When to Cave Over a Fake Copyright Claim

When they have a lawyer and you can't afford one.

(Jurisdictionary - lousy packaging, great course.)

Hopefully, you don't have a lot invested in that book. Might be a crying shame, but get over it.

The two questions you have to ask yourself:

• Can I afford a lawyer and legal battle?
• Can I afford to have the government copyright search at $150/hour?

Probably not.

That's the simple business plan for a SOHO Indie publisher:

Back off, apologize, and pull the book.

There's plenty more public domain books you can publish which say the same thing, whether fiction or non fiction. But your budget simply can't afford any conflicts.

Take the hint from Google Play and Amazon. If there's a whiff of lawyer in the air, they simply suspend the book immediately and tell the indie publisher to sort it out. If you come out with your own version of an ebook, Google quickly pulls their free version with no questions asked - even though it's still in the public domain. They simply don't want the hassle.

I ran into this recently. Some claim about how I "infringed" on someone's rights.

Turns out that book has never been on solid legal footing. I searched all over on Stanford Copyright site to find that book. Double, triple checked - looked for different spellings. No one had ever simply renewed that copyright after it expired.

Then I checked Google Books to search through the digital hardcopies of copyright renewals - still nothing there.

Just for a lark, I looked up their version of this book - and found that while it was published since 1977, they hadn't bothered to register that book, either.

What was really occurring was some relative was getting a nice little check every month from the publisher and no one wanted to upset that apple-cart. That relative had enough moxie to look out for and defend his little paycheck by alerting the current publisher.

Nothing is on file with the Government. So they don't have a leg to stand on.

But they do have lawyers.

And I don't.

So it's apologize, pull the book, find another to replace it. Even though I did nothing wrong. Discretion being the better part of valor, and all that.

Other options:

• Publish only in countries which don't support that copyright.

Of course, that knocks out about 80% of your potential revenue - but you'll still have some. Simple enough to do - just check the countries you know you have rights in.

• Publish with distributors who aren't in the US. 

Even worse income. Can be done. None that I'd bother to mention here...

• Set up digital sales on a server outside the U.S. on a non-signatory nation like China and do your own promotion to sell the book from there.

Oh, come on. You just made Indie publishing an expensive hobby.

Look, there are tons of great books which are out of copyright. Many are unquestionably so. Invest your time in the ones which will give you real returns, not headaches.

Like the old Queen's approach to a parade: nod, smile, and move on.

PS. The pity is that these books aren't being made into ebooks, just suppressed from them. So people can't easily find the data. Solution: extract the data as a "review" or "study guide" under fair use (less than 10% of the original text).

PPS. Just realized that this same publishing executive who didn't renew his copyrights (or have them checked) also gave me bogus data about a book originally written and published in France. The translation is a different edition, different copyright - and was never renewed in the U.S. where it was first published. I'm not trying to republish that original book in French. So I'm good until someone complains... Just keep a low profile - which means less sales. (sigh.)

Related articles

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• Copyright and the Value of the Public Domain: An Empirical Assessment
• How to Really Profit from Self-Publishing - Follow the Disney Route to Success
• Rules, Attribution, and Doing The Right Thing
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• How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever - Part 2

Your Next Challenge in Publishing - Finish What You Started

Editing Great Books Doesn't Get Them Selling or Sold - Publishing Does.

(Photo credit: Kev)

It's an easy trap to get into. Many niches have lots of books hanging around which beg you to bring them back to life.

And just in research alone, you can stumble onto fascinating projects which lend to even more interesting work.

The trick is to narrow your focus to the job at hand, and trust your research that you are working on the right product for the right niche.

I say this as now I'm in the middle of several incomplete publishing projects. Luckily, the changes at Lulu now force me to simply complete some of these shorter ones. Since all my PD/PLR books now have to be hand-submitted, it forces some choices. (A back-handed thanks, I guess.)

Some of the profitable approaches worth noting

• Finding overpriced textbooks and simply republishing at a slightly or much lower price can be profitable. (Just watch for where they added additional material to the original PD work.)
• Finding and publishing an out-of-print set of books with a new set of covers which binds them into a series - particularly where no one publisher has all of them, and most have been out of print for years.
• Finding books which have not been ported over as ebooks - or only to a single distributor (like Amazon).
• Building collections of books - very useful on Amazon, but they'll sell well on all the distributors.
• Really doing the market research before you start and then sticking to the keywords and successful actions you found.
• Evergreen launches.
• Memberships with private links to discount versions in the paid area, but plenty of free material in the free area.
• Finishing the marketing of one project before you start editing the next batch.
• Getting your membership to buy discounted new releases and leave honest reviews. (The "instant bestseller" strategy.)
• Surveying your email lists to find out what they actually want - and then publish that type of book.

Errors in publishing

• Too many projects started, even published, and nothing marketed. You'll make some money, but are leaving tons on the table. 
• Exclusive publishing on Amazon or any single distributor - same resul
• Publishing only ebooks and not making the hardcopy available (from POD like Lulu.)
• Getting dispersed with all the great books you can edit into shape. (Start with the highest quality digital files you can find.)
• Buying conventional wisdom about spending a huge amount of time on social media "building your platform." (Get your reading audience to join your membership and interact with them by email.)
• Only publishing a few books or spending an extreme amount of time "getting the marketing just right." Publish, Market. Then: publish, market. Then: publish, market. Some of your projects can overlap, since it takes time to proof hardcopy books. The solution to publishing income is to publish regularly and market when you aren't publishing.

- - - -

The end result for any home-business publisher isn't a lot of published books that sell well. That's just the whipped cream topping on top of that dessert.

A regular income from selling books just frees you up to really follow your bliss. This is also known as a "funded proposal." It pays for itself as it goes.

Your bliss-progress is gained only by helping other people find and follow theirs.

All this is designed around that central idea. That is also where you'll get your inspiration just before you dive into another editing-publishing-marketing project.

P. S. The reason for this post is to say - finish what you start. If you have a lot of incomplete projects, line them up by which is the quickest to finish and wrap them up on that order. Work on one project at a time from then on. Sure, download and file away books you want to work on, but get things completed. Review what you did earlier and do it better next time - don't go backwards, but simply do better with your next one. "Plan your work, work your plan."

Luck to us all.

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Making Sense of Amazon's Public Domain Policies

When the same policies get different results - it makes you wonder...

(Two McCoy's... photo: JD Hancock)

We start with very simple Amazon policies regarding Public Domain (PD) books:

In order to provide a better customer buying experience, our policy is to not publish undifferentiated versions of public domain titles where a free version is available in our store. We consider works to be differentiated when one or more of the following criteria are met:

• (Translated) - A unique translation
• (Annotated) - Contains annotations (unique, hand-crafted additional content including study guides, literary critiques, detailed biographies, or detailed historical context)
• (Illustrated) - Includes 10 or more unique illustrations relevant to the book

Books that meet this criteria must include (Translated), (Annotated), or (Illustrated) in the title field.

For example, "Pride and Prejudice (Annotated)" is acceptable, while "Pride and Prejudice (with an Introduction by Tiffany Gordon)" is not. The product description must also include a summary of how the book is unique in bullet point format at the beginning of the product description (maximum 80 characters). 

 And also this policy:

Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content, however we may choose to not sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books. 

Then there is  policy concerning confirming content rights:

During the title upload process there are two areas where you will be asked to confirm your rights to publish your content.

You can publish content that is in the public domain. We may request additional documentation to confirm that it is not under copyright. Titles which consist entirely or primarily of public domain content are not eligible for the 70% royalty option at this time (see the Pricing Page for more details). 

A Test of Amazon Public Domain Publishing 

Earlier, I avoided Amazon because at the time they had just started publishing public domain again, after having banned those books for awhile. The policy wasn't exact, and what was there meant I would have to create special books just for Amazon - so I skipped them and worked on publishing via Lulu to iTunes and Nook, direct to Kobo and later Google Play. I made money on all of them with tests in both PLR (Private Label Rights) and PD books . (Amazon doesn't accept PLR.) 

When Lulu started distributing to Amazon and Kobo, they stopped distributing Public Domain books (but will still distribute PLR.) Since I had to start publishing directly to iTunes and Nook, Amazon came back on the radar. As well, a book I'd published there a couple of years ago went number 1 in it's category and started giving me substantial extra income once it hit the algorithms just right (and got a lot of great reviews - an Amazon-only foible.)

The test

I was doing research on copywriting classics. This wound up with 12 books which were all public domain editions. In order to make them work under the policies above, I added a selection of essays to each one - same set for each book. In that way, they'd be annotated - which takes much less time than finding images for each book which are appropriate and original.

In the middle of this, I ran into the concept that it's actually a problem they have in differentiation - they want unique books. Because there are a handful of public domain books which are huge bestsellers that everyone wants to publish. Amazon simply doesn't need more versions of these. They've already got tons.

The other interesting facet is that they will bring in reviews from other versions of the same book. So when you publish a public domain book, you'll get instant reviews and share the sales which have already developed there. Another reason they don't need more versions of these bestsellers.

So I made roughly half of these PD books "annotated" and the others mostly had different titles than the original. This was to test this differentiation theory. I was fully prepared to take a lower percentage.

Out of a dozen books, One got blocked right off. Three others were queried. The other 8 were approved right off. 

The blocked one was Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." The exact reject quote was: "In order to provide a better customer buying experience, we've stopped accepting and selling undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of book content previously published in the catalog even if the title, author, and other metadata for new versions may be unique."

[Update: It was found that the Carnegie book was actually under copyright as it had been renewed - although some questions remain, Amazon was right to block it - even if they gave me some odd reply.]

The three queried books came back with various requests:

To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming your publishing rights within five days:
Acceptable documentation includes:
- A contract or statement from the author or publisher verifying you retain publishing rights
- An e-mail from the address listed on the official author or agent’s website
- For authors using a pseudonym, copyright registration or statement of pseudonym use.

To verify public domain status please provide the following:
1. A URL that includes all authors and translators (if applicable) and their dates of death
2. A URL that includes the initial publication date of the work.

1.      If you hold the publishing rights for this book, please resubmit your book for publishing following the instructions provided below.
2.      If the book is in the public domain, please confirm the initial publication date of the work and the author’s date of death. We will contact you if we need additional information.
3.      If you do not hold the rights for this book, please remove your book following the instructions provided below.

Two got the same reject in one email. One required several goes at this. You can see that these are cut/paste responses.

Test Results:

As covered, eight got approved immediately. Over the next three days, the other three were also approved.

Only one of the three was "annotated." The blocked book was also "annotated." The annotation in each was the same.

But even though two of the non-"annotated" books were queried on the basis of being public domain, there was no instruction (as I've experienced on Kobo) to declare them as such. But per their agreement with you as a (self-)publisher, you have to declare them as such anyway - and take the lower percentage.

Just be prepared to have no reviews (and few if any sales) as you'll be at the bottom of their algorithms.

The general idea that if you want to share reviews, you simply use the same author- and title-name - plus add (annotated) or (illustrated) to the title and a bullet point at the beginning of the description saying how you did.

If you don't worry about the reviews, then rename it as something else.

But the real scene seems to be whether that particular public domain book is has some behind-the-scenes copyright/DMCA conflicts. (But the other distributors don't have this problem, so be prepared to just move on.)

Workarounds

1. Rename it and have other ways to drive traffic to the book to get sales.
2. Annotate or Illustrate the book, title it as such.
3. Publish as boxed sets (binders/collections/series) and get multiple placements on Amazon's search engine for author/title combinations. Box sets/Bundles/Collections/Series of public domain books are uniquely copyrighted as a set, so need no annotation or illustration. This seems the way to get around some of the public domain publishing problems on Amazon - and may actually be the best way to sell PD books by a single author or in a given genre.
4. Always have a web page around with the Author date of death and original publishing date for the book, plus any data such as the renewed copyright expiry. Then you can give them that link simply. A series page can have them all listed.

Upcoming Tests

Watch the sales (or lack thereof) and see how these perform.

I'll shortly be porting a stack of public domain fiction books to Amazon and will let you know how these go. They'll be showing up as both individual books and also binders. As these sell well on other platforms, getting them accepted on Amazon for sale should result in near-immediate additional income.

Update: Results are in... Binders of books are queried just as individual PD books are. One binder was blocked as it contained the same single PD book blocked above. It's that particular book they have a problem - rightfully.

Summary

1. Be prepared for senseless rejects, but answer just what they need. If a book is blocked - move on to the next (and meanwhile you're still publishing it everywhere else, right?) Unknown PD books don't apparently get queried as much as the better known.
2. Always match up the ebook with a hardcopy version to max out your possible sales.
3. Always promote all the distributors you posted the book at - both ebook and hardcopy.
4. Either go for reviews with the existing name and share in the existing sales, or create binders and hope they sell well so you can get reviews. You're competing with a commodity, so add value - you can't compete on price as they are already available for free. Binders add value.

This is all the effort to profit from Amazon with public domain, but avoid their crap-shoot approach most original self-published books receive there. Once we get the breakthrough - which points to bundles (by any name) - we should be able to get popular sales to bring that package up the ranks.

The point to all this work is to get regular sales and leverage PD publishing for extra income. Nice work for a home business.

[Update: per their terms and conditions, "Books that consist primarily of public domain content are not eligible for the 70% Royalty Option." So your options are a) to go the "annotated" route and b) create binders with the bestselling name/author as a "collection". You can only claim 35% royalty on Amazon, so stick with the bestsellers. Or build a new book which is not primarily public domain. I'll need to check out iTunes for this scene. GooglePlay doesn't ask whether it's public domain (and only gives a flat 52%, regardless. Nook doesn't require you to declare it as public domain, but asks. Kobo does (and gives only 20% royalty.)]
[Update 2: This also means you can't use KDP select. So make sure you publish your books as broadly as possible.]

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