Authors and their publishers are partners. But partners need clarity regarding their rights in a relationship. As an author working with a publisher, you have the right to review and approve: If your publishing contract does not include these elements, ask that they be included. Even if your signed publishing agreement does not include these…
Publishers are under profit pressure. Like many such businesses, they have responded by merging, eliminating redundancies, automating processes, and offshoring to save labor costs. Authors are creative. Most have no experience in publishing processes; even those who’ve written a book or two will be like be encountering some elements of the process for the first…
What’s the difference between fair use and piracy? Fair use is when I use your content. Piracy is when you use my content. That sounds like a joke. It’s not. It’s how people behave. And if the entity alleging piracy is a large company, it’s a business model. I touched on this Wednesday. But the…
After a year of study and more than 10,000 comments, the US Copyright Office issued its second report on AI and copyright. This report attempts to address the question of when works created with AI tools can be copyrighted. (A third report, to be released later, will address the contentious issue of the legality of…
Newsletter 79: American tech pirates want protection from Chinese tech pirates, patent examiner crisis, data infrastructure erosion, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Nobody whines louder than a disrupted disruptor Chinese AI model Deepseek has thundered onto the scene, competing effectively with existing players like OpenAI and Meta while using far…
There’s a simple trick I use with every author or prospective author I work with: I treat them like an author. My meeting invites always have titles like “Talk about your book.” My project plans include titles like “Stages in the development of your book.” I always refer to them as authors. Every first-time author…
The em-dash (—) is getting a lot bad press these days. Writers overuse it, and not coincidentally, so do AI language generators. An em-dash is a perfectly reasonable piece of punctuation, but if you’re going to use it, you might need a little more detail on when and how. So here’s a tutorial on the…
If your book stinks, I can’t make it great. But if your idea is awesome, maybe I can. I get hired as an editor by all sorts of people. They bring me a manuscript — or sometimes, just an idea and a chapter or two — and say “Help me.” I have all sorts of…
These are the rules for working with writers and editors in a way that demonstrates good manners. If you follow these rules, everything will be efficient and run smoothly. If you do not, professional writers and editors will curse you and your descendants. (Yes, I’m writing this today because I’m annoyed at some people.) The…