The following is a chapter from Business for Breakfast, Volume 1: The Beginning Professional Writer.
The ebook is available from Amazon, Kobo Books, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, and the paper version is available from Createspace.
However, if you’re like most writers (broke!) I will also be posting a chapter a week, so you’ll merely have to have patience to read all twelve chapters.
Chapter 2
Property
For your writing business, what do you create?
I know, I know. Stories. Novels. Worlds. Intergalactic government plots. Descriptions of pure love that leave your readers in tears.
All of that may be true.
But those are all the writing side of that creation.
What do you create in terms of the business?
This chapter describes the concept of intellectual property, as well as introduces some of the important concepts around copyright.
Copyright, the Beginning
First of all, I recommend that you read The Copyright Handbook from NOLO Press.
Yes, it’s a huge tome. Maybe alternate your reading of it with this book and tackle it twenty minutes at a time.
I know a writer who opens that book at random once a week, when she has a couple of hours to spare. She’ll find a specific aspect of copyright that interests her, then she’ll do a deep dive of that topic to thoroughly understand it.
Whatever your method, as an artist/writer, you must understand copyright. This is not something you can pass off to your business partner or agent.
Let me put it this way, when you “sell” a story, what exactly are you selling?
For your business, how can you sell something if you don’t know what it is you’re selling?
The Subdivision
Kudos to Dean Wesley Smith for coming up with the subdivision metaphor.
When you make the decision to start writing, you have just sectioned off a subdivision; that is, a large piece of land on which you are about to build houses, flats, and parks.
Every time you write a short story or a novel, you are building a house in that subdivision.
If you write many books in a series, you might want to think about it as developing a neighborhood in that subdivision.
A building, on a lot, is a physical piece of property.
Every story or novel you create is also property, but it’s called intellectual property.
In many ways, intellectual property is treated identically to physical property.
When you “sell” a short story or a novel to a publisher, are you actually selling the property?
No.
(That is, not if you’re smart and you haven’t signed away all your rights in the contract. But going into depth about contracts is beyond the scope of this book. It may be covered in detail in a future Business for Breakfast volume.)
What you are doing is licensing rights to the publisher for a specific amount of time.
The publisher pays you for that license.
They do not own the property.
They are merely renting a particular house in your subdivision.
Again, watch your contracts to make sure that they can’t make changes to that house without your written approval. (These are often referred to as moral rights.) This would include being able to complete rewrite your material without your approval or review.
You also need to be aware of competition clauses in contracts, so that you can continue to build similar houses in that subdivision or neighborhood.
Apartment Buildings (or Flats)
To continue with the metaphor, sometimes instead of an individual house you end up building a larger building with many individual rooms inside of it for rent.
Only one person can rent an single room at a time.
But all those rooms can be rented.
That is, you can individually license the audio rights, the German language rights, the screenplay rights, T–shirt printing rights, roleplaying game rights, etc.
Each of those forms of your work is an individual room you can rent in that one property.
Again, watch your contracts. Make sure that you’re not giving away the entire building when you sign a contract.
Form
Copyright is based on the form of the work. That is, once you commit a work to a format, such as when you save an electronic file, it is automatically copyrighted.
NOTE: There are some exceptions to this. Recent court cases have not accepted backups to a cloud as being copyrighted. Print is still king.
This means that the copyright for an electronic work is separate for the copyright for a printed work, etc.
It is no longer required that you must specify Copyright © by XXX DATE. For a few years, back in the 1980s, it was. If that attribution was accidently left off your book, the material automatically entered public domain.
However, it’s still a good idea.
And remember, you’re copyrighting the form.
When you create a print–on–demand book, you can specify the following:
Interior design copyright © by XXX DATE
Registration
In the United States, you can also register your copyright. There are other conventions in other part of the world to accomplish the same thing—you’ll need to look up what is legal where you live.
Registering your work is different than merely copyrighting your material.
The difference has to do with how the courts treat your work if someone tries to steal it, which is also called infringing.
You can claim statutory damages if your work is registered.
In the United States, this means that the court can fine the person who has stolen your work for every copy produced.
For example, if the person who stole your work produced an electronic copy, and thousands of copies were purchased, the court could charge them for every single copy that was sold, between $750 to $30,000 per copy.
Does it makes sense to register every single piece of work you produce?
Probably not. It costs money and takes time.
When should you register your copyright?
My rule of thumb is to register longer works (i.e., novels) and any property that I think is an office building, not a simple house.
That is, if I think a property has more than one room I can easily license, I’ll register the copyright.
In the United States, the site for registering your copyright is: http://copyright.gov/eco/
Signing Away Rights
You can only sign away your copyright.
There must be a signed agreement between the parties.
HOWEVER.
The courts have accepted the Terms of Service agreements, the online kind that nobody except copyright geeks like me read as signed agreements.
You might want to start paying attention to those agreements before you automatically scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.”
In addition, in the United States, at this time, the only place where verbal agreements are legally binding are in California.
So be careful if you’re talking on the phone with someone from Hollywood. There are unscrupulous people out there. They might claim at a later date that the twenty–minute conversation you had about your cats was actually when you verbally told them they could produce your work for nothing, that you verbally gave them your copyright.
In Conclusion
These are the three things you need to remember about property:
- In many ways, intellectual property is treated the same way as physical property. Every story or novel you create is another house in your subdivision.
- Copyright is by form, which you can specifically register for greater protection against someone stealing (infringing) your work.
- You can only sign away your copyright.
This book is available from Amazon, Kobo Books, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, and the paper version is available from Createspace.