As a writer, you may assume you will have the copyright of your book when it is published. If you write for magazines or newspapers, you may need to negotiate rights over your own written material — one time use — but these days, once you write something, you are assumed to own the copyright from that moment on. Although historically there were some European writers who managed to get full rights to publish and sell their own books, the first American copyright law was not passed until 1673, and even then, only in Massachusetts. But it was not the same kind of copyright that an author has today. It was called a “bookseller’s copyright” because there was only a narrow distinction between Publisher and Bookseller. Since this law protected the publisher, it protected the bookseller in the same breath. What this copyright law didn’t protect was the Author. This was true on both sides of the Atlantic. In the American colonies, each state had its own regulations (or lack thereof). Because of this, a publisher in one state could basically take the text of a book from another and republish for full profits. Book printing, however, was considered a “gentleman’s trade,” with agreements between publishers more common that outright stealing. But authors in the colonial states were only paid by their original publisher since they had no rights of their own. In those days, authors had to pay for their book to be published, much like “vanity publishing” these…
When I mentor interns, I often spend time thinking about what advice might be helpful to those who pursue career goals in the world of publishing. This month I’ve had the good fortune to have two interns working with Swenson Book Development LLC. They’ve both seen many of their friends and classmates graduate this June but both of them completed their third not final year… [Read More]
Filed Under: bookseller, career in publishing, college graduation, internships, jobs, library volunteer
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Amidst the nervous titter of soon-to-be graduates, I could feel the excitement boiling under the clean, black robes at Lawrence University’s graduation ceremony. This year’s commencement speaker was Lan Samantha Chang. An Appleton WI native, Chang is the author of Hunger, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, and Inheritance. Hunger is a novella and collection of short stories, published in 1988. Chang’s prose follows the… [Read More]
Filed Under: commencement, graduation, Hunger, immigration, Inheritance, Iowa Writers Workshop, Lan Samantha Chang
Guest blog by Naomi Yaeger, Duluth MN A book award ceremony can refresh and energize you while you plug away at a manuscript. For more than three years I’ve worked on a manuscript. I’m a newspaper journalist, but that doesn’t make writing a book any easier for me. I’m used to weekly deadlines and writing short stories. I’ve been in a funk lately. A couple… [Read More]
Everyday my email is flooded with a rush of correspondence. There’s a seemingly endless stream of messages all day, every day. Yours, too? Do you sometimes wonder whether your message disappeared into cyberspace because you did not receive a response? Did they end up in a spam folder? Is no response a “no”? How are the email messages you send handled by recipients who are… [Read More]
More than 75 years ago, Richard Halliburton set sail in a Chinese junk, “The Sea Dragon,” hoping to arrive in time for the San Francisco Golden Gate International Expo. Instead, he vanished without a trace when his craft sank in March 1939. Halliburton had been a household name since 1930, known for his bestselling books published by Bobbs-Merrill. The first biography written about this nearly… [Read More]