Copyright Basics

Copyright law can be confusing, so it’s easy for first-time authors not to realize they’re violating it. However, it’s important for authors to appreciate the importance of abiding by copyright law, no matter how irksome it may seem. Luckily, you can get started by learning a few basics.

What Copyrighted Material Is

Material published before December 31, 1922, has passed into the public domain and is therefore fair game (with proper attribution, of course). If your book contains newspaper articles, poems, song lyrics, long sections of text quoted from books or magazines, pictures, or photographs of others (even if you took them), you must acquire permission to use them or be in violation of copyright law.

Material You May Not Realize is Copyrighted

Just because the material is quoted in other works, don’t assume it’s fair game. If the quote is under copyright, the author most likely acquired permission to reprint it. The permission will be listed in the acknowledgments, on the copyright page, or in a section of the book dedicated to listing quotes that were “reprinted with permission.”

Unpublished work is still subject to copyright law, as long as it’s in some fixed form (such as letters, diaries, etc.—electronic forms count too). Obtaining permission to use these works can be tricky. If the author of the work is known and alive, then he or she can be directly appealed to. If the author is dead, then his or her legal heirs are the rights owners. If the author is unknown, a reasonable effort must be made to locate him or her. Even so, a reasonable effort may not protect the new work if the author shows up after its publication.

The copyright for an author’s previously published work, such as freelance articles for journals, magazines, or other publications, likely belongs to the publisher, not the author (unless their contract stipulated otherwise). The author will need to request permission from the publisher to reprint the material or risk legal repercussions.

And finally, for public domain works translated after 1922, the specific translation is protected by copyright law. An example is a modern translation of the Bible, such as the New International Version.

Basics about Fair Use

So, you have some copyrighted material in your book. Don’t worry just yet; the material may fall within the boundaries of the Fair Use clause.

Fair Use allows you to quote another person’s copyrighted material without obtaining permission, provided the quote does not represent a large percentage of the work as a whole (and you provide proper attribution). This means that quoting song lyrics and poetry under copyright without permission is never acceptable. Here are some basic guidelines that are generally considered fair use:

• Material quoted from a book that does not exceed three (3) paragraphs or one hundred (100) words, whichever comes first.
• Material quoted from an article that does not exceed one (1) paragraph or thirty (30) words, whichever comes first.

The caveat is that what constitutes “fair use” is up to the judge of the copyright infringement case. Material quoted for the purpose of promoting academic knowledge is usually granted more leniency than material quoted for aesthetic or inspirational purposes.

Acquiring Permission to Reprint Copyrighted Material

Okay, so the material in your book is under copyright law and doesn’t fall within the Fair Use boundaries. Don’t panic. You’ll just have to petition the copyright holder for permission to reprint the material.

A good resource for discovering who owns the copyright to a work is the U.S. Copyright Office web site. There you can learn more about copyright law and search copyright records. Copyright.gov has a complete listing of all copyrighted materials printed after 1977. Records for materials printed before 1977 are a bit spottier, so you might have to contact the U.S. Copyright Office for official information.

If your book has been accepted for publication, your publisher will have standard forms for obtaining permission from the copyright holder. If your book is as yet unpublished, you can find basic permission forms on the web, or you can contact the web site, magazine, newspaper, or publishing company who printed the material and ask about their permissions process.

(See our previous post about common copyright myths.)

Today’s blog was brought to you by Erin Werley, editing intern.

Book Signings: Part II

This article is the second in a series. If you missed part one, find it here: Book Signings: Part I.

Now that your event is scheduled and your publisher and publicist have all the information, you need to be sure nothing falls through the cracks. Bookstore managers and event coordinators are busy people and may not follow up with you when they have ordered the books or listed the signing on their calendar. While you shouldn’t call them every day (and make them regret inviting you), for your own sanity you should follow up a few times to make sure everything is on track.

6. First follow up

Four weeks before the event, follow up with the manager to see if they have any questions for you and to make sure they have purchased (or are planning to purchase) your book. If they are willing to let you leave postcards or flyers with information about your signing at the store, drop those off around this time as well. Sometimes stores will place these at the registers or drop them in the bags of their customers.

7. Second follow up

About two weeks before the event, check in again to make sure the store has ordered your books and that they have arrived. If the books haven’t arrived and there was an issue, let your publisher know so that they can look into it.

Be sure to also confirm your plans for the signing with the store at this time. Rather than sitting at a table with a big pile of books, you should plan some type of warm-up event to engage the store’s customers. A speech, discussion, song, puppet show, or skit will help draw more customers to your table and make the event more fun (and easy) to promote.

8. Getting ready

A week or two before your event, send an e-mail or letter out to all of your local family and friends and encourage them to spread the word. Crowds draw more crowds, and it’s a nice comfort to know there will be some friendly faces in attendance.

If this is your first book event, you should rehearse what you will be reading or discussing so that you have some main talking points. Don’t forget to gather your materials (props, costumes, giveaways) ahead of time as well.

9. The day of the event

If you haven’t visited the store before, get good directions online and find out how long it should take you to get there (considering traffic). You should show up ten to fifteen minutes early. Too early and you will be in the way. Too late and they may worry that you’re not showing up (not to mention that it’s unprofessional). When you arrive, make sure you check in with the event coordinator.

During the event, be sure to smile, make eye contact, and talk with everyone. If you have a long line of people waiting for books, don’t talk too long to each person but be sure to build some connections. Bring a notepad so that people can sign up for your mailing list. If people are not waiting in a line and no one is approaching you, walk around the store and engage customers. Also, if any books are left over after the event, offer to sign them. The store may put “autographed copy” stickers on them and award them a special display.

Best of luck with your events! Let us know if you have any other tips that authors will find useful.

The next posting in this series will focus on signings from a bookstore’s point of view.

Dialogue Punctuation: Part II

Welcome to part two of our series on dialogue punctuation. In this second installment, we’ll get into some finer points of grammar as well as some style considerations. Be sure to read part one, which covers the basics, if you haven’t already.

5) A change in speaker is best indicated by starting a new paragraph. This makes it easier for a reader to keep track of who’s speaking and makes the story feel like it’s moving faster (big blocks of uninterrupted text can intimidate a reader).

6) Commas in dialogue can be used with more flexibility and expression than in regular text because they reflect natural pauses in speech (and speech isn’t always grammatical). However, there are still some set rules to follow.

Commas always set off a direct address:

“Mrs. Jones, won’t you sit down?”

“Hey, Dad!”

“Shut up, stupid.”

Commas follow “oh” and “ah” only if a pause is intended (which is the same as an exclamation or question mark):

“Oh, I didn’t realize.”

7) Speaking of direct addresses, in dialogue, proper names, kinship terms, and titles are capitalized in a direct address. However, nicknames and endearments are not.

“Good morning, Sherriff.”

“But, Mom, I really can’t talk right now!”

“Come here, sweetheart.”

8) Em dashes (—) are used for interruptions and abrupt stops in dialogue, but avoid overuse or your dialogue will appear choppy.

“Well, I thought maybe we could—”

“No.”

9) Ellipses indicate long pauses (think about five seconds). However, like em dashes, avoid overusing this device. A line of narration or some other action is usually a better way to make the reader really “feel” the pause.

“What happened to the baby?”

“I don’t know…I was asleep,” the young boy said.

An example of demonstrating the same emotion without using an ellipse:

“What happened to the baby?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said, avoiding eye contact with the woman. “I fell asleep.”

Clean dialogue makes for better-read dialogue, which is the first step in making it effective. By using these few, simple rules, your dialogue will transform from elementary to superior, leaving your editor to concentrate on higher-level issues.

(Today’s blog brought to you by Kate Oncken, editing intern.)

Cover Me Badd

There are lots of ways to design a good book cover. So many ways that, in blog form, the advice would require a 250-part series. Instead, I’ll take the easy way out and focus on what makes a bad book cover. Here is a list of cardinal book cover sins.

1. Do not put a picture of yourself on the cover.

Yes you may be very attractive and yes you want people to recognize you, but unless they already recognize you (i.e., you are a celebrity), you should save your picture for the back. Your cover should easily convey what your book is about. A photo of you will not do this. “But I’m writing a memoir—it’s about me.” Yes, but a reader can’t tell that your life story is captivating just from your picture. Other graphical elements are better at piquing interest. However…

3. Do not use more than three graphic elements on the cover.

Space on a book cover is limited. Don’t try to get around this by making your graphics tiny and numerous. Research says consumers decide in the first eight seconds of seeing a book cover whether they are going to purchase it or not. If you have five pictures on the cover, your potential reader will have moved on before they’ve reached the fourth. But excessive graphics are just one manifestation of my next point:

4. Do not try to tell your story on the cover.




Any one of the pictures on the above cover would be better than all of them together. Covers should be representative of the book, but completely recreating your complex story in thirty-five square inches is impossible. Any attempts will just leave your readers confused. Speaking of confused…

4. Do not make the cover hard to understand.






















What’s going on here? Is it a book about Space? Brains? Planets? Space-Brain-Planets? I have no idea and, after seeing this cover, no interest in finding out. Your cover should be easily, if not immediately, comprehensible.

5. Don’t use unprofessional-looking artwork on your cover.

This painting is not terrible—it’s much better than I could do—but the quality isn’t high enough to warrant making it your book’s primary sales tool.

Committing any of these transgressions can be enough to ruin a cover; just imagine if someone employed all of them at once. Oh wait, you don't have to, someone already did.

Dialogue Punctuation: Part I

So you’re convinced that you’re the dialogue master, and then your editor sends your manuscript back. The pages look like they’ve been hit by a red-ink bomb. It’s not the dialogue, your editor explains, it’s the punctuation. But before you consider jumping out a window to end the pain, behold! Hope presents itself in the form of a blog. Let’s go over the basics of dialogue punctuation to ensure your character's wit isn’t obscured by errant commas and periods.

1) The number one thing to remember when punctuating dialogue is that, despite the quotation marks, normal sentence punctuation rules apply. In other words, if you were to remove the quotation marks, the sentence should read, grammatically, like a regular sentence. For example:

Let’s go, he said. (right)

Let’s go. He said. (wrong)

The second example is wrong because “he said” is not a complete sentence. So, when choosing between a comma or a period at the end of a line of dialogue, determine whether the text that immediately follows is the beginning of a new sentence or not. This rule gets trickier when a dialogue tag (he said, she asked, etc.) is inserted in the middle of the line of dialogue:

I’m not sure, she said, that I will be able to sleep tonight. (right)

I’m not sure, she said. That I will be able to sleep tonight. (wrong)

I’m not sure, she said. You will have to look it up. (right)

Again, the second example is wrong because the beginning and ending half of the line of dialogue form a complete sentence. In this case, the dialogue tag should be treated like a parenthetical statement. In the third example, however, the dialogue that occurs after the sentence tag is the beginning of a new sentence.

2) Punctuation that belongs to the dialogue always goes within the closing quotation marks. Period.

“Dialogue is a pain,” he said. (right)

“Dialogue is a pain”, he said. (wrong)

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“What do you mean,” she asked? (wrong)

3) Exclamation points and question marks at the end of a line of dialogue act like a comma if the text following the quotation mark is part of the overall sentence (see rule 1). This means the first letter is lowercased, unless it’s a proper noun.

“I will not go with you!” she said. (right)

“I will not go with you!” She said. (wrong)

4) In American writing, double quotation marks indicate speech. However, when a character is quoting a line of text, or something of that nature, the quoted material is enclosed by single quotes.

“Shakespeare once wrote ‘to be or not to be.’”

When using single quotes, commas and periods always go inside of both the single and double quote, as in the example above. However, exclamation points and question marks only go inside the single quotation mark if they belong to the quoted material.

“He said, ‘I want a pony for Christmas!’”

“Did he say, ‘I want a pony for Christmas’?”

These are just some of the basic punctuation rules. Keep an eye out for part two, when we’ll discuss internal comma use, em dashes, ellipses, and some basic formatting and style suggestions.

(Today’s blog brought to you by Kate Oncken, editing intern)

Survey Says...

While perusing the internet this morning, a recently released poll conducted by Random House/Zogby International caught my eye. This survey examined people's reading habits, and I wanted to share a few interesting tidbits:

- 82% of respondents said they prefer to curl up with a printed book over using the latest in reading technology

- Just 11% of respondents said they are comfortable reading books in other formats, such as online or with an e-book reader or PDA

- 43% of respondents said they somewhat often head to a bookstore knowing exactly what they want, while nearly as many (38%) very often head to a bookstore with a particular book in mind

- For nearly half (48%), the first thing that draws them to a book while browsing in a bookstore is the subject, followed by the author (24%) and the book's title (11%)

- More than half (52%) admit to judging a book by its cover

You can read all of the results here.

NPR comments on Returns

On the way to work this morning, I heard this story, "Publishers Push for New Rules on Unsold Books" by Lynn Neary on NPR's "Morning Edition."

The story discusses the dreaded book returns practice, which started during the Great Depression, and how B&N's CEO has called for change. It also featured how booksellers, publishers and distributors deal with returns. The story also features one of our distributors, National Book Network. For more on returns, check out The End of Returns.

What are your thoughts on the future of returns?