Common Myths About Copyright

November 19th, 2010

Jane Smith, over at How Publishing Really Works, is doing a blog carnival on the topic of copyright in order to help spread the word about the issues in this area. I thought I might contribute my top 10 errors I hear made about copyright and intellectual property.

Myth #10: If I pay the site where I find the download, I’m not pirating.
Maybe. There are on-line stores that pay the distributors or producers of the video and music that they offer. There are others that don’t. You need to be very careful about this. Especially so, because many of the pirate sites not only charge you for material that isn’t theirs to sell, but also install malware on your computer as part of the bargain. Or steal your identity. Or . . .

Myth #9 Sending your manuscript to yourself in a sealed envelope is enough to establish your copyright.
This is just plain wrong. You have copyright as soon as you create the work, but you really can’t effectively defend it until you register with your national copyright agency. (In the US, that’s the Library of Congress Copyright Office.)

Myth #8: Anything that’s out of print is up for grabs.
Nope. Copyright extends for the life of the creator plus 70 years. And for corporate owners, it’s a similar length of time.

Myth #7: It’s hard to clear permission to use all or part of a work.
Sometimes, but not usually. There are agencies whose purpose is to help with this process for many types of work. For example, if you want to use part of a literary work originally published in the US, you should start by checking with the Copyright Clearance Center. Most of the ones you’re going to want will be there. Of course, you’re probably going to have to pay the owner for the rights you want, but the prices are usually quite reasonable. Failing that, you should contact the original publisher. Most of them have whole departments that do nothing but clear permissions.

Myth #7: Images you find on Google are available for your use.
They’re easy to steal, but they’re still under copyright, and you still need permission. And, of course, if you try to print them, the chances are pretty good that the resolution will be inadequate for your use.

Myth #6: Anything under 300 words is fair use.
Maybe, maybe not. For example, if the work is a poem or song, any use requires permission. (Other than listing the title in order to identify which work you’re talking about, or listing very short pieces in a review or piece of literary criticism.)

Myth #5: Fair use is clearly defined, and you can look it up and be safe.
Definitely not. Fair use is a defense your attorney can use if you’re sued. By then, you’re already spending more than you can afford. It’s better to clear permissions if there’s any doubt at all.

Myth #4: As long as I use proper attribution, I’m not violating copyright.
This confuses plagiarism and copyright violation. Giving other writers credit for their work may keep you out of trouble with your teachers when you’re writing a term paper, but it’s nothing like enough if you’re publishing.

Myth #3: Obscurity is a greater danger to writers than piracy. They actually gain sales from the exposure.
I know of one publisher who has sold 5,000 copies of a book that has been downloaded 250,000 times. I’m quite sure that there are other examples. Yes, some bodies of work become more popular after samples are given away. Other works sell more after free copies are available in another format (e- vs. print, usually). But this is a choice that should be left to the owners of the rights. Let them make a mistake if necessary, but recognize that this is their work, their livelihood, and their choice.

Myth #2: No real people are getting hurt in piracy. It’s all big business with tons of profit anyway.
This is so wrong, it’s funny. There are 100,000 publishers active in the US alone. Less than 100 of them (1/10 of 1%) are what anyone reasonable could call a big business. And none of them are rolling in money. And then there are the authors. Most of them are making less than minimum wage for their hours spent creating the work you want to use. Give them their due.

Myth #1: If it’s on the web, it’s free for use unless it’s behind a paywall.
Absolutely not. The law says that they have the right to control your use of it regardless. So does morality. Think:

Someone (or many people) worked hard to make it available to you in that one place. They’re giving it away in that one place for a reason. Kids may want attention, and nothing more, but they rarely create anything you’d want to use. The folks who are creating the “good stuff” deserve to be able to get what they want from you when they’re giving you that “good stuff.”

You don’t know what they want until they ask. Many will allow you to use an article with their byline and credit lines attached. Others want money, or links, or an ad beside it, or . . . . The only way to be fair is to ask.

So, those are my top ten myths. What are your favorites? And where did I err?

Posted in For Authors | 7 Comments »

Estimating Sales, Part V: A Technical Issue

November 4th, 2010

I often refer people toMorris Rosenthal’s Graph of Sales Rank vs. Sales for Amazon. It’s the best I’ve found, and an admirable resource.

A commenter on Estimating Sales, Part III was having difficulty with the logarithmic nature of that graph. So, rather than answer the question in a very loooong comment, I’m adding it as a post.

Logarithmic graphs are used when a curve is complicated and hard to handle on a regular graph. We use them to straighten out the line, or remove one level of complexity from our attempt to get the formula for the line.

That’s the why of them, but the question was how do we use them. Our needs are simpler than a scientist or engineer’s.

To use the Amazon Sales Rank Graph, you need to know that each order of magnitude (1, 10, 100, and so on) starts with a large distance between one number and the next, and the lines get closer and closer together as you approach the next one.

The lines between 10 and 100 are 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and so on, even though they’re never numbered. You can interpolate between those lines, using logs yourself, but we don’t want to do that.

Why don’t we? Because we’re estimating sales based upon historical data. The numbers aren’t very accurate in the first place. Our average sales rank isn’t. The implications of that rank aren’t (across years and seasons, and the vagaries of Amazon’s programmers).

So what do you do? Suppose that your book’s comparables are all in the range of 50,000 sales rank. Count forward from the line for 10,000 or back from the line for 100,000 (or both). Run down that line, and find where it crosses the red curve. As I write this, that point is also where curve crosses the horizontal line for 20 books per week. It’s actually not quite at the corner, but we’re not going to interpolate for further accuracy on the graph.

In fact, we’re not even going to multiply by 52 weeks per year to get annual sales. Just use 50. It’s close enough. (And better to be under than over!)

So, that’s how you duck the complexities of the log scales. If you are interested in more information about logarithmic graphs, I recommend the Wikipedia article on the subject.

I’m not really sure that I made myself clear above. If you have a question I didn’t clarify, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll take another try at it.

Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | No Comments »

Need to Know?

October 5th, 2010

“Everyone who (fill in the blank) needs to read my book!”

It may be true, and often is. Unfortunately, this statement is also a signal that the writer (or even the publisher) is probably headed for grief. I have seen it over and over again.

I’m sure you’ve heard consultants, including me, say that you should identify a group of people who share a need for the information you have, or whose emotional needs will be fulfilled by the story you want to tell before you publish your book. If that’s true, what’s the problem with our first sentence then?

[If you would answer that in the comments section, before you go on, we'll all learn more from each other . . . Don't be worried about getting a different answer than the one I'm about to give. There aren't any wrong answers here.]
. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

My answer:
The most common reason that our first statement signals trouble ahead is that it doesn’t look at what the reader sees as his or her needs, but at what an outsider sees as the problem and the answer.

There’s often a very large gap between what an objective outsider sees going wrong and what the person in the middle of the issue thinks the problem is. Sometimes we’re too emotionally invested in a position or approach to see the situation clearly. Sometimes we’re too busy to look for the roots of the problem, as we frantically try to deal with the symptoms. And there are other reasons why insiders may see the problems and their needs differently than you do.

Whatever the reason, the successful author and publisher needs to think about not what the reader should want, but what the reader does want to know. Once you’ve drawn them in, then you can continue on to show them a more comprehensive solution, but you must first offer the bait that will set the hook.

Posted in Common Errors, For Authors | 2 Comments »

Do Publishers Rip Off Authors?

September 14th, 2010

Most people reading this know that it’s very rare for publishers to deliberately shortchange their authors on royalties or other obligations. (NB: Mistakes do happen, but that’s different.)

And almost all of us are aware that it’s not only wrong, but also generally pointless, and extremely rare, for a publisher to “steal your idea.”

The thought that does gain traction, though, is that publishers take the lion’s share of the profits on the books they bring out. So let’s look at where the money goes.

Let’s assume a typical non-fiction trade book in trade paperback format. (That is: a larger-sized paperback, on a general interest topic like those you might find in a normal bookstore.)

Let’s say that the price is $15.95.

The retailer buys it for about $9.57, maybe a penny or two less. (They have $6.38 to cover any discounts they give, their rent, payroll, utilities, and so forth, as well as a smidge of profit. And that’s not usually enough, which is why so many of them are going out of business.)

The wholesaler (and there usually is one in the mix) buys it for $7.18. (That is, they get $0.80 per copy to be in the middle between the thousands of stores and the tens of thousands of publishers — and that’s very slim, which is why there are only a very few of these folks left standing . . .)

Now, there’s either a distributor, or the publisher is large enough to do this function in-house. Either way, it costs something like $1.60 to $2.40 per copy to handle the orders, the picking, packing and shipping of books out of the warehouse, the storage of books in the warehouse, receiving the books into the warehouse from the printer, insuring them, and so on and on.

So, the typical trade publisher is going to see something like $5.18 out of that $15.95. Well, that’s a lot more than the author gets, isn’t it?

Oh, but wait: we still haven’t printed the book, paid the author, or any of the rest.

So, the typical tradepaperback is going to cost something like $2 to print.

And, preparing the manuscript for the printer (cover design, text composition, editing, copyediting, proofreading, and such like) will cost at least $3,500, and maybe $5,000. Let’s suppose that this book sells 7500 copies. And it cost $3750 to prepare. That’s $0.50 per copy.

A typical trade non-fiction tradepaperback royalty is 7.5% of list price on the first 5,000 copies, 8.5% on copies 5,001 to 10,000, and 10% of list price thereafter. On 7500 copies, the author will earn $5,981.25 on the first 5,000 copies, and $3,389.38 on the next 2,500, for a total of $9370.63, or $1.25 per copy on average.

Marketing will have cost the publisher something like $0.26 per copy.

Total direct costs (and I’ve been pretty minimal here) are: $2+.50+$1.25+.26, or $4.01

So, before covering overhead (salaries, rent, etc.) or getting a penny of profit, the publisher has:
$5.18 – $4.01 = $1.17.
Note that a reasonable overhead might well be $1 per copy, so this publisher is making a princely $0.17 in profit on every $15.95 book.

Compare that to the author’s take: $1.25.

And realize that the publisher is not only contributing expertise and effort and all of that, but risking a minimum of $25,000 up front on this book. (Printing, prep, marketing and an author advance all have to be paid before the book is published, and aren’t refundable!)

I truly don’t think that this author has been ripped off.

What do you think?

Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | 6 Comments »

What Do You Get From Your Publisher?

July 12th, 2010

I keep hearing the question, “Why bother with a publisher? After all, authors are doing a lot of the marketing, and their work is the core of the book.”

My answer: Money, distribution, time and quality.

Money: You’re not risking your own money, and a publisher will invest a lot more than you want to risk. A trade book will usually cost more than $20,000 to launch. Yes, self-publishers can substitute time for money, and there are other ways to economize, but any commercial publishing venture takes a big old wad of cash.

Distribution: Even a modest-sized house will have better distribution than you’ll be able to secure on your own. Yes, anyone can sell online, even through the biggest sites, like Amazon. But that leaves a lot of potential sales and readers that you’re not reaching. You can trade volume for margin, but it’s a move that needs to be carefully examined.

Time: Publishing well is a lot more complicated than it seems. You can certainly learn to do it. There are even books on most parts of the process, and if you read three or four overviews, one or two on design, a couple on editing, three to five books on publicity and book marketing, and a couple on the general business aspects of running a publishing company, you’ll learn a lot of the basics, but that’s eleven to fifteen books, plus time to try the techniques and practice. By the time you’ve learned to publish at all well, you could have written another couple of manuscripts.

Quality: Most “civilians” don’t consciously see the difference between a pedestrian cover design and a good one, let alone the difference between a pro’s text layout and an amateurish job. But these “trivial” differences do matter in the end. They can make someone decide to buy or not to buy your book, on an unconscious level.

All the people who decide what gets onto the bookshelves can tell the difference at a glance. These standards are the way they are because they work.

So, yes, Virginia, you can self-publish successfully. There are even a few people who use one of the so-called “self-publishing companies” successfully. But your chances of getting a larger readership, or of getting a decent living, from the effort are much better if you sign up with an experienced publishing team.

So, that’s a very short answer to a very complicated question. Which points did I gloss over, or even get completely backwards? If you’re still with me after that last hiatus, you must have an opinion. Let’s hear it!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | 6 Comments »

How Big A Problem is Piracy?

March 12th, 2010

Do you sell electronic versions of your book? I do.

Have they been pirated? Mine was, even before I started any sort of marketing push.

From my reading, there appear to be 3 types of pirates:
–Those looking for profit
–The terminally naive or astonishingly ignorant, who don’t realize that they’re doing harm, much less breaking the law
–The misguided idealists who believe that they’re striking a blow for artistic liberty, freedom, against corporate villains, or some similar concept.

The profit motivated ones tend to have many of the same issues that legitimate publishers have — they have to find customers, and bring them to purchase their books. And they have to do so cost-effectively. That’s just one reason that they tend to focus on “big” books. Because they need volume, they’re also not all that hard to find and shut down. This is one place where significant enforcement assets will have an effect.

I believe that the terminally clueless tend to be large in numbers, but to download relatively few books. This is one way in which our industry is different from the music business. There are a lot more people interested in downloading music, and they’re likely to download many more songs. A song can be listened to in a few minutes, where a book, even a short one will absorb hours. And most Americans read no more than one or two books per year.

Those one or two downloads per person might amount to a very large number indeed, but it seems likely that most of those downloads are not cannibalizing sales, whether or e- or print books, that would have occurred without the easy availability of illegal copies.

Even if these people constitute a costly problem, finding and prosecuting them is problematic at best. This group is also likely to be willing to buy if the legitimate ebook is both easy to buy and inexpensive. And as time goes by, it may be that the relentless efforts of IP rights-holders will finally make a dent in the assumption that this is a harmless infraction, and not a real evil at all.

The misguided idealists, though, can provide a problem that is both hard to find and has a significant impact. These are people who may work as hard as any publisher, as a volunteer. (Just about the only way to drop personnel costs below those paid by publishing is to use volunteers, as we all know to our sorrow!) They crack DRM, they scan books, and they generally upload masses of material without thought of compensation. They’re hard to identify, because they’re not looking for compensation, and may well have rafts of pseudonyms. It can be hard to tell that all of these different identities resolve into a single entity worth catching.

These people can be stopped only by persuasion or by denying them access to distribution channels upon which they rely. Many of them reason from a radically different set of assumptions or values than those that motivate the book publisher, or the author. Of course, some people hold their minds open to persuasion even by those with whom they disagree most. But most people simply discount and reject arguments that threaten cherished beliefs. This guarantees that persuasion will be less effective than we would like.

Unfortunately, the impact of the sincere zealot can be significant. Even when the cost of tracking down illicity uploads and issuing takedown notices is non-trivial, we may need to engage in it.

Each of you may want to crunch some numbers and come up with an estimate of the number of uploads/downloads required to make an impact on your bottom line, and the size of the customer base for each pirate haven that makes that number of downloads likely, in order to judge where you should search for these copies, and how much effort you should expend on getting them removed.

Personally, I use something like my marketing campaign-based sales estimation technique to make these decisions.

How do each of you handle this?

Do you see another breed of pirate out there?

How do you assess the severity of the issue?

And do you have any other topics you’d like to see me respond to?

Posted in Publishing Answers | 5 Comments »

Guest Post: There’s More To Book Layout Than Meets the Untrained Eye

February 1st, 2010

By Michele DeFilippo, owner
1106 Design
www.1106design.com

Michele is a frequent contributor to many of the publishing lists and email groups, so, when I knew it was time to discuss design, I asked her to pitch in. Thank you, Michele!

We’ve heard the question many times, “Should I layout the interior of my book myself?” Seems like a no-brainer. You have word processing software. You know how to set margins and choose a typeface. You even know about books that describe the process (written by folks who are not trained in typography by the way). So why shouldn’t you layout your own book?

Of course you can and should use your word processing software to write your text, but interior design and formatting are best left to people who do this for a living. Why? Because there are a lot more details involved in page composition than you’d think.

For starters, word-processing software does not have the sophisticated hyphenation and justification controls that professional page layout software does. This results in tight and loose lines that are unsightly and that distract the reader. And even if you were to buy page layout software, there is a very steep learning curve. It’s a mistake to assume that no knowledge of typography or design is required to use it effectively. As the saying goes, “Owning a hammer does not make one a carpenter.”

There are several dozen conventions to be followed in book design that may not be perceptible to the reader, but when followed, they give your book a polished appearance. But it’s not only about knowing the rules, it’s knowing how and when to bend or break them on a case-by-case basis that makes the difference between an amateur layout and a professional one. These decisions must be made quite often when the words in the text don’t cooperate with the page geometry.

Quality typesetting has never been about the tools. Experienced typesetters rarely use software at the default settings. We adjust the settings for better results, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, line by line, and even word by word. Why? We were trained to see the difference between “so-so” type and great type.

For what it’s worth, only beginning self-publishers consider using a word processor for page layout. Established publishers wouldn’t think of producing the text in this way. They know that experienced book designers bring real value to the table, offering creativity and aesthetic judgment that only comes with training and experience.
When we show customers the difference between their attempt at book layout and our own, they are usually blown away. They’ll say something like, “Wow! I thought my layout was just fine. Now I see how bad it really is!”
Here’s a current before-and-after example. IC_Book_Orig.pdf is the client’s attempt at book layout, and IC_Book_Designed.pdf is our design. (You may want to open or print both PDFs to compare the pages side by side.) See the difference? In addition to a much better look and the elimination of giant spaces between words in the original, professional typesetting saved 5 pages from the original’s 19 (more than 25%), thus reducing the client’s printing costs significantly.

It’s been clinically proven that quality typography improves reading comprehension. More importantly, an amateur job won’t satisfy the distributors, reviewers, and book retailers, the “gatekeepers” of the book industry, who will immediately spot a beginner’s efforts and reject your book as “self-published.”

Many people think that converting a word-processed file to a PDF is all the printer needs. That’s true. But it’s not all that YOU need. Printers won’t turn away a PDF that was made from a word-processed document. They’ll print your book because that’s what they’re in business to do. Their success is measured in how many books they print. Your success, on the other hand, is measured in the number of books you sell.

Your book design, inside and out, establishes your credibility in the eyes of the buyer. Buyers may not be able to pinpoint exactly what is wrong, but without a professional interior design, your book will not measure up to those that are professionally prepared. For the success of your new publishing endeavor, we hope you’ll give this issue some serious thought, and choose an experienced book designer to give your book the professional look it deserves.

Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | 13 Comments »

The Profitable Publisher — A new E-Book Series

January 12th, 2010

Hello all,

I have finally (!!) released the first ebook in my new series. Yes, the series name is The Profitable Publisher. This first entry is subtitled: Making the Right Decisions. It’s short (maybe 40 pages, if you printed it out), so it shouldn’t give your brain indigestion.

I’d like to think that it should help any publisher make more money from all of your books. If you are moved to purchase it (from Amazon, or elsewhere as it comes out in other markets), do please let me know what you think?

Tags: , ,
Posted in For Authors, General Comments, Publishing Answers | 4 Comments »

My First Ebook is Launching

December 22nd, 2009

If you’re a frequent visitor here, you might want to keep an eye out: I’m teetering on the edge of releasing my first ebook in a series. None of them will be long: this one’s about 33 pages of text and 13 pages of spreadsheets and charts illustrating the techniques.

I’ve found that this is about the length at which the eyes roll back in the head and the brain shuts down, so why go longer??

I hope that any of you who grab a copy will like it. I’d love to hear what you think. (And if you email me with an error or confusion, I’ll send you a free copy of the next work in the series!)

Posted in For Authors, Me, my life, and this blog, Publishing Answers | No Comments »

Ebooks: What We Lose With Them

December 19th, 2009

Ebooks are wonderful things. I love them. I read on my Kindle, and on my Kindle app on the iPhone, and wouldn’t give them up for worlds.

With ebooks, we gain convenience and the ability to change font sizes. We gain on price and on environmental impact. We gain a number of obvious things. But we lose, as well, and some of the losses are less obvious.

We’re losing privacy, and we’re losing control of our books. We’re losing readability (both in terms of text design and in image resolution). And we’re losing barriers to entry, which is a two-edged sword.

Privacy: Some ebook readers already “phone home” and report what you’ve read and how far you’ve gotten in it. It’s not hard to imagine that this information could be used in many ways. Even if you’re reading on a device or an app that doesn’t seem to do this, it’s not hard to imagine hackers or security agencies that could install backdoors in your software that would allow them to monitor your activity. Paper books never do that. And it’s almost impossible to track your purchases at random stores, especially if you use cash.

Control: With a print-on-paper book, it’s very hard to take or damage your copy. With ebooks, someone else can take your copy without any physical contact with it. Amazon has already proven that they can pull your books back off the Kindle. Other ebook providers may or may not have the same capability.

Digital Rights Management techniques (DRM) also cuts into your control. It’s quite difficult to craft DRM that doesn’t prevent you from doing things that are within your rights, as well as those that aren’t. Certain types of copying are allowed, even by the most draconian interpretations of copyright.

Readability: Text design is an art that’s generally under-appreciated. But it doesn’t take long with a badly designed book before you realize that something feels wrong. It’s just harder to read, and often harder to understand. It’s not comfortable on the eyes. Something feels “off.”

But being able to change font sizes within a fixed screen size means that you text design and composition go out the window. Of course, the e-readers could come with a hyphenation and justification program, such as the modules that underpin TeX or InDesign, which would help enormously, but they don’t now, and they probably won’t in any near future. Who wants to wait for the text to be re-flowed when you change the font size? Who wants to pay more for the program or for the cpu size needed to run it?

Screen resolution on the Kindle is roughly twice what the resolution is on a computer screen, but it’s still only 1/2 to 1/4 what a printed book offers. And it’s black on gray only. The color screens of iPhones and laptops offer the lower dots per inch to offset their colors. It’s not as easy on the eyes.

Lower Barriers to Entry: The last loss I listed is the lowering of barriers to entry. This means that we gain ease of publishing. But as readers it means that we have a harder time finding the books we’ll enjoy. And as publishers it means we have a far harder time rising above the roar of the crowd to draw our readers’ attention. And that means that more new readers will experience fewer wonderful books in the short time during which they decide whether they “like books” or not. And that’s the worst loss to our literary community.

As usual, I invite you to tell me what I missed or messed up. The comments section doesn’t require registration, although it is moderated to reduce the flood of spammers.

Posted in General Comments, Publishing Answers | 10 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »