Just finishing reading “Law and Authors” by Jacqueline D. Lipton which led me to wonder how much most authors know about the legal framework under which they’re operating. My experience is that publishing law can be pretty counterintuitive and it’s good to understand the underpins before you get into signing up to deals you might not actually like the look of, if you understood what everything means.
And that’s the main issue with legally binding stuff. One of the ironies of law is that it’s supposed to let everyone know where they stand (at least in rule of law countries) but somehow due to the accretion of time and rules and statute and case after statute and case, it never quite works out that way and you find that you’ve accidentally sold your soul to your publisher.
So you’re forced to turn to lawyers and the legal industry to get it back. Which can be expensive. Which for most writers means it’s prohibitive as for most of us writing’s never going to make us enough money for more than a couple of hours of lawyer time.
To be fair it is better in some places than others (and in some time periods than others), with a permanent see-saw between attempts to complicate for accuracy, and simplify for fairness.
As an example my understanding is that the whole area of equity in the common law jurisdictions was intended to deal with overly technical stumbling blocks in the way the ‘law’ of the time worked, which tended to boil down to “misspelled a word in a dead language?”
No justice for you.
So, back to the start. The book. It’s great.
I can heartily recommend the book to anyone looking for a primer so that they can enter meaningful conversations with publishers, confirm where they stand (in broad terms) when writing about real people and/or any of the other queries that immediately come to mind when you’re seriously thinking about putting your words out there.
As to level of knowledge you’ll need to get something from it, well for background I’m a lawyer by training but that training was a very long time ago and my actual practice is very specialised into a specific area of England/Wales law so my knowledge of publishing law is similar to any other person tangentially involved in the publishing industry – nothing more.
If that describes you (the second half, rather than the first) and you want to get the basics down so you can understand when you need to ask questions, then this book might be right for you.
It tends to take what could sound like a complex question like ‘do I have copywrite in what I write’ and give a straight answer. It’s my favourite sort of book, practical!
That’s it for today. Back to editing my series, and then an hour or two on the company website. We have authors to add!
Ice Age in Scarlet 