Understanding ISBNs and Copyrights for Authors

Interesting parts of the writing business, am I right? Yeah. They may not be quite as fun as some of the other stuff, but they are really important parts of the business to understand. And I field an enormous number of questions about this online, mostly in the 20 Books group. I find that a lot of newer writers and even older writers have some misconceptions about how this stuff works and what is best practice. So we're going to be going through a lot of that today. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to try and leave us a good block of time at the end for asking questions. So everybody who has questions, please save them. We'll have you line up at the mic and toss them out there. Quickly about me. My name is Kevin McLaughlin. I'm a multiple USA Today bestselling author. I've got almost 100 books out. I've been a full-time six-figure author for a long time now. I've worked in and around copyrights, typography, and the book business for over 30 years, long before I was an indie. So I have some background in this stuff which helps me make more sense of it than a lot of people do. We're going to start with ISBNs. This is the easy part. Before we really get into the ISBN and the things, how many people have already published a book here? Okay, how many people used a paid ISBN for your book? How many people used a paid ISBN for your e-book? Okay, we're going to talk about a couple of those things. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It was created in 1967 to assist bookstores in tracking their physical inventories. It has expanded over time, and now we use them for all kinds of stuff that they were never intended to be used for originally. E-books, audio books, a lot of digital products. And the main reason why that's still happening is because the large traditional publishers all have legacy royalty systems that are their royalty bookkeeping infrastructure is all based around the pre-ebook era still and so they have to assign an ISBN to everything otherwise they can't adequately track sales and hand us our royalties. This is mostly a traditional publishing thing however there are obviously really big Elements of this that are important for indie authors too. They're issued by one central body in each nation. This is usually government run, except in a few nations like the US, UK and Australia, where ISBNs are managed by for-profit companies. Those are the only three countries that I know off the top of my head where ISBNs are sold instead of given out to citizens. So if you're from Canada, if you're from Iceland, if you're from Norway, if you're from Germany... From France, you're not paying for your ISBNs, but those of us from these other countries, from the countries where it's for profit, are. There is a side component to that. We'll get back to that in a second. What is an ISBN not? They have nothing to do with copyright of the work. They have nothing to do with ownership of the work. They have nothing to do with who is the publisher of a work. No one ever owns an ISBN. They're licensed. So when we buy them, we're actually buying a license to use that number. We're not buying a number. And there's actually a lot of case law in the United States because back when CreateSpace was publishing a whole bunch of stuff and giving people free ISBNs, a bunch of people thought, well, I can get some easy money from Amazon, who owns CreateSpace, and sued CreateSpace as the publisher of the book. The problem is that the US courts have consistently, and UK courts, have consistently said that the owner of the ISBN is not the publisher. The person who causes, the person or company who causes a book to be published is the publisher. And so those lawsuits were literally just thrown out of court because they were invalid. You can't sue the printer for what the publisher did. Ownership of the ISBN does not equate to ownership of the work. So that's important because we hear all the time, well, you have to own all of your ISBNs because otherwise somebody else is the publisher, right? But that's not actually the case. Optimal use of ISBNs for indie authors. All right, basically, this is my little map here. Broadly speaking, most indie authors do not need to use ISBNs for e-books, nor is there a benefit for doing so. Broadly speaking, there are exceptions to this. Any ebook retailers or distributors who require ISBNs will issue them for free. So that means that if you're a wide author and you're releasing your ebook, When you drop it on Kobo, they're going to assign a number. When you drop it on Apple, they're going to assign a number. When you drop it on Amazon, they're going to assign an ASIN. These things are already in place. And you don't need to use a universal number for these things in most cases. The exceptions come in in two specific areas. And there's others too, but there's two main areas where there are exceptions. Exception number one is if you live in a country Where there's public lending rights. Canada is a great example of this. Always put an ISBN on your e-book if you're a Canadian citizen because PLR means that if the book has an ISBN, when it goes into their library system, anytime somebody borrows it, you will get paid. If you do not have your own ISBN, you will not get paid. You will not be able to take advantage of the PLR system. That's true in a lot of countries. Most of Europe has some form of PLR. Canada does. I know a lot of other countries do. The United States does not, so if you're a U.S. author, don't even worry about that. The other major exception is any type of publishing where readers routinely search for the book by ISBN number instead of by title. This is mostly stuff like college textbooks, where the college professor hands the students a specific ISBN so that they get the right edition. They don't want to get the 13th edition when their teacher is using the 16th, or something like that. So they hand out the specific ISBN so that the students get the right book. For any case like that, any kind of scenario where your ISBN, where your readers are going to be looking for the book by ISBN, the simpler you can keep it the better at that point. Use one ISBN for your ebook across all vendors, use a paid registered ISBN of your own and make it the same across all of them in that case. But these are exceptions. Most of the time, there's actually no benefit to using a paid ISBN for a novel, for the e-book, or for the audiobook. However, print is a little bit different. Print books was where ISBN started. That was the initial thing for them, and they're still in heavy, heavy use across all bookstores, including the online ones. The most optimal path for print is to use the same license ISBN at both KDP print and IngramSpark. Turn off expanded distribution. I'm reading this off because it's complicated. Turn off expanded distribution for KDP. Make sure to upload to both sites within 72 hours from each other to avoid the ISBN being locked. To expand on that, A lot of the time people will just upload their book to KDP. That's most of the time what I will do as well. To KDP Print does a great job. If you click the expanded distribution button, that means put it into the Ingram catalog, and I don't even have to pay for ISBN. They give me one, so I don't need to worry about that piece. However, if you are selling a lot of copies of your books to non-Amazon vendors, then you lose money every time somebody buys a KDP Print book. on Barnes & Noble or a KDP print book through any other bookstore except for Amazon. Ingram pays more than KDP for non-Amazon sales. KDP pays more than Ingram for Amazon sales. So a lot of authors who do a lot of print sales will do both. They'll do Spark and KDP print. And then it's optimal to use the same ISBN for both. And there's only one way to do that. and that's to go buy the ISBNs. The bid about 72 hours is important. Now one of the things we love about owning our own ISBNs is we can bring them with us, right? If we decide to go to a different printer at some point down the road, we can bring it with us, except that's not true anymore, because the way that Ingram and a lot of the other sites have set this stuff up is that they vet the ISBN by whether or not it's already in use. And the tool that they use to vet it by is Bowker's Books in Print, which means when you upload the book to Amazon and use your paid ISBN a year ago, and then you decide a year later you want to go upload it to IngramSpark, you're almost certainly going to run into a snag where you're not, they're going to tell you that that ISBN is already in use and you can't use it. Now, you have two choices at that point. You can go get on the phone with Bowker and you can spend the next... You can spend an extremely long period of time on hold trying to get them to unlock the ISBN, or you can just get a new ISBN, unpublish the old edition, and publish a new edition. I strongly recommend... option B if you ever find yourself with a locked ISBN. But the true answer, the best answer, if you're gonna go with paid ISBNs, if you're gonna go with KDP and Spark, is to do them both within 72 hours. I have yet to see a single scenario where a book was uploaded two days ago and Bowker's already got it listed. I've yet to see a single scenario where the ISBN gets locked that quickly. So 72 hours is sort of our safe window. Obviously, if you can do it same day. do it same day that's the best way but you've got about a 72 hour window to be safe um if you buy isbns buy the largest bulk bundle you can afford saves a lot of money these things are expensive folks if you're buying them one at a time they're enormously expensive if you're buying a 10 pack it's i think it's still about thirty dollars each for a ten pack like three hundred dollars So if you're buying a hundred pack it's $600. Which means that as soon as you publish your 11th book, if you're using one ISBN per book, as soon as you publish your 11th book, it's cheaper to have bought a pack of 100 than two packs of 10. Always buy the biggest block you can afford to easily do. I might not buy a block of a thousand because you're probably never going to use them all. But a block of a hundred is usually going to do better for you if you're planning on writing more than 10 books. Weird cases. All right, we already talked about locking. We already talked about public lending rights. Woo! I'm ahead of things. There remain a few vestiges of the industry where licensing your own ISBN block is seen as more pro. This is another exception here. If you run into cases where this is true for you, buying a block is a good idea. And I don't pretend to know what all of these are. So let's say that you're... Let's say that you are joining the Independent Book Publishers Association to get their mailing list, and you're sending out 500 mailing flyers to 500 different indie bookstores across the country every time you release a new book, and that's a major part of your book business, that's part of your plan. Well, in that case, since you're going into the mainstream print industry, you probably want to have a paid ISBN for that book and not a freebie one. It's going to look more professional, they can identify. when it is a free ISBN versus when it's a paid one. And book buyers will sometimes look at that kind of thing. So you might find more benefit in using a paid one for that particular case. Okay, we're going to shift gears at this point into copyright. Did I lose anyone for any of the stuff for ISBNs there? Because I'll make a couple minutes here for quick questions if there are any. Anyone's come on up, please Just to confirm, you said that if I have books already on KDP and I decide later to add them to Spark, I should use a completely new ISBN. I would try your existing ISBN. It is possible that it didn't get locked for some reason or another. The part of the problem with the ISBNs getting locked is it's extremely inconsistent. I've seen people who tell me that they have never had an ISBN locked ever and they've had no problems even years later switching over their books. So there's a great deal of inconsistency here and I don't know exactly where that's stemming from. I know that this is a software issue on the printer's side, the KDP and Lulu and Ingram. This is a software issue with their tool that they use to test if the ISBN is valid or not, is available or not. So it depends. Thanks. Hi, I apologise, I missed the first minute or so of your talk there. If you wouldn't mind repeating the thing about public lending rights in other countries, and if there's any, in addition to that, if there's any significant differences in your recommended use of ISBNs for... books coming from the UK. Okay. Public lending rights, I would check your specific country to find out. I believe that the UK does have PLR. So you may find yourself getting a little bit of extra cash every year as a result of plunking an ISBN on an e-book. I would check into that to be sure because I don't know the answer to that question. I do know that in Canada you have to have a Canadian ISBN on the e-book otherwise you it's not eligible for their public for their public lending rights I know it's also true in most countries that have free ISBNs. However, the UK is using Nielsen for paid ISBNs. So it's sort of like halfway between the US and Canada and I'm not sure exactly where it's gonna fall on that. So using an ISBN for an e-book, you're never gonna be wrong doing that? No, you're never gonna be wrong but you might be setting six or thirty dollars on fire, you know. But that's the worst that... That's the worst that's going to happen. That's the absolute worst that will ever happen is you're effectively tossing away the money. Right. And the opposite could be quite detrimental. It's not using your own ISBN if there are. Yes. But I would always look into whether or not it's going to be an effective use of my money before spending it. I'm very averse to throwing away even six dollars if I can avoid it. And any significant differences with anything to do with ISBNs with the UK market? No, it's actually very similar to the US because they're both paid-for-profit companies that are running the show. Nielsen and Bauker are kind of birds of a feather. Good afternoon. So in order to avoid having an ISBN locked, you suggest uploading to multiple platforms at the same time. Pardon my ignorance because I'm new. I've never purchased an ISBN. So you're saying to buy, if you wanted to avoid that, you could buy an ISBN and then you're saying upload to the different platforms within 72 hours? Yes. Again, ignorant. I don't know entirely what you mean by upload. Do you mean like to publish on these different platforms? Yeah, yeah. You have to press publish. Okay, so it would be not KU compatible or friendly. You're talking about print? Yeah. We're talking about print books. All right. Your e-books probably don't need ISBNs at all. There is no major e-book vendor which still requires an ISBN to be applied to the book in order to publish it. The ones that do use them will apply their own for you. I have never put a paid ISBN on an e-book, and I probably never will. Okay. Thank you. No problem. So, if you're going wide and publishing e-books only, is there any valid case for having an ISBN that's consistent across all the platforms? If it makes you feel good. If the feel-good feeling of it... I've known people who are just like, it just feels better to me. I'm like, oh, great, great. If you can afford it and it feels better to you, do it. It's not hurting you. There's no downside, except for the money you spent. So it's a vanity item at that point. Got it. But there is no harm in doing it. And if that's something that makes you feel more professional, if that's something that makes you feel a little bit better, just do it. If you can afford it. Why not? Thank you. No problem. So I've gotten conflicting things from people. I've heard that you have to get an ISBN for a paperback and then a separate one for a hardback. Or is it the same because it's print? Or do you need one for each? So the... You do need separate ones for hardcover and paperback. That one's pretty much set in stone. That one should be different from the one that's used on your ebooks, which should be different from the one that's used on your audiobooks. If you're using one on all of these things, they should all be different. Plus, if you're doing a library edition, that will also have its own ISBN. If you do a large print edition, that will also have its own ISBN. So every different version of the print book should have its own ISBN. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Hi, I have a series of books and I did not know about the locked ISBN issue and so when I went to transfer them over to Ingram after a year, two out of the three books were locked. The middle, the second book in my series, no problem. First book, last book, locked. And I received word that it was it was locked because of Barnes & Noble and because of Amazon. And so Bowker was like, we can't help you. It's those companies. You have to talk to them. And then when I talked to them, they said, we have no idea what you're talking about. We would never lock this. Amazon KDP Print reported the book as in use, the ISBN as in use to Bowker. Bowker added it to their books in print. I have not yet managed to find somebody who has effectively found a way to get Bowker to unlock them. It is definitely a Bowker end thing. Okay. You could also potentially contact customer service at IngramSpark and get them to force it through. But honestly, if you're spending... $6 on ISBN, like I recommend buying a pack of 100, it is cheaper in terms of the time spent to just say, you know what, I'm taking down those old editions and I'm doing a second edition now. But that would mean losing my reviews. It will not mean losing reviews. It wouldn't? No, this is probably leaving the scope of this session a little bit, but the ebook will hold the reviews. So if you take down the print book, the e-book will hold all the reviews. When you put up the new print book and then associate them together, it will pick up all of the reviews again. So as long as you have any versions of the linked books still up on Amazon, you'll keep your reviews. Good to know. Thank you. No problem. Last one, then we're going to go on to copyright. Quick question. I have a book and a workbook. Is there a way for me to use one of my ISBN to put both together as one? product on Amazon yes but then they have to be bundled together and you'll have to ship them to Amazon and warehouse them with Amazon and that that I actually have never done I know how to do it roughly you have to basically become a bookseller a physical object vendor on Amazon and that you have to ship the stuff to their warehouse and go through all that stuff I'm the wrong person to ask for this but no particular one but I can use one ISBN to Create the bundle. Yes, you should have one ISBN for the workbook, one ISBN for the book itself, and then another ISBN for the bundle. Awesome, thank you. No problem. All right. So we're moving on to copyrights. How many people are here from non-U.S. countries? Okay, a couple. Keep in mind that the U.S. I'm going to be mostly talking about U.S. law here because the U.S. has... Very stupid and unique copyright laws compared to the rest of the world. Copyright protection is granted to most forms of human created expression, including photos, drawings, paintings, computer software, comics, graphic novels, audiobooks, books, and more. Pretty much any creative thing that a human makes gets copyright. It's granted at the moment of creation. That is fixed under the Berne Convention, which is one of the most important and far-reaching international treaties in the world. with over 170 signatory nations. Basically, nobody is allowed to require registration to get copyright protection. Our books are protected from the moment they're created, whether or not they're registered, even in the United States. However, copyright protection... However, in the United States, we have to register in order to be able to sue. We still have the rights and we still have the protection, but we have to register before we're allowed to go to court to defend them. Copyright protects the specific expression of a work, not the underlying ideas or concepts. So this is important because a lot of people misunderstand this. Your plot is not protected by copyright. I can go and pick up a copy of Harry Potter, and I can go through and outline each chapter and turn it into beats, and I can go and I can write my own version of it, changing all of the names, scratching off all the serial numbers, and I can publish it, and even though I followed the same plot line, beat by beat by beat, I've created a new work, it is a new copyright, it is not infringing. Plagiarism is bad in school, but it's not illegal. Okay? Now it might be unethical, and you might want to not do that, but it's not illegal. So when you find somebody who has gone and written the same book as you, or you find somebody... The movie Gravity, the author of... the book that was nominally possibly maybe sort of based on sued and lost because they pretty much stole her book idea beat by beat made it into a movie but didn't pay her for it and didn't give her credit for it or anything else they can do that because they didn't actually borrow her names they didn't borrow the specifics of her story they just borrowed the plot and plots are not protected only implementations Copyright in the U.S. lasts for 70 years after the creator's death, in most cases, unless it's a work-for-hire or corporate-owned thing, in which case it's a little bit different. Copyright versus public domain. Copyright, all original human works of authorship. Public domain includes expired works. Works explicitly made public domain by the creator. Works created by animals or AI. ...ideas and systems. It's important to know the difference between these things. When you go and you grab an image, random image off the internet, and you throw it up on your professional Facebook page, you've just broken the law and they can sue you in court. And now that case is live in the United States, they can sue you in small claims without ever actually going to court. So, don't do that. Be aware of copyright. If you're going to use images on your newsletters, if you're going to use images on your Facebook feed, if you're going to use images that have anything at all to do with your business, honestly, even if it doesn't have to do with your business, don't infringe on somebody else's copyrights. But especially if it has to do with your business in any way, shape, or form, you must have the rights to use that work. Which means it has to be public domain. You have to have made it. Or you have to have licensed it, gotten permission in writing from the creator. Who thinks it's okay to take an image and give credit for it without asking permission? Good. Right answer. It is not okay. Credit is insufficient. And that's something, again, that a lot of authors misunderstand. Credit is insufficient. Permission is essential. You cannot use somebody's work without credit. Otherwise, I could go and take your book, upload it to my KDP account, give you credit, and it'd be fine, right? You would have no problem with that. No, don't do that. Ideas are not protected. Only implementations are protected. We touched on this a little bit. Plagiarism isn't okay in school, but it's not illegal. Ideas are not protected. That said, if you're writing nonfiction, citing sources still remains best practice, obviously. A cover that looks just like yours but different is legal. A book with the same plot as yours but different words is usually not infringing either. Unfortunately, that means that if somebody, if I go and get a really great cover that I really love on my book, and somebody else goes and creates a cover that's almost exactly like mine, but it's different. There is literally nothing I can do to address that. Not legally. I can yell at them. I can throw tomatoes at them, but I can't do anything legally. Registering will work. Most nations don't have any form of copyright registration. This is one of those weird things from the United States. A lot of other nations have some form of copyright registration. Canada has a registration system, but it's not mandatory and you don't actually need to do it. In the United States, there are some big differences between registering a work in a timely manner and not registering a work in a timely manner. So, works are fully protected even without registration, but you have to register before you can sue for infringement. Now, that means that, let's say you wrote a book 10 years ago and somebody infringed on it today, and you never registered it. That doesn't mean you're out of luck. It means that you need to go register it now in order to be able to sue them. You can pay an extra $800 fee to expedite it, and then it takes weeks instead of months to get the registration back, because you have to have the completed registration form in your hands to be able to initiate the lawsuit in the first place. The main reason why we want to do things in a timely manner, and the timely manner is defined in the United States as before the book is published or within three months after publication, is because you get extra benefits for registering in that manner. If you register in a timely manner, you get access to statutory damages in addition to actual damages. So the person who didn't register right away can only get paid, can only win actual damages. They sold 100 copies of my book without my permission, so they have to pay me all of the profits that they made. That's actual damages. If I had registered it within that three months before publishing or within three months after publishing, Then, in addition to that, the judge would award me some level of cash ranging between like about $1,000 and $150,000, which is the maximum. The judge will hand me some extra cash from the person, from the loser, if I win. In addition to that, a timely registered work... is eligible for reimbursement of all of your legal and attorney fees, or reasonable legal and attorney fees, which usually means all of them. So after I go and sue that person for infringing on me, not only do I get the actual damages, not only do I get another, let's say $5,000 in statutory damages, but the loser has to pay my lawyer's fees too. That's the only thing that makes a copyright case workable in most cases. So here's the thing. If you're ever planning to sue for infringement, it is best to register in a timely manner. If you don't, then you're going to find yourself in a situation where you have to kick out $10,000 in legal fees to get $1,000 back from the loser, because that's all that they actually made from infringing on your stuff. It might actually be worse than that. So, you're going to be stuck in a scenario where you... are losing money to defend your work unless you're able to get those lawyer's fees and stuff like that paid for by the loser. So if you are the sort of person who is actively going to defend in court their rights, if they find themselves infringed upon, register within three months of publication. If you are not the sort of person who's going to go and file that lawsuit, and you know that already, it is sometimes not necessary to do so. You don't need to. You don't have to register if you don't want to. But it will make it more difficult to make money from, or to even break even a lawsuit down the road. The case has made that a little bit easier. The case is the Small Claims Copyright Act for small... something or others. But what it says basically is it created a new tribunal system which allows people to essentially do a small claims court type lawsuit for copyright infringement. And it's just really starting up and we don't know exactly all the details about how it's going to work, but the other person has to opt into it too. They can say, no, I don't want to do that. I want you to take me to court. And then you're going to have to pony up for your lawyer and everything else. And it's a lot more expensive. Oh, bottom line here. This is also important. One of the reasons why people are so worried about copyright these days is because a lot of people have had Amazon say, prove this work is yours. You guys have all seen that on different groups, right? Amazon sent me a letter. They don't believe that it's my work. What do I do? Copyright registration is one of the types of things that Amazon accepts as proof of ownership. So it's a really reliable way to prove to Amazon that you own the book. However, Amazon accepts the proof of submission. They don't require the final copyright form. So that means that you can literally wait until Amazon sends you a letter saying, prove that you own this, and then go register. And Amazon doesn't do this very often. It sounds like it. It feels like it. I've had, I've published 89 books so far. It's happened to me twice. So, if you don't want to register, you can literally just wait until Amazon asks for proof, register, and then send them the form that you get back for having submitted the registration. They will accept that as evidence. The reason why... The reason why is because it's illegal to falsify information on government documents. So they're figuring that if you're dumb enough to put in a fake copyright registration, you deserve what's coming to you. That book, everyone who wants to take a picture of that right now, this book is the best thing I've ever seen on copyright law for authors. This book will tell you everything that you need to know, all the nitty gritty stuff that I'm not covering today, all of the fine details and stuff like that. It is a superb manual for learning how to do this stuff better. And copyright, guys, copyright is what we sell. Copyright is the core of our business. So it's important to know this stuff. All right. And I have left enough time at the end for some questions on copyright. So anybody who's got them, please come up. So you mentioned using images off the internet, for example, on your Facebook page, etc. Does this apply to book covers? If you're reviewing someone else's book and you're using an image of the cover? So... Yes and no. Yes, it applies. Copyright applies to all use of all kinds. However, if you're writing a review on your blog, say, and you write reviews on your blog, you're essentially performing a news service. And news and education are two of the primary exceptions to copyright where you're allowed fair use. So using the image as part of your article on the book, that's almost always going to be acceptable. And would that apply across social media platforms, including TikTok? Yes. Okay. Are there any... Special considerations you would apply to authors who are looking towards licensing film, television, games, other kinds of rights on the materials? Like what kinds of things are you talking about? Just based on my limited experience, Hollywood lawyers seem to be really big on the chain of title. So I've heard people in the Hollywood sphere say you need to copyright every iteration version of your work so you can establish the chain of title along the way. That's probably overkill for most people. If you're getting to the point where Hollywood is optioning a fair number of your books, then I would probably consider doing that. Other than that, just do the single registration. I think you're probably fine. If you do a major change, like let's say you do a 10-year anniversary edition of your nonfiction book and you've changed up a whole bunch of stuff, then I would do a new copyright because that one is a new, essentially you've changed more than like 10 or 20 percent of the work. It's a new work. It should probably get a new copyright. Just like you should probably get a new ISBN when you publish it. So I would lean toward doing additional registrations if there's significant changes, but I would not worry about it if, essentially, this... I wouldn't worry about it after, like, a or something like that, if that makes any sense. It does. Thank you. No problem. Also, be careful of your rights because you can sign away rights that you might want to use later really, really easily. So never sign away a right that the publisher or person you're working with isn't going to actively use. Yes? Do you think it's worth it to trademark your work? Is that in the realm of this class? That's a little bit outside of the realm, but... If it's a long series. So you can't trademark a book. You can't trademark a title. You can't trademark a commonly used word, generally speaking. Well, you can, but good luck defending it. We all saw what happened when we tried trademarking cocky. It didn't work out very well. It worked out badly, honestly, for everyone involved, because that author went and trademarked the title to their series, which was good. That's okay. You're allowed to trademark a series title, not a book title. It is... expensive to do, the benefits from it are limited, and you will have to defend it in court almost certainly, which will cost you a bundle of money. So unless this series is in the half million dollar plus range for potential future earnings, I probably wouldn't really consider doing a trademark on it. If this is the sort of series that you think really has legs and might someday end up on Netflix or something. I would definitely consider trademarking the series name. Be cautious about it because a lot of people, somebody tried trademarking the word quantum for a series title. And immediately a bunch of people, including myself, started writing books with quantum in it. In fact, one of my books is titled The Quantum Dragon Slayer, because somebody was trying to trademark the dragon slayer at the same time as somebody was trying to trademark quantum. And I put the book out specifically so I could put my hat in the ring and lodge a protest. Because those are not words that should be trademarked. Those are common use words. And you can trademark them. They'll let you do it. They'll take your money. The government will happily take your money. But good luck defending them in court. It will not work. There was a case a number of years back where an indie author published a book with Space Marine in the title. It was immediately sued by Games Workshop. Amazon took the book down, and the author went to CIFWA. CIFWA went to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and between CIFWA and the EFF, they countersued. Games Workshop lost badly and has never sued anybody for Space Marine ever again. Good afternoon again. Hi. What would you suggest be the course of action for serials? If you're publishing chapter by chapter, say Kindle Vela, and then you want to publish the entire work once it is complete. Or, I mean, taking a step back, what would you suggest for serials? Because I wouldn't think it very likely for somebody to try to rip off a single chapter. They could. But it's... Oh. The problem with serials is that you're almost always going to fail the 90-day test. So if you publish it, from the moment you publish it, you have three months to register a copyright on that thing or you lose all the extra benefits. It does not matter if it's only a chapter. If you publish chapter one of that book, that's the first publication of that chapter and you have 90 days to copyright it, to register the copyright. So the problem, one of the problems with serials is it's very difficult to register in a timely manner. The copyright office does have stuff set up for serial stuff, like magazines. It's designed for magazines and stuff like that. So you can copyright blog articles, you can copyright bunches of stuff. Group registration is what it's called. So you're looking for group registration and it'll let you... file a single copyright on a group of things for cheaper. But it only works for things like serials and magazines and stuff like that. So is there really any way to approach it? Do a group registration. It's a little bit different from the standard copyright registration. You can look right on the copyright.gov site, though, and they'll have the links for group registrations there and instructions. Okay, would you do that at the start or at the end? Well, I would do it after you... I think it's 10. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think it's up to 10 objects for a group registration. And if it's 10, I would wait until you have 10 episodes out, and then I would register. And then I would register again for 11 to 20. Because you've got three months, so you've got plenty of time, right? I'm assuming you're probably going to release more than 10 episodes in a three-month period. So from the moment the first episode of that block comes out, you've got three months to register it. Wait until you have 10 of them done, and then bundle them together and send them off as a group registration. Okay. That sounds like, I mean, if you do one per week, you're going to finish 10 before three months are up. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. No problem. Question for like with pen names, pseudonymous works. So we've got the way we set it up or the way I set it up was copyright claimant was in authorship by the pen name. And then I had rights and permissions by the LLC that owns that. Is that right? Okay. We're almost at time, so. I have a quick question about, I hope it's quick, about copyright and after death. I have some unpublished works of my parents who were both aspiring writers before the age of Amazon and never published. What would be the avenue for, one of my passion projects is to want to publish some of those? So in order to create a chain of ownership, honestly, this is one you probably want to talk to an estate lawyer about. You're going to need to have them look at the will. They need to know who the executor is. And they're going to need to make sure that whoever is publishing it actually has the rights to do so. So I would definitely talk to a lawyer, to an estate lawyer before jumping on that. But it's a relatively simple matter. If my wife and I are both publishing under different names, is there a way to be able to share the same block of ISBNs? Yes. Register the block of ISBNs to a company that both of you own. It doesn't have to be an LLC or something like that. It can just be a sole proprietorship. But register the ISBNs, the block you bought, to a company that you jointly own together. Of course, that means if you end up splitting up, the company is going to go with one of you or not both of you. But it could cause problems down the road. But hopefully not. We're good. Thank you. All right. I think we are at one minute. Is there any last questions at all? Oh, we got one. All right, quickly. I'll stick around outside after this is done too. Yeah, any recommendations for people from other countries, i.e. the UK, registering US copyright? Do it on copyright. Registering copyright in the US. Do it on copyright.gov, same as everybody else. There's only one legitimate place to register copyright in the United States. And you don't need to have an LLC or a US company? Okay, I think that's it, guys. Thank you very much.

Interesting parts of the writing business, am I right? Yeah. They may not be quite as fun as some of the other stuff, but they are really important parts of the business to understand.

And I field an enormous number of questions about this online, mostly in the 20 Books group. I find that a lot of newer writers and even older writers have some misconceptions about how this stuff works and what is best practice. So we're going to be going through a lot of that today. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to try and leave us a good block of time at the end for asking questions.

So everybody who has questions, please save them. We'll have you line up at the mic and toss them out there. Quickly about me. My name is Kevin McLaughlin. I'm a multiple USA Today bestselling author.

I've got almost 100 books out. I've been a full-time six-figure author for a long time now. I've worked in and around copyrights, typography, and the book business for over 30 years, long before I was an indie.

So I have some background in this stuff which helps me make more sense of it than a lot of people do. We're going to start with ISBNs. This is the easy part.

Before we really get into the ISBN and the things, how many people have already published a book here? Okay, how many people used a paid ISBN for your book? How many people used a paid ISBN for your e-book?

Okay, we're going to talk about a couple of those things. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It was created in 1967 to assist bookstores in tracking their physical inventories. It has expanded over time, and now we use them for all kinds of stuff that they were never intended to be used for originally. E-books, audio books, a lot of digital products.

And the main reason why that's still happening is because the large traditional publishers all have legacy royalty systems that are their royalty bookkeeping infrastructure is all based around the pre-ebook era still and so they have to assign an ISBN to everything otherwise they can't adequately track sales and hand us our royalties. This is mostly a traditional publishing thing however there are obviously really big Elements of this that are important for indie authors too. They're issued by one central body in each nation.

This is usually government run, except in a few nations like the US, UK and Australia, where ISBNs are managed by for-profit companies. Those are the only three countries that I know off the top of my head where ISBNs are sold instead of given out to citizens. So if you're from Canada, if you're from Iceland, if you're from Norway, if you're from Germany... From France, you're not paying for your ISBNs, but those of us from these other countries, from the countries where it's for profit, are. There is a side component to that.

We'll get back to that in a second. What is an ISBN not? They have nothing to do with copyright of the work. They have nothing to do with ownership of the work. They have nothing to do with who is the publisher of a work.

No one ever owns an ISBN. They're licensed. So when we buy them, we're actually buying a license to use that number.

We're not buying a number. And there's actually a lot of case law in the United States because back when CreateSpace was publishing a whole bunch of stuff and giving people free ISBNs, a bunch of people thought, well, I can get some easy money from Amazon, who owns CreateSpace, and sued CreateSpace as the publisher of the book. The problem is that the US courts have consistently, and UK courts, have consistently said that the owner of the ISBN is not the publisher. The person who causes, the person or company who causes a book to be published is the publisher.

And so those lawsuits were literally just thrown out of court because they were invalid. You can't sue the printer for what the publisher did. Ownership of the ISBN does not equate to ownership of the work. So that's important because we hear all the time, well, you have to own all of your ISBNs because otherwise somebody else is the publisher, right?

But that's not actually the case. Optimal use of ISBNs for indie authors. All right, basically, this is my little map here. Broadly speaking, most indie authors do not need to use ISBNs for e-books, nor is there a benefit for doing so. Broadly speaking, there are exceptions to this.

Any ebook retailers or distributors who require ISBNs will issue them for free. So that means that if you're a wide author and you're releasing your ebook, When you drop it on Kobo, they're going to assign a number. When you drop it on Apple, they're going to assign a number. When you drop it on Amazon, they're going to assign an ASIN. These things are already in place.

And you don't need to use a universal number for these things in most cases. The exceptions come in in two specific areas. And there's others too, but there's two main areas where there are exceptions. Exception number one is if you live in a country Where there's public lending rights.

Canada is a great example of this. Always put an ISBN on your e-book if you're a Canadian citizen because PLR means that if the book has an ISBN, when it goes into their library system, anytime somebody borrows it, you will get paid. If you do not have your own ISBN, you will not get paid. You will not be able to take advantage of the PLR system.

That's true in a lot of countries. Most of Europe has some form of PLR. Canada does. I know a lot of other countries do.

The United States does not, so if you're a U.S. author, don't even worry about that. The other major exception is any type of publishing where readers routinely search for the book by ISBN number instead of by title. This is mostly stuff like college textbooks, where the college professor hands the students a specific ISBN so that they get the right edition. They don't want to get the 13th edition when their teacher is using the 16th, or something like that. So they hand out the specific ISBN so that the students get the right book.

For any case like that, any kind of scenario where your ISBN, where your readers are going to be looking for the book by ISBN, the simpler you can keep it the better at that point. Use one ISBN for your ebook across all vendors, use a paid registered ISBN of your own and make it the same across all of them in that case. But these are exceptions. Most of the time, there's actually no benefit to using a paid ISBN for a novel, for the e-book, or for the audiobook.

However, print is a little bit different. Print books was where ISBN started. That was the initial thing for them, and they're still in heavy, heavy use across all bookstores, including the online ones. The most optimal path for print is to use the same license ISBN at both KDP print and IngramSpark.

Turn off expanded distribution. I'm reading this off because it's complicated. Turn off expanded distribution for KDP.

Make sure to upload to both sites within 72 hours from each other to avoid the ISBN being locked. To expand on that, A lot of the time people will just upload their book to KDP. That's most of the time what I will do as well. To KDP Print does a great job. If you click the expanded distribution button, that means put it into the Ingram catalog, and I don't even have to pay for ISBN.

They give me one, so I don't need to worry about that piece. However, if you are selling a lot of copies of your books to non-Amazon vendors, then you lose money every time somebody buys a KDP Print book. on Barnes & Noble or a KDP print book through any other bookstore except for Amazon. Ingram pays more than KDP for non-Amazon sales.

KDP pays more than Ingram for Amazon sales. So a lot of authors who do a lot of print sales will do both. They'll do Spark and KDP print.

And then it's optimal to use the same ISBN for both. And there's only one way to do that. and that's to go buy the ISBNs.

The bid about 72 hours is important. Now one of the things we love about owning our own ISBNs is we can bring them with us, right? If we decide to go to a different printer at some point down the road, we can bring it with us, except that's not true anymore, because the way that Ingram and a lot of the other sites have set this stuff up is that they vet the ISBN by whether or not it's already in use. And the tool that they use to vet it by is Bowker's Books in Print, which means when you upload the book to Amazon and use your paid ISBN a year ago, and then you decide a year later you want to go upload it to IngramSpark, you're almost certainly going to run into a snag where you're not, they're going to tell you that that ISBN is already in use and you can't use it. Now, you have two choices at that point.

You can go get on the phone with Bowker and you can spend the next... You can spend an extremely long period of time on hold trying to get them to unlock the ISBN, or you can just get a new ISBN, unpublish the old edition, and publish a new edition. I strongly recommend...

option B if you ever find yourself with a locked ISBN. But the true answer, the best answer, if you're gonna go with paid ISBNs, if you're gonna go with KDP and Spark, is to do them both within 72 hours. I have yet to see a single scenario where a book was uploaded two days ago and Bowker's already got it listed. I've yet to see a single scenario where the ISBN gets locked that quickly.

So 72 hours is sort of our safe window. Obviously, if you can do it same day. do it same day that's the best way but you've got about a 72 hour window to be safe um if you buy isbns buy the largest bulk bundle you can afford saves a lot of money these things are expensive folks if you're buying them one at a time they're enormously expensive if you're buying a 10 pack it's i think it's still about thirty dollars each for a ten pack like three hundred dollars So if you're buying a hundred pack it's $600.

Which means that as soon as you publish your 11th book, if you're using one ISBN per book, as soon as you publish your 11th book, it's cheaper to have bought a pack of 100 than two packs of 10. Always buy the biggest block you can afford to easily do. I might not buy a block of a thousand because you're probably never going to use them all. But a block of a hundred is usually going to do better for you if you're planning on writing more than 10 books.

Weird cases. All right, we already talked about locking. We already talked about public lending rights.

Woo! I'm ahead of things. There remain a few vestiges of the industry where licensing your own ISBN block is seen as more pro. This is another exception here.

If you run into cases where this is true for you, buying a block is a good idea. And I don't pretend to know what all of these are. So let's say that you're... Let's say that you are joining the Independent Book Publishers Association to get their mailing list, and you're sending out 500 mailing flyers to 500 different indie bookstores across the country every time you release a new book, and that's a major part of your book business, that's part of your plan.

Well, in that case, since you're going into the mainstream print industry, you probably want to have a paid ISBN for that book and not a freebie one. It's going to look more professional, they can identify. when it is a free ISBN versus when it's a paid one. And book buyers will sometimes look at that kind of thing.

So you might find more benefit in using a paid one for that particular case. Okay, we're going to shift gears at this point into copyright. Did I lose anyone for any of the stuff for ISBNs there?

Because I'll make a couple minutes here for quick questions if there are any. Anyone's come on up, please Just to confirm, you said that if I have books already on KDP and I decide later to add them to Spark, I should use a completely new ISBN. I would try your existing ISBN. It is possible that it didn't get locked for some reason or another.

The part of the problem with the ISBNs getting locked is it's extremely inconsistent. I've seen people who tell me that they have never had an ISBN locked ever and they've had no problems even years later switching over their books. So there's a great deal of inconsistency here and I don't know exactly where that's stemming from. I know that this is a software issue on the printer's side, the KDP and Lulu and Ingram. This is a software issue with their tool that they use to test if the ISBN is valid or not, is available or not.

So it depends. Thanks. Hi, I apologise, I missed the first minute or so of your talk there. If you wouldn't mind repeating the thing about public lending rights in other countries, and if there's any, in addition to that, if there's any significant differences in your recommended use of ISBNs for...

books coming from the UK. Okay. Public lending rights, I would check your specific country to find out.

I believe that the UK does have PLR. So you may find yourself getting a little bit of extra cash every year as a result of plunking an ISBN on an e-book. I would check into that to be sure because I don't know the answer to that question.

I do know that in Canada you have to have a Canadian ISBN on the e-book otherwise you it's not eligible for their public for their public lending rights I know it's also true in most countries that have free ISBNs. However, the UK is using Nielsen for paid ISBNs. So it's sort of like halfway between the US and Canada and I'm not sure exactly where it's gonna fall on that.

So using an ISBN for an e-book, you're never gonna be wrong doing that? No, you're never gonna be wrong but you might be setting six or thirty dollars on fire, you know. But that's the worst that... That's the worst that's going to happen.

That's the absolute worst that will ever happen is you're effectively tossing away the money. Right. And the opposite could be quite detrimental. It's not using your own ISBN if there are. Yes.

But I would always look into whether or not it's going to be an effective use of my money before spending it. I'm very averse to throwing away even six dollars if I can avoid it. And any significant differences with anything to do with ISBNs with the UK market?

No, it's actually very similar to the US because they're both paid-for-profit companies that are running the show. Nielsen and Bauker are kind of birds of a feather. Good afternoon. So in order to avoid having an ISBN locked, you suggest uploading to multiple platforms at the same time. Pardon my ignorance because I'm new.

I've never purchased an ISBN. So you're saying to buy, if you wanted to avoid that, you could buy an ISBN and then you're saying upload to the different platforms within 72 hours? Yes.

Again, ignorant. I don't know entirely what you mean by upload. Do you mean like to publish on these different platforms?

Yeah, yeah. You have to press publish. Okay, so it would be not KU compatible or friendly. You're talking about print? Yeah.

We're talking about print books. All right. Your e-books probably don't need ISBNs at all. There is no major e-book vendor which still requires an ISBN to be applied to the book in order to publish it.

The ones that do use them will apply their own for you. I have never put a paid ISBN on an e-book, and I probably never will. Okay. Thank you.

No problem. So, if you're going wide and publishing e-books only, is there any valid case for having an ISBN that's consistent across all the platforms? If it makes you feel good.

If the feel-good feeling of it... I've known people who are just like, it just feels better to me. I'm like, oh, great, great.

If you can afford it and it feels better to you, do it. It's not hurting you. There's no downside, except for the money you spent.

So it's a vanity item at that point. Got it. But there is no harm in doing it.

And if that's something that makes you feel more professional, if that's something that makes you feel a little bit better, just do it. If you can afford it. Why not? Thank you. No problem.

So I've gotten conflicting things from people. I've heard that you have to get an ISBN for a paperback and then a separate one for a hardback. Or is it the same because it's print? Or do you need one for each?

So the... You do need separate ones for hardcover and paperback. That one's pretty much set in stone. That one should be different from the one that's used on your ebooks, which should be different from the one that's used on your audiobooks.

If you're using one on all of these things, they should all be different. Plus, if you're doing a library edition, that will also have its own ISBN. If you do a large print edition, that will also have its own ISBN. So every different version of the print book should have its own ISBN. Okay, perfect.

Thank you. Hi, I have a series of books and I did not know about the locked ISBN issue and so when I went to transfer them over to Ingram after a year, two out of the three books were locked. The middle, the second book in my series, no problem.

First book, last book, locked. And I received word that it was it was locked because of Barnes & Noble and because of Amazon. And so Bowker was like, we can't help you.

It's those companies. You have to talk to them. And then when I talked to them, they said, we have no idea what you're talking about.

We would never lock this. Amazon KDP Print reported the book as in use, the ISBN as in use to Bowker. Bowker added it to their books in print.

I have not yet managed to find somebody who has effectively found a way to get Bowker to unlock them. It is definitely a Bowker end thing. Okay.

You could also potentially contact customer service at IngramSpark and get them to force it through. But honestly, if you're spending... $6 on ISBN, like I recommend buying a pack of 100, it is cheaper in terms of the time spent to just say, you know what, I'm taking down those old editions and I'm doing a second edition now. But that would mean losing my reviews.

It will not mean losing reviews. It wouldn't? No, this is probably leaving the scope of this session a little bit, but the ebook will hold the reviews. So if you take down the print book, the e-book will hold all the reviews.

When you put up the new print book and then associate them together, it will pick up all of the reviews again. So as long as you have any versions of the linked books still up on Amazon, you'll keep your reviews. Good to know. Thank you. No problem.

Last one, then we're going to go on to copyright. Quick question. I have a book and a workbook.

Is there a way for me to use one of my ISBN to put both together as one? product on Amazon yes but then they have to be bundled together and you'll have to ship them to Amazon and warehouse them with Amazon and that that I actually have never done I know how to do it roughly you have to basically become a bookseller a physical object vendor on Amazon and that you have to ship the stuff to their warehouse and go through all that stuff I'm the wrong person to ask for this but no particular one but I can use one ISBN to Create the bundle. Yes, you should have one ISBN for the workbook, one ISBN for the book itself, and then another ISBN for the bundle. Awesome, thank you.

No problem. All right. So we're moving on to copyrights. How many people are here from non-U.S.

countries? Okay, a couple. Keep in mind that the U.S. I'm going to be mostly talking about U.S. law here because the U.S. has... Very stupid and unique copyright laws compared to the rest of the world.

Copyright protection is granted to most forms of human created expression, including photos, drawings, paintings, computer software, comics, graphic novels, audiobooks, books, and more. Pretty much any creative thing that a human makes gets copyright. It's granted at the moment of creation. That is fixed under the Berne Convention, which is one of the most important and far-reaching international treaties in the world.

with over 170 signatory nations. Basically, nobody is allowed to require registration to get copyright protection. Our books are protected from the moment they're created, whether or not they're registered, even in the United States. However, copyright protection... However, in the United States, we have to register in order to be able to sue.

We still have the rights and we still have the protection, but we have to register before we're allowed to go to court to defend them. Copyright protects the specific expression of a work, not the underlying ideas or concepts. So this is important because a lot of people misunderstand this.

Your plot is not protected by copyright. I can go and pick up a copy of Harry Potter, and I can go through and outline each chapter and turn it into beats, and I can go and I can write my own version of it, changing all of the names, scratching off all the serial numbers, and I can publish it, and even though I followed the same plot line, beat by beat by beat, I've created a new work, it is a new copyright, it is not infringing. Plagiarism is bad in school, but it's not illegal.

Okay? Now it might be unethical, and you might want to not do that, but it's not illegal. So when you find somebody who has gone and written the same book as you, or you find somebody...

The movie Gravity, the author of... the book that was nominally possibly maybe sort of based on sued and lost because they pretty much stole her book idea beat by beat made it into a movie but didn't pay her for it and didn't give her credit for it or anything else they can do that because they didn't actually borrow her names they didn't borrow the specifics of her story they just borrowed the plot and plots are not protected only implementations Copyright in the U.S. lasts for 70 years after the creator's death, in most cases, unless it's a work-for-hire or corporate-owned thing, in which case it's a little bit different. Copyright versus public domain. Copyright, all original human works of authorship. Public domain includes expired works.

Works explicitly made public domain by the creator. Works created by animals or AI. ...ideas and systems.

It's important to know the difference between these things. When you go and you grab an image, random image off the internet, and you throw it up on your professional Facebook page, you've just broken the law and they can sue you in court. And now that case is live in the United States, they can sue you in small claims without ever actually going to court.

So, don't do that. Be aware of copyright. If you're going to use images on your newsletters, if you're going to use images on your Facebook feed, if you're going to use images that have anything at all to do with your business, honestly, even if it doesn't have to do with your business, don't infringe on somebody else's copyrights. But especially if it has to do with your business in any way, shape, or form, you must have the rights to use that work. Which means it has to be public domain.

You have to have made it. Or you have to have licensed it, gotten permission in writing from the creator. Who thinks it's okay to take an image and give credit for it without asking permission? Good.

Right answer. It is not okay. Credit is insufficient.

And that's something, again, that a lot of authors misunderstand. Credit is insufficient. Permission is essential. You cannot use somebody's work without credit. Otherwise, I could go and take your book, upload it to my KDP account, give you credit, and it'd be fine, right?

You would have no problem with that. No, don't do that. Ideas are not protected.

Only implementations are protected. We touched on this a little bit. Plagiarism isn't okay in school, but it's not illegal. Ideas are not protected. That said, if you're writing nonfiction, citing sources still remains best practice, obviously.

A cover that looks just like yours but different is legal. A book with the same plot as yours but different words is usually not infringing either. Unfortunately, that means that if somebody, if I go and get a really great cover that I really love on my book, and somebody else goes and creates a cover that's almost exactly like mine, but it's different. There is literally nothing I can do to address that. Not legally.

I can yell at them. I can throw tomatoes at them, but I can't do anything legally. Registering will work. Most nations don't have any form of copyright registration.

This is one of those weird things from the United States. A lot of other nations have some form of copyright registration. Canada has a registration system, but it's not mandatory and you don't actually need to do it. In the United States, there are some big differences between registering a work in a timely manner and not registering a work in a timely manner. So, works are fully protected even without registration, but you have to register before you can sue for infringement.

Now, that means that, let's say you wrote a book 10 years ago and somebody infringed on it today, and you never registered it. That doesn't mean you're out of luck. It means that you need to go register it now in order to be able to sue them.

You can pay an extra $800 fee to expedite it, and then it takes weeks instead of months to get the registration back, because you have to have the completed registration form in your hands to be able to initiate the lawsuit in the first place. The main reason why we want to do things in a timely manner, and the timely manner is defined in the United States as before the book is published or within three months after publication, is because you get extra benefits for registering in that manner. If you register in a timely manner, you get access to statutory damages in addition to actual damages. So the person who didn't register right away can only get paid, can only win actual damages.

They sold 100 copies of my book without my permission, so they have to pay me all of the profits that they made. That's actual damages. If I had registered it within that three months before publishing or within three months after publishing, Then, in addition to that, the judge would award me some level of cash ranging between like about $1,000 and $150,000, which is the maximum. The judge will hand me some extra cash from the person, from the loser, if I win. In addition to that, a timely registered work...

is eligible for reimbursement of all of your legal and attorney fees, or reasonable legal and attorney fees, which usually means all of them. So after I go and sue that person for infringing on me, not only do I get the actual damages, not only do I get another, let's say $5,000 in statutory damages, but the loser has to pay my lawyer's fees too. That's the only thing that makes a copyright case workable in most cases. So here's the thing. If you're ever planning to sue for infringement, it is best to register in a timely manner.

If you don't, then you're going to find yourself in a situation where you have to kick out $10,000 in legal fees to get $1,000 back from the loser, because that's all that they actually made from infringing on your stuff. It might actually be worse than that. So, you're going to be stuck in a scenario where you...

are losing money to defend your work unless you're able to get those lawyer's fees and stuff like that paid for by the loser. So if you are the sort of person who is actively going to defend in court their rights, if they find themselves infringed upon, register within three months of publication. If you are not the sort of person who's going to go and file that lawsuit, and you know that already, it is sometimes not necessary to do so. You don't need to.

You don't have to register if you don't want to. But it will make it more difficult to make money from, or to even break even a lawsuit down the road. The case has made that a little bit easier. The case is the Small Claims Copyright Act for small... something or others.

But what it says basically is it created a new tribunal system which allows people to essentially do a small claims court type lawsuit for copyright infringement. And it's just really starting up and we don't know exactly all the details about how it's going to work, but the other person has to opt into it too. They can say, no, I don't want to do that.

I want you to take me to court. And then you're going to have to pony up for your lawyer and everything else. And it's a lot more expensive.

Oh, bottom line here. This is also important. One of the reasons why people are so worried about copyright these days is because a lot of people have had Amazon say, prove this work is yours. You guys have all seen that on different groups, right? Amazon sent me a letter.

They don't believe that it's my work. What do I do? Copyright registration is one of the types of things that Amazon accepts as proof of ownership.

So it's a really reliable way to prove to Amazon that you own the book. However, Amazon accepts the proof of submission. They don't require the final copyright form. So that means that you can literally wait until Amazon sends you a letter saying, prove that you own this, and then go register. And Amazon doesn't do this very often.

It sounds like it. It feels like it. I've had, I've published 89 books so far.

It's happened to me twice. So, if you don't want to register, you can literally just wait until Amazon asks for proof, register, and then send them the form that you get back for having submitted the registration. They will accept that as evidence. The reason why...

The reason why is because it's illegal to falsify information on government documents. So they're figuring that if you're dumb enough to put in a fake copyright registration, you deserve what's coming to you. That book, everyone who wants to take a picture of that right now, this book is the best thing I've ever seen on copyright law for authors. This book will tell you everything that you need to know, all the nitty gritty stuff that I'm not covering today, all of the fine details and stuff like that. It is a superb manual for learning how to do this stuff better.

And copyright, guys, copyright is what we sell. Copyright is the core of our business. So it's important to know this stuff. All right.

And I have left enough time at the end for some questions on copyright. So anybody who's got them, please come up. So you mentioned using images off the internet, for example, on your Facebook page, etc.

Does this apply to book covers? If you're reviewing someone else's book and you're using an image of the cover? So... Yes and no.

Yes, it applies. Copyright applies to all use of all kinds. However, if you're writing a review on your blog, say, and you write reviews on your blog, you're essentially performing a news service.

And news and education are two of the primary exceptions to copyright where you're allowed fair use. So using the image as part of your article on the book, that's almost always going to be acceptable. And would that apply across social media platforms, including TikTok? Yes.

Okay. Are there any... Special considerations you would apply to authors who are looking towards licensing film, television, games, other kinds of rights on the materials? Like what kinds of things are you talking about? Just based on my limited experience, Hollywood lawyers seem to be really big on the chain of title.

So I've heard people in the Hollywood sphere say you need to copyright every iteration version of your work so you can establish the chain of title along the way. That's probably overkill for most people. If you're getting to the point where Hollywood is optioning a fair number of your books, then I would probably consider doing that.

Other than that, just do the single registration. I think you're probably fine. If you do a major change, like let's say you do a 10-year anniversary edition of your nonfiction book and you've changed up a whole bunch of stuff, then I would do a new copyright because that one is a new, essentially you've changed more than like 10 or 20 percent of the work.

It's a new work. It should probably get a new copyright. Just like you should probably get a new ISBN when you publish it. So I would lean toward doing additional registrations if there's significant changes, but I would not worry about it if, essentially, this...

I wouldn't worry about it after, like, a or something like that, if that makes any sense. It does. Thank you.

No problem. Also, be careful of your rights because you can sign away rights that you might want to use later really, really easily. So never sign away a right that the publisher or person you're working with isn't going to actively use. Yes? Do you think it's worth it to trademark your work?

Is that in the realm of this class? That's a little bit outside of the realm, but... If it's a long series. So you can't trademark a book. You can't trademark a title.

You can't trademark a commonly used word, generally speaking. Well, you can, but good luck defending it. We all saw what happened when we tried trademarking cocky.

It didn't work out very well. It worked out badly, honestly, for everyone involved, because that author went and trademarked the title to their series, which was good. That's okay. You're allowed to trademark a series title, not a book title.

It is... expensive to do, the benefits from it are limited, and you will have to defend it in court almost certainly, which will cost you a bundle of money. So unless this series is in the half million dollar plus range for potential future earnings, I probably wouldn't really consider doing a trademark on it. If this is the sort of series that you think really has legs and might someday end up on Netflix or something. I would definitely consider trademarking the series name.

Be cautious about it because a lot of people, somebody tried trademarking the word quantum for a series title. And immediately a bunch of people, including myself, started writing books with quantum in it. In fact, one of my books is titled The Quantum Dragon Slayer, because somebody was trying to trademark the dragon slayer at the same time as somebody was trying to trademark quantum.

And I put the book out specifically so I could put my hat in the ring and lodge a protest. Because those are not words that should be trademarked. Those are common use words. And you can trademark them.

They'll let you do it. They'll take your money. The government will happily take your money. But good luck defending them in court. It will not work.

There was a case a number of years back where an indie author published a book with Space Marine in the title. It was immediately sued by Games Workshop. Amazon took the book down, and the author went to CIFWA. CIFWA went to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and between CIFWA and the EFF, they countersued. Games Workshop lost badly and has never sued anybody for Space Marine ever again.

Good afternoon again. Hi. What would you suggest be the course of action for serials?

If you're publishing chapter by chapter, say Kindle Vela, and then you want to publish the entire work once it is complete. Or, I mean, taking a step back, what would you suggest for serials? Because I wouldn't think it very likely for somebody to try to rip off a single chapter. They could.

But it's... Oh. The problem with serials is that you're almost always going to fail the 90-day test. So if you publish it, from the moment you publish it, you have three months to register a copyright on that thing or you lose all the extra benefits. It does not matter if it's only a chapter.

If you publish chapter one of that book, that's the first publication of that chapter and you have 90 days to copyright it, to register the copyright. So the problem, one of the problems with serials is it's very difficult to register in a timely manner. The copyright office does have stuff set up for serial stuff, like magazines.

It's designed for magazines and stuff like that. So you can copyright blog articles, you can copyright bunches of stuff. Group registration is what it's called. So you're looking for group registration and it'll let you... file a single copyright on a group of things for cheaper.

But it only works for things like serials and magazines and stuff like that. So is there really any way to approach it? Do a group registration. It's a little bit different from the standard copyright registration.

You can look right on the copyright.gov site, though, and they'll have the links for group registrations there and instructions. Okay, would you do that at the start or at the end? Well, I would do it after you... I think it's 10. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think it's up to 10 objects for a group registration. And if it's 10, I would wait until you have 10 episodes out, and then I would register.

And then I would register again for 11 to 20. Because you've got three months, so you've got plenty of time, right? I'm assuming you're probably going to release more than 10 episodes in a three-month period. So from the moment the first episode of that block comes out, you've got three months to register it. Wait until you have 10 of them done, and then bundle them together and send them off as a group registration.

Okay. That sounds like, I mean, if you do one per week, you're going to finish 10 before three months are up. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

No problem. Question for like with pen names, pseudonymous works. So we've got the way we set it up or the way I set it up was copyright claimant was in authorship by the pen name.

And then I had rights and permissions by the LLC that owns that. Is that right? Okay.

We're almost at time, so. I have a quick question about, I hope it's quick, about copyright and after death. I have some unpublished works of my parents who were both aspiring writers before the age of Amazon and never published.

What would be the avenue for, one of my passion projects is to want to publish some of those? So in order to create a chain of ownership, honestly, this is one you probably want to talk to an estate lawyer about. You're going to need to have them look at the will.

They need to know who the executor is. And they're going to need to make sure that whoever is publishing it actually has the rights to do so. So I would definitely talk to a lawyer, to an estate lawyer before jumping on that. But it's a relatively simple matter.

If my wife and I are both publishing under different names, is there a way to be able to share the same block of ISBNs? Yes. Register the block of ISBNs to a company that both of you own.

It doesn't have to be an LLC or something like that. It can just be a sole proprietorship. But register the ISBNs, the block you bought, to a company that you jointly own together. Of course, that means if you end up splitting up, the company is going to go with one of you or not both of you.

But it could cause problems down the road. But hopefully not. We're good.

Thank you. All right. I think we are at one minute.

Is there any last questions at all? Oh, we got one. All right, quickly. I'll stick around outside after this is done too. Yeah, any recommendations for people from other countries, i.e. the UK, registering US copyright?

Do it on copyright. Registering copyright in the US. Do it on copyright.gov, same as everybody else. There's only one legitimate place to register copyright in the United States.

And you don't need to have an LLC or a US company? Okay, I think that's it, guys. Thank you very much.

Transcript for:Understanding ISBNs and Copyrights for Authors

Transcript for:
Understanding ISBNs and Copyrights for Authors