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Contributor Agreement

Version 2026-06-20 · Booked Up Media Ltd

Welcome, and thank you for wanting to write for The SEM Dispatch. This is the agreement between you and Booked Up Media Ltd (company number SC832128), a company registered in Scotland whose registered office is at 5 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH2 4AN, and which publishes The SEM Dispatch. We have written it to be read, not skimmed past, because the relationship works best when both sides know exactly what they are getting. You bring the hard-won, first-hand experience and the words; we bring the platform, the audience, and the editing and design that make your work look its best. Here is exactly what each of us is signing up to, in plain English, and we think it is a good deal. The full licence terms live in this agreement, so if you have also read the licence summary in our website Terms, treat this document as the complete and controlling version, and where this agreement and our website Terms differ on what a contributor agrees to, this agreement governs.

What we provide

  • A credible, bylined platform. Your name sits on your work, in front of a real and engaged audience of working performance-marketing professionals, not a content mill and not a passive readership.
  • Distribution that actually reaches people. We publish your article on The SEM Dispatch website, feature it in our newsletter where it earns the spot, and promote it across our social channels, so it reaches readers well beyond your own network.
  • Professional editing and fact-check support. A human editor reads every piece properly and works with you to sharpen it, and our house design makes it look genuinely excellent on every screen.
  • Profile-building that compounds. You get your own author page and a growing portfolio of published work in one place, plus progression through our contributor tiers, Bronze, Silver and Gold, earned by your body of work over time rather than by who you know.
  • A permanent, well-kept home for your writing. Your article stays in the The SEM Dispatch archive, properly attributed to you, where readers and search engines can find it long after publication.
  • The freedom to keep building on the work afterwards. You may republish your own articles elsewhere once they have run with us (we simply ask for a credit), and you can ask us to take a piece down through the removal process below.

The licence you grant us

First, the important part, stated plainly, because it is the part people most want to hear: you keep your copyright. Nothing in this agreement transfers ownership of your work to us. We are not asking you to sign anything away. What you give us instead is a licence, which is simply your permission to publish and make the most of your article. The licence is broad, because running a publication needs it to be, but it is non-exclusive, so you keep the right to use your own work too, and it is never a transfer of copyright. You remain the author and the owner; the licence is just the mechanism that lets a real publication do its job and keep the doors open. The licence is what a working publication needs to publish, promote, syndicate and fund your article, and in return you get the platform, the editing, the distribution and the profile set out above, so the arrangement runs both ways. And if we do not take a piece forward, this licence simply never starts for that piece: you are free to do whatever you like with it.

You grant Booked Up Media Ltd a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, perpetual and irrevocable licence, for the full term of copyright and any renewals or extensions, to use each article we publish, or that we approve and then proceed to publish, together with any images or other material you supply with it. That licence covers the right to copy-edit and lightly edit the article for clarity, accuracy, house style and length; and to publish, reproduce, store, distribute, display, syndicate, translate, format, promote and otherwise make commercial use of and monetise it, in whole or in part, across The SEM Dispatch website, the newsletter, our social channels and the permanent archive, and in the formats and on the platforms we use to publish and distribute the publication now or in the future. It includes the right to create and run excerpts, compilations, collections, round-ups, best-of selections and translated editions; the right to place advertising and sponsorship around and alongside the article, and, where clearly labelled as such, within the page that presents it, and to keep the resulting revenue, which is what funds the platform, editing, design and distribution we provide to you for free; and the right to grant sub-licences of any of these rights to third parties, including syndication, distribution, aggregation, platform and content-licensing partners, so your work can reach a wider audience. Any partner we sub-licence to must keep your byline and must not misrepresent your work as anyone else's, on the same terms we hold ourselves to, and a sub-licence we have granted continues in accordance with its own terms even if this licence later ends, so partners can rely on the rights we passed on. You also agree we may use your name, byline, the professional biography and author photograph you supply, and your likeness as it appears in that photograph, to credit your work and to promote the article and the publication, including in our marketing and on third-party platforms, for as long as the licence lasts; we will not use your image in paid advertising creative without asking you first. You can also ask us at any time to stop using your photograph and likeness in our active marketing going forward, and we will; this does not affect the byline credit on your published articles or material already in circulation. Because the licence is non-exclusive, you keep every other right yourself and stay free to use your own work elsewhere. In particular, the licence continues after you stop writing for us or close your account, so the article can remain in the archive; asking us to take a piece down (see the removal process below) does not revoke, end or narrow this licence, it only changes whether we display the article on the surfaces we control. This licence binds your successors and is not affected by any later licence or assignment you grant to anyone else. We will not sell or assign your copyright, because it remains yours throughout.

Your promises

  • The article is your own original work, written by you.
  • You have the right to submit it and to grant the licence set out above, and doing so does not break any agreement you have with anyone else, including an employer or a client.
  • What you have written is accurate to the best of your knowledge and is grounded in your genuine first-hand experience as a practitioner, not borrowed, second-hand or invented.
  • The article does not infringe anyone else's intellectual property, breach any duty of confidentiality you owe, defame anyone, or otherwise break the law.
  • Where your article names or identifies other people, or includes their data, screenshots or quotes, you have the right to use that material, and doing so does not breach data-protection law, anyone's privacy, or any confidence you owe. Please anonymise client data unless you have permission to identify it.
  • The thinking is yours: the ideas, the analysis and the judgement are your own, not generated by an AI tool. You may use AI to help tidy or proofread your wording, but the substance must originate with you and must never be machine-written work passed off as your own.
  • You have disclosed to us any commercial interest relevant to what you have written, for example a product you sell, a client you work for, or a tool you advise on, are paid by or have a stake in, so we can handle disclosure properly.
  • Moral rights. You keep your moral rights in the article, and we will always credit you as the author and will never present your work as someone else's. So that we can edit lightly, run corrections, translate, format and present the article, and run advertising and sponsorship around it as described above, and so that we can publish it without a byline if you ask us to in writing, you agree (to the extent the law allows) not to assert your moral rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 against us or our sub-licensees in respect of those specific, good-faith uses, and not for any other purpose. We will not change the substance of your argument without talking to you first.

Your rights

  • You keep the copyright in your article. Always. You are and remain its author and owner, and the licence above never changes that.
  • If we do not take a piece forward, the licence never starts for it, and you are free to do whatever you like with that work.
  • You are free to republish your own work elsewhere after we have published it. We just ask that you credit The SEM Dispatch as the original place of publication and, where you can, link back to it.
  • You can ask us to remove or unpublish your article at any time, and we will handle any reasonable request fairly and promptly under the removal process below.
  • You can ask us at any time to stop using your photograph and likeness in our active marketing going forward, separately from any removal request, and we will do so; your byline credit on your published work stays in place.
  • Your work stays attributed to you. We will keep your byline on the article and credit you on your author page and across the surfaces where it appears, except where you have asked us in writing to publish without attribution.

Editorial control and removal

The SEM Dispatch is an edited publication, so editorial control sits with us. We may copy-edit and lightly edit for clarity, accuracy, length and house style, and we may decline to publish a piece or remove one we have already published if it no longer fits the publication or the standards we hold to. Editing for length never changes the substance of your argument, which we will not alter without talking to you first. We will always edit in good faith, and if we decide not to publish, or to unpublish, we will tell you why where we reasonably can. On removal: you may ask us to unpublish an article at any time by emailing info@byltmedia.com. We will consider reasonable requests and, where we decide to honour one, we will use reasonable efforts to take the article down from the surfaces we control, normally within a few working days, and we will ask our syndication partners to do the same. Removal is at our discretion: we are not obliged to remove an article, and we may instead retain it, for example in the archive or where legal, accounting or contractual commitments to partners require it. We may also remove or amend a piece on our own initiative, for example to correct an error, to comply with the law, or in response to a credible complaint, including where a person named or identified in an article raises a credible objection or exercises their data-protection rights, and we will let you know when we do. Because of how the open web and our syndication partners work, taking an article out of public view does not revoke, end or narrow the licence you granted, and it does not require us to recall copies already distributed, syndicated, cached or held in the archive; we cannot guarantee that caches or quotations held by third parties disappear the moment a piece comes down. After a removal we honour, we will not make any new use of the article on the surfaces we control, beyond keeping or covering the copies already in circulation as described above.

Payment

Contributions to The SEM Dispatch are unpaid unless we have agreed otherwise with you in writing. Writing for us is about the platform, the audience, the distribution, the editing, the design and the profile it builds, and we are upfront about that. If a particular commission or arrangement does carry a fee, we will set it out in writing before you file, and those written terms will sit alongside this agreement rather than replace it.

Liability and indemnity

Because we are relying on the promises you have made above when we publish, you agree to cover us for the reasonable, direct losses, costs and claims that arise from a breach of those promises, for example a copyright claim over material you supplied, a privacy or data-protection claim over someone named in your article, or a defamation claim over something you wrote. This indemnity is meant to be proportionate and fair, not punitive. It applies only to losses that actually flow from a breach you knew about or ought reasonably to have known about, so an innocent, reasonable mistake is handled through our good-faith editing and corrections rather than a full indemnity. Any amount you owe us under this indemnity will be reasonable and proportionate to the loss actually caused by your breach. It does not extend to anything we add or change in our own editing or to our own acts, omissions or decisions; any legal costs we recover are limited to those reasonably and properly incurred; and we will take reasonable steps to keep losses down. We will tell you promptly about any claim, give you a fair chance to be involved in how it is handled, and not settle it in a way that admits fault on your part without talking to you first; and we will not seek to recover under this indemnity any amount we agreed to pay a third party without first giving you a fair opportunity to comment. The indemnity does not apply to anyone who was under 18 at the time they submitted the article. In short, you stand behind your own work, and we stand behind ours. Where this agreement and our website Terms differ on what a contributor agrees to, this agreement governs. The promises you have made and this indemnity continue in force in respect of any article we have published, and survive the end of this agreement, the closing of your account, and any cancellation, for as long as the article or any copy of it remains in circulation. This indemnity does not affect any statutory rights you have as a consumer, and nothing in this agreement limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

In closing

That is the whole arrangement, and we think it is a fair one: you keep your copyright and your freedom to reuse your work, and in return we get the room to publish, promote and run your article the way a publication needs to. Your right to change your mind: because you may be agreeing to this as a consumer, you have a legal right to cancel within 14 days of agreeing, by emailing info@byltmedia.com. If you expressly ask us to publish your article before the 14 days are up (submitting it for review counts as that request), you agree we may begin straight away, and you accept that once an article has been published the cancellation right no longer applies to that article and the licence over it continues as set out above. We handle your own personal data, your name, byline, biography, author photograph and any correspondence, as the data controller, in line with our Privacy Policy, which explains your rights and how to exercise them. The UK GDPR applies to all personal data we handle. If anything here is unclear, or you would like to talk a clause through before you sign, just email us any time at info@byltmedia.com. We would always rather have the conversation. This agreement is governed by the law of Scotland, and the courts of Scotland will have jurisdiction, though if you live elsewhere in the UK you may also be able to bring proceedings in the courts of the part of the UK where you live. You confirm you are at least 16 years old. If you are under 18, you confirm a parent or guardian has read this agreement and agrees to it on your behalf before you submit, including the indemnity above, and we may ask for written confirmation. We are genuinely glad to have you writing for The SEM Dispatch, and we are looking forward to your first piece. Welcome to the masthead.

See also our Terms and Privacy Policy. Questions about this agreement: info@byltmedia.com.