'Self-Publisher's Legal Handbook' a Must-Read
This is not usually a space for book reviews. That’s not the way blogs function in the world of authors trying to get their work noticed.
Yet in the spirit of Indies helping Indies and pushing the lot of us forward, I can’t help but promote a book I wish I’d discovered long before now.
Fiction and non-fiction author Helen Sedwick recently released the second edition of her Self-Publisher’s Legal Handbook: Updated Guide to Protecting Your Rights and Your Wallet.
I know, I know. It sounds like it might be a slog. It’s not. Yes, the words "author" and "legal" in the same sentence usually trigger paralysis from those of us at a keyboard. Not this time.
Sedwick's book contains information that every author, whether an Indie, DIY or traditional, should have in their knowledge base.
Sedwick: Step by Step Legal Processes
Sedwick, an attorney and an author, writes in easy-to-understand prose and not at all in legalese. She walks reads through the step-by-step process of the most important business touchpoints an Indie author needs to consider when embarking on a publishing career:
Copyright protections
Business ABCs
Contracts
Pen names
Spotting scams
Taxes
Estate planning
In her second-edition, she added sections about pen names (how and when to choose one, and do you need one), fighting any theft of your writings, how to use images and song lyrics without violating someone else’s rights, and a few more updates based on changes in the industry.
The most valuable sections are ones that were in the first edition – about contracts.
Signing a contract with an agent, publisher or production company (hey, dream big!) is without question the scariest business proposition authors face. All of them have attorneys. Undiscovered authors usually don’t.
Sedwick’s advice: Get one before you sign away rights that you’ll want to keep.
She takes readers through some of the specific language that appears in publishing contracts, the good, bad and ugly.
Another section I found valuable contains her thoughts on how an author can set up their writing business. LLC, corporation or sole proprietorship?
Non-Legal Author Topics
Sedwick covers a number of topics that don’t fall in the legal realm, such as marketing, author branding, and whether to self-publish or to pursue a vanity press (or a small publisher). She also reinforces why all authors, regardless of status, owe it to themselves to build a trusted, reliable team around them to provide help (with editing, designing cover art, formatting, marketing) and honest feedback.
Knowledge is power, and this is an empowering book. It is not the be-all, end-all book about the business and legal dealings an Indie author will face. And it comes with the qualifier that all attorneys deliver at dinner parties when they inevitably get asked about legal matters: This is not privileged communications (between attorney and client), and don’t make any final decisions about legal matters until you consult your own attorney (in your own state).
But in our technology-driven, fast-changing publishing world where new publishing platforms and manuscript-producing/publishing software seem to arise every six months, this is a solid base.
She provides meaningful Do’s and Don’ts all along, and each chapter concludes with a checklist of things to consider (and act on).
This book should be required reading in the Author 101 panel at writing conferences around the country.
Setting Up Your Author Business
When it was my turn to dip a toe in the business waters, I didn’t have this book as a guide. The steps I ended up taking:
Gaining an EIN from the Internal Revenue Service for an author/publisher business.
Securing a PO box with the U.S. Post Office.
Creating a sole proprietorship business with the state of Florida.
Creating a business bank account.
Creating a separate author PayPal account and linking that to the new bank account.
Creating an account with IngramSpark.
Creating author pages with Amazon, Goodreads and Barnes & Noble.
And publishing Dead Odds, starting with Amazon, and then linking revenue streams to the new bank account.
From there, it’s a case of monitoring all the systems. That money owed to you funnels into your accounts as scheduled. That you get your mail. And so on.
A quick word about payments from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IngramSpark and others: They arrive 90 days after the month of sales closes. Your January sales won’t hit your bank account until the end of April.
Crafting a new career as an author remains an exercise in perseverance despite the rise in technology and the ease of getting one’s words out into the mass market.
It’s a marathon riddled with potholes, speed bumps and obstacles along the way. And it takes determination – or plain stubbornness – to get to the end, whatever one’s particular end is.
Those of us who embark on the publishing journey need help along the way. The Self-Publisher’s Legal Handbook provides more than its share of help.
