Effective date: 9 August 2026
Operated by: Sasha Marshall Arts, LLC, doing business as Lit Hype Squad
Contact: hey@lithypesquad.com
In these Terms, "we", "us", and "our" mean Sasha Marshall Arts, LLC. "Lit Hype Squad" is the name of the platform it operates.
You must be 18 or older to create an account. There are no exceptions and no accounts for minors, whether supervised or not. We may ask you to verify your age at any time, and we will suspend accounts we reasonably believe belong to someone under 18.
You need an account to join or run a Squad. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account.
Squad owners create and run Squads. There are two kinds of owner:
festival, launch party, or tour.
Readers cannot create Squads. We ask authors to verify before creating one — usually a link to a retailer author page, a publisher email address, or an ISBN record, and usually within a day.
Members join Squads, complete tasks, earn Hype, and redeem rewards. Joining is always free.
An account can be both a member and an owner. If you run an event Squad, section 3a applies to you.
You may not upload, host, post, or display sexually explicit images, video, or text on Lit Hype Squad. This applies to Authors, team members, and Members equally, in every part of the product: graphics libraries, marketing copy, banners, avatars, chat, application answers, and profile fields.
Specifically prohibited on our servers:
AI-generated imagery
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and law enforcement
Authors who publish explicit work are welcome here. Host that content on your own storage — your website, your newsletter platform, your reader magnet delivery service — and add it to your Squad as an external link. Mark it mature when you do. We will show Members a clear interstitial before they leave, and what happens on your storage is governed by your terms, not ours.
Every image uploaded to Lit Hype Squad passes through automated moderation before it becomes visible to anyone. Images that fail are not served. We may also review content manually.
Covers, teasers, and promotional graphics must be safe-for-work versions. Most Authors already maintain SFW variants for Instagram and TikTok; those are what belong here.
An event Squad promotes many authors at once, which means it distributes material none of its organizers own.
Every author on your lineup confirms their own materials. You add them to the lineup; they tick the box. Until an author has confirmed, you cannot upload a single graphic attributed to them, and you cannot tick it on their behalf — the platform will not let you.
An author can withdraw that confirmation at any time. When they do, their materials are hidden immediately. The Squad, its members, its calendar, and its Hype ledger are untouched, and the rest of your lineup is unaffected.
Event Squads must describe the event accurately: dates, venue, ticket status, and who is actually confirmed to attend. Listing an author who has not agreed to appear is a Terms violation, and it is the fastest way to lose the account.
We act on copyright complaints quickly. Assets are frozen rather than deleted so a mistake is reversible, and the Squad owner is told what was frozen and by whom. Repeated infringement ends the account.
Running a Squad for an author who has asked you not to is a Terms violation.
Hype may never be awarded for leaving, changing, or removing a review or rating, on any retailer or review site, ever. This is not a preference. It is a hard rule and the platform is built so that it cannot be broken:
flagged and held before it can go live.
We enforce this because Amazon's community guidelines prohibit incentivized reviews, and because the FTC treats undisclosed compensated endorsements as deceptive. Authors have lost titles, and readers have lost accounts, over exactly this. We would rather annoy you with a rewrite than get your book delisted.
Hype is awarded for shareable actions: posting a graphic, signing up for a newsletter, adding a title to a TBR, sharing a preorder, showing up on release day, attending an event, bringing a friend into the Squad.
Hype has no cash value, cannot be transferred between accounts, cannot be bought, and is not property. It exists inside one Squad and does not move between Squads.
Promotional copy provided through Lit Hype Squad carries a disclosure tag such as #gifted or #streetteam. Members must keep that disclosure when they post. Authors must not ask Members to remove it. This protects both of you.
When you publish a reward and a Member spends Hype on it, you have made a commitment. You agree to:
45 days if you state none
letting Members redeem something you cannot supply
Your Squad carries a public Trust Score derived entirely from your fulfillment record. You cannot edit it. You cannot hide it. Unfulfilled redemptions trigger escalating reminders and eventually affect your Squad's standing and listing.
Running out of stock happens. Ghosting your readers is a Terms violation.
Rewards on Lit Hype Squad are earned through participation, not chance. If you choose to run a random-draw giveaway, you are solely responsible for complying with the sweepstakes, lottery, and prize-promotion laws that apply to you and to your entrants, including official rules, eligibility limits, no-purchase requirements, and any registration or bonding obligations. We do not provide this compliance and we are not a party to your promotion.
You are responsible for shipping costs, customs, taxes, and any duties on physical rewards.
The Author who creates a Squad is its owner. Only the owner can:
These restrictions are enforced in the database, not just in the interface.
Do not share your login. Add your assistant as a team member instead and give them exactly the permissions they need. We record the IP address, approximate location, device, and time of every sign-in to your account so we can alert you to unfamiliar access and so you can revoke a session. See our Privacy Policy for how long we keep this and who can see it.
Deleting a Squad takes three steps and a 30-day hold, and every Member is notified when it begins. You can cancel at any point before the hold expires.
Lit Hype Squad does not collect legal names, phone numbers, or postal addresses, and does not ship anything. There is no address field and no fulfillment system for physical goods.
Rewards reach Members one of four ways:
retailer delivers it. The retailer holds the address; the Author never sees it and neither do we. This is the recommended route for anything physical.
Tracking numbers. An Author may record a carrier and tracking number against a redemption so the Member can follow their parcel. That number is typed in by hand. We do not query any carrier, so we never receive a destination address. The number is visible only to the Author and that one Member, and it is deleted 30 days after the Member confirms receipt.
Be aware that a carrier's own tracking page usually shows the destination city and postcode to anyone holding the number. Treat it accordingly.
Confirming receipt. Only the Member who redeemed a reward can mark it received. An Author cannot confirm their own delivery. This is what keeps a Squad's Trust Score meaningful when the platform is not handling the shipping.
If an Author posts something themselves, they are the controller of any address the Member gives them. Those obligations attach to the Author, not to us. Delete it once the item is sent.
Private messages exist between a Member and the Squad's team, visible only to that Member and to team members the Author has given messaging permission.
Private threads are deleted automatically 60 days after the last reply, either party can delete an individual message immediately, and a Member can erase their whole history with a Squad at any time.
Do not use private messages to request contact details you do not need, to pressure a Member, or for anything unrelated to the Squad.
As a Squad owner you can see a Member's display name, @handle, profile, social handles, wishlist link if they added one, birth month and day, and their activity in your Squad. That is the complete list.
Authors set their own Squad rules. Members must follow them. Authors and permitted team members may warn, suspend, remove, ban, or block Members for violations. Members are always shown the action taken and the rule cited.
Separately, we may suspend or terminate any account for violating these Terms.
Running a Squad costs $25 per month, or $200 per year — the yearly option saves you a third. Your first Squad is included. Each additional Squad is $10 per month or $80 per year, added from your portal and billed on the same cycle as your main subscription, so everything renews together on one invoice.
The price is the same for everyone. An author running their own team and a reader running a team for an author they love pay identically.
Every new owner gets 7 days free, once per account. One Squad during the trial.
A payment card is required to start the trial. When the seven days end, we charge that card the amount you chose — $25 for your first month, or $200 for your first year — automatically. You do not need to do anything for this to happen — that is what you agree to when you start the trial, and we ask for that agreement separately from the rest of signup.
We email you three days before the charge, with the amount, the date, and a link to cancel.
Cancelling during the trial costs you nothing. One click in your portal. Your card is never charged. Your Squad becomes read-only rather than deleted, and everything is waiting if you come back.
After the trial converts, the term you paid for is not refundable. Cancelling switches off auto-renewal: you keep full access until your current month or year ends, and we do not charge you again. We will not refund the period in progress. You can switch auto-renewal back on at any point before the term ends.
Renewal is automatic, monthly or yearly depending on what you chose. We email you before each renewal — 30 days ahead for yearly, 7 days for monthly with the amount and the date. Cancellation is always available online, from your portal, in the same number of steps it took to sign up. We will never require a phone call, an email to support, or a conversation with anyone to let you cancel.
Joining a Squad as a member is free and always will be.
Fees are charged in advance and are non-refundable except where required by law. We will give at least 30 days' notice before a price change affects your renewal, and a price change never applies mid-term.
If a Squad's subscription lapses, it becomes read-only. We do not delete Squad data for non-payment for at least 90 days.
You keep ownership of everything you upload. You grant us a license to host, store, reproduce, and display it as needed to operate the platform. Authors grant their Squad Members a license to share their uploaded promotional assets for promotional purposes.
You may close your account at any time. Authors who close an account with active Squads must fulfil or cancel outstanding redemptions first, or the cancellations are recorded on the Squad's Trust Score.
The platform is provided as-is. We do not guarantee Author fulfillment of rewards; the Trust Score is information, not a warranty. To the maximum extent permitted by law, our aggregate liability is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
We will give at least 30 days' notice of material changes to these Terms by email and in-product.
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Georgia, United States, where Sasha Marshall Arts, LLC is registered, without regard to its conflict of law provisions.
If you have a problem with us, contact hey@lithypesquad.com first — most things are resolved that way. Any dispute that cannot be settled informally will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Georgia, and you and we both consent to that venue.
Nothing here prevents you from bringing a claim in small claims court, or from reporting conduct to a regulator.