Pottermore’s Effect On Upcoming Copyright Deadline

I’m not sure if this has been written about, yet, but on Monday I read an interesting article from Publisher’s Weekly about an upcoming deadline in a subject that strict fear into most new writers, if not some established ones as well.

Copyrights.

This article talked about a little discussed clause in the 1998 “Sonny Bono” act. You know, the one that let Disney hold onto Mickey Mouse for a few more decades. To be honest, I took a copyright class in college and I forgot about it too. The clause allows authors do everything from renegotiate royalities to complete reclaimation of rights of the work no matter the current contract 35 years after publication. Now these are for all works published from 1978 and on. So next year will be the first year in which rights can start to be completely reverted back to authors.

Here is where I think J.K. Rowling is about to gain favor with many of the authors that panned her over the years.

If Pottermore, her online store and virtual World of Harry Potter, becomes a successful model for authors selling their books themselves (and not just short term where all current fans go and rack up millions of downloads in hours, but  there are enough constant sales to keep it functioning and make a profit), we could see the possibility of many well-known authors exercising this Termination Clause and setting up their own shop.

A quick glimpse of genre fiction around 1978 shows us this:

Stephen King only had three novels, plus Rage under the Richard Bachmann pseudonym, out before that. It was the year that The Stand and Night Shift were published. Piers Anthony released the second Xanth novel. Terry Brooks just published The Sword of Shannara last year. Peter Straub will publish his third book next year as V.C. Andrews and Douglas Adams are going to make their publishing debut. That’s all I know of off hand, but I also know that it is also not long after that the 80′s horror boom hit publishers.

Can you imagine if these authors, or their estates, took back the rights and re-published themselves and continued that trend as each subsequent book came up for the Termination Clause? And then all the authors that came after them and their books?

The Hamburger Paradigm

by Rob from Cincinnati

So, the other day was a really funny day if you were a writer.

“Why?” you ask. (Sorry if I just put words in your mouth, it was for dramatic purposes)

Real simple. A fledgling writer put her self-published e-book up at some point and asked various review bloggers to get a copy and review it. I’m sure the writer’s out there know where I’m going, but for everyone else, this review was the result. What was so funny was the way the writer of the ebook devolved into a petulant 12 years-old in the comments and failed to do anything with a modicum of professionalism in response to both the review and the comments. So, yes, we writer’s do, like everyone else, enjoy the spectacle of a person’s self-destruction.

Now, as of said incident, whether caused by it or not, people have begun again to harp on the self-publishing movement and all things connected to it yet again. One instance cause a fellow writer, C. S. Daley, to write this blog post. While I can’t say for sure who he is talking about, I have a few guesses, and even if they are all wrong, they are still people that have said something similar recently. I began to wonder why we seem to be always having the same discussion, which is really just a shouting match at one another with fingers in our ears.

And then I thought of it: Hamburgers.

*Special Note* The only animals that may be harmed for the rest of this prolonged metaphor are of an ephemeral existence. Nothing actual living has been harmed, except possibly the egos of some at the very end.

“Everyone can make a hamburger, right? Sure they can,” I say as my eyes shift back and forth looking for some fake belief in what I just said.

Writing is like making hamburgers:

Characters = Type of meat

Beginning, middle, and end = make a patty, heat in a skillet, and add to bun

Subplots and Style = condiments and topping

Now you have this hamburger, how are you feed it to people? There are lots of ways depending on how you make you make. From food trucks to Micheline Star restaurants. So, of course most people are going to try the best restaurants they can. For a lot of us, some of the best burgers have been from those establishments. A few people get into those restaurants. But what about the rest of the hamburgers? The cooks have choices, but each have their own limited audience. Or, they can take the gamble and open their own restaurant. Some do well, a few more even better, but not every restaurant is meant to last.

Now here is where perception changes everything. For the upstart restaurant, they are doing just what the want: making hamburgers, feeding them to people and having people come back for more. Does not stop their dreams of one day having one of their hamburgers being spotlighted in the ranks of the Micheline burgers. But they use the restaurant as place to work on that. But the up scale guys see the indie restaurants as lesser, sometime no better than a McDonalds or Burger King. They don’t have a world class chef perfecting their burger to its highest degree. They don’t have the benefit of a restaurant name people know. They don’t think they could have the same quality of ingredients or the skill to create a worthy competitor to theirs. So why have would people want those burgers when the up scale burgers are of such great quality?

And this just makes it seem like the consumer doesn’t know what they like. No matter where you get it, how it’s made, and with what ingredients, they are all hamburgers. No kind of hamburger is going to make another either better or worse. The individual hamburgers will do that.

So just make your hamburgers, forget everyone else’s, and let the diners decide where they want to go. It what is going to happen anyways no matter how much we talk about it, or just shout the same stereotypes at each other.

I’m going to go make a hotdog now.