in-app-browser hooks are introduced, and the iOS privacy manifest declares no tracking and no collected data types. What remains is the platform layer, and it is worth naming precisely rather than claiming the app is incapable of networking: the App Store and Google Play handle downloading the app, delivering updates, and verifying your one-time purchase through StoreKit and Play Billing, with no payment vendor of ours in that loop. Text-to-speech uses voices already installed on your device; additional voices are installed through your device’s own settings, not through AuthorAZ. And when you export a backup or save a card, the destination you pick — a drive, a chat, your own cloud storage — receives that file under its own terms. Author content is not part of any of the platform exchanges.
No authentication or account system. No analytics, attribution, advertising, or crash-reporting SDK. No AI SDK or model API of any kind. No cloud storage SDK. No third-party purchase or receipt-proxy service. These are enforced as a dependency blocklist, not just a policy.
One boundary worth stating plainly: no app on a modern phone is physically incapable of networking. The claim here is narrower and checkable — AuthorAZ ships no code that sends your author content anywhere, and runs no service that could receive it.
Straight answers
No. An imported manuscript is parsed on your device and kept as a read-only snapshot in the app’s encrypted local database. It is not uploaded to AuthorAZ, because AuthorAZ has no server to upload it to.
No. Your library never reaches AuthorAZ, and the local database is encrypted with a key held only in your device’s secure keystore. There is no support console, no admin view, and no copy of your work on our side to look at.
No. Your writing is never sent to a model, so there is nothing for AuthorAZ or anyone else to train on. No content is used for AI training under any circumstance.
No. Every manuscript tool in the app is deterministic: literal search, plain-text filters that surface candidate quote lines, and word and sentence counts. The card and carousel generators are templates filled with your own content.
No. There is no sign-up, no sign-in, and no email address required for normal use of the app.
No. The app contains no analytics, advertising, or behavior-tracking SDKs, and builds no profile of your activity. This website does use ordinary web analytics, which is described in the privacy policy.
In an encrypted SQLite database inside the app’s own storage on your phone or tablet. Exported backups and saved cards go wherever you choose to put them.
Deleting the app removes its local storage, including the library database, from that device. Anything you have already exported — a .authoraz backup, a saved card, your original manuscript files — is unaffected, because it lives outside the app. Export a backup before you delete or reset a device.
Yes. Export a password-encrypted .authoraz file containing your library, including cover image data, and store it wherever you like. Importing it on another device restores the library there, replacing what is currently on that device. AuthorAZ cannot recover a forgotten backup password, so keep it somewhere safe.
There is nothing to stop paying. AuthorAZ is a one-time purchase with no subscription and no renewal, and your data sits on your own device regardless. If AuthorAZ ever disappeared, the app you have installed keeps working offline and your exported backups remain yours.
Keep reading
One-time purchase. No account to create, no cloud to trust, no model reading your pages. Available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store and for Android phones and tablets on Google Play.