Gate your manuscript behind your own NDA. Let agents read it clean — no watermark scrawled across your prose. And know the moment an agent opens or downloads it.
A finished manuscript is the most valuable file most authors will ever email. And email is exactly where control ends: you can’t tell whether an agent opened it, whether it was forwarded, or whether your query is sitting unread in a spam folder. Asking an agent to sign an NDA through a generic e-signature tool feels heavy-handed and slow — so most writers skip protection entirely and hope for the best.
Arkin Vault sits between your finished draft and the agent’s inbox. You keep the control, the proof, and a clean reading experience for the person you’re trying to impress.
An EPUB straight from Kindle Direct Publishing or Apple Books, a Word document, or a PDF. We render it for reading — there’s nothing for the agent to install.
Upload the confidentiality agreement you want signed — your wording, or your lawyer’s. Arkin Vault is not a template shop and does not replace your DocuSign account for everything; it just makes NDA-gating a manuscript take one step instead of ten.
One unique link per agent — no account for them to create, no password. Revoke any link the moment a submission is dead.
The agent signs your NDA in the browser and opens the manuscript. You choose whether it carries a watermark; for a full read, turn it off so nothing sits across your prose. Every access is still recorded either way.
An email lands when the NDA is signed — and when the manuscript is first opened or downloaded. You know your work arrived, without sending a single “did you get it?” follow-up.
A diagonal watermark across every page is fine for a leaked-document deterrent and terrible for a 90,000-word read. Arkin Vault lets you keep the protection without the obstruction: gate access behind the signed NDA, deliver a clean, readable manuscript, and still hold a complete access record — who opened it, when, and whether they downloaded a copy. The evidence lives in the log, not smeared across your chapters.
Protection and readability are usually treated as a trade-off. For a manuscript going to an agent, they shouldn’t be — the agent needs to fall in love with the pages, and you need to know the pages arrived.
The Arkin Vault viewYou bring the agreement; Arkin Vault runs the workflow. The signed NDA is captured as a retained, reproducible record, and the completed signature is the condition that releases the manuscript. If you’d rather not gate a particular submission at all, send it as a simple acknowledged-receipt exchange instead — still tracked, just lighter.
Honest scope:
Whether it’s one dream agent or a submission list of thirty, we’ll show you the author workflow end to end — upload, NDA, private links, and notifications — in about fifteen minutes.
Book a 15-minute walkthrough