I am traveling at the moment so can’t do my weekly Publishing News, Book Marketing, and Writing Craft roundup. I started the blog to learn about publishing nearly eighteen years ago, and in the spirit of always learning I’ve written some articles on important topics for a writer to consider. These are my thoughts. It is not legal advice. Hopefully, I can shed some light on the subject of Literary Estates.
Last week I wrote about copyright and some of the ideas behind how it started and how it has changed over the last two centuries. This week I want to talk about Literary Estates. I touched on the subject briefly last week when I talked about the length of copyright. The length of your copyright lasts until fifty years after your death here in New Zealand or seventy years after your death in the UK or USA. So, all those books you have been selling on Amazon are your property and part of your literary estate until seventy years after your death.
Your literary estate has value. It can be used in a divorce settlement as an asset. We saw last year how authors caught up in the Unbound mess couldn’t get their rights back to their own work. Bankruptcy law deemed their acquired works an asset of the Unbound company. Bankruptcy law trumps copyright law unless there is a specific clause about publisher bankruptcy in the contract.
At the moment, our family is grappling with the literary estate of a family member who is now needing care. Our family member was a romance author and published over two hundred novels, short stories, poems and had an award-winning story turned into a film. A lifetimes literary work which still brings in royalties and remains an asset until seventy years after their death. As it is unlikely that the children will be around until copyright expires, a chat with the grandchildren was important as they will be looking after the estate.
First, we needed to find all the contracts and get them into a database. Our family member is too ill to deal with this. Luckily contracts were filed in paper and put into file boxes and then into cardboard boxes. In between moves they ended up in strange places, so we are still hunting down some boxes, but we think we have the bulk of them. We are dealing with contracts from the 80’s until the 2010’s we think. We don’t know if there are electronic contracts for books floating around that might not have been printed out and stored. It is very useful to have all your contracts in one place, printed, and easily accessible. (If the contracts are electronic, will you be able to read them in the future? Printing them out means they are still readable if technology gets outdated.)
When looking through these old contracts you are struck by the dense language first. Some contracts are twenty pages or more of legalese which strains average comprehension. You can imagine how difficult it would be for anyone inheriting such a complex task if they have no idea what a publishing contract entails. I photocopied one and then went through the copy with a high lighter explaining all the terms to the grandchildren. They are adults with degrees, and they still found it confusing. Don’t expect that your heirs will even know what a royalty means.
One of the hardest jobs we have is matching books to contracts. A lot of contracts were for multiple books named as The Work One, The Work Two, The Work Three etc. If we are lucky the contract specified the title, but often the title changed between signing the contract and publication. We must work from the publication date. This is where the imprint or verso page is important in a book. If we have a physical copy of the book, we can check copyright dates and match them up with the contracts. Then we can note down the books we think apply to each contract. If you have multi book contracts -jot down the titles on the contract, your heirs will thank you. To help us we took pictures of the cover and imprint page of every physical copy of the books. The short stories are more problematical unless they were in collected works or anthologies. We know some are buried in computer files.
The next important thing is rights. What rights are available or reserved to the publisher? Short stories often have first publication right contracts. The film that was made was from an award-winning short story. It is very common for short stories to be adapted into films. With novel contracts the publishers wanted ‘all rights for all forms of publication now and to be invented in the future.’ When you read this in a contract written in the 1980’s you have to admire the publisher’s lawyers who wrote these complex documents. They were trying to cover everything. Just think about all the publication forms and new rights invented in the last forty years and what might be invented in the next forty years.
Now you might be thinking who would want to republish a book from the 1980’s or a short story from then? Well as it happens, publishing houses. All these contracts represent Intellectual Property that they own a piece of. It’s an asset. And when there is a new publishing format they want to use as many assets as they can to earn as much money as possible.
Recently our local weekly bestseller list had six books out of ten of a beloved local children’s author’s book. They were all format variations of the original story published in 1983. The author is still alive. The small publishing house that published the original book series was swallowed up by a big publisher. They are doing very well from their Intellectual Property acquisition with the merchandise and international sales featuring the famous character.
In the 1980’s manga comics was a small niche publication only found in Japan, printed on cheap paper. In the last ten years the publishing world discovered manga. The romance manga genre is huge and they love classic tales. Publishing companies have been mining their backlists for suitable stories for the new format.
The first we knew about this romance goldmine was when some manga books arrived at the house, to the consternation of our frail family member. What were these books? We needed to translate from the Japanese to find out that they were new books using old stories. There were no letters in the package, just the books. The original stories had been first published over twenty-five years before and they were having another outing in an overseas market.
Was their publication an extension of the original contract? The books were published by the Japanese branch of the publishing house. Graphic novels weren’t specified in the original contract, but translation is. Had these stories been published originally in Japanese? We don’t know. Is this a reprint or a new format? It is probably covered by the contract phrase ‘all forms of publication and those yet to be invented.’
Periodically money arrives in a bank account. We have to go through emails and royalty statements and track which stories they might be from. All of this would be easy if the author was well but add in failing health, and severe memory issues and you have a mountain of work to make sense of.
We sat down with our family member and discussed their wishes for the literary estate. We put together a list of questions we needed answers for. Some scenarios we thought might be wildly improbable, for example would you allow your stories to be used in adult films? No. The wildly improbable can happen. No one, least of all the author, predicted that their stories would live on in Manga novels. Would you allow a film adaptation bringing the story into the present day? It depends on the story. Would you allow the original story to be updated? No.
Now we have a working document roughed out, we are using that as our plan going forward for any literary estate decisions. This helps everyone involved know what the creator wished when they are no longer able to tell us.
Literary estate heirs need to keep the literary estate current and findable. This is so people can contact the estate for reprint permissions. Sometimes this is a landing page or a website with contact details. Publishers and editors move on, so making it easy for anthology editors to contact the estate is important. The second is a bank account for ongoing royalties and to deal with taxes. This can be tricky if the estate is for a deceased author. This is where lawyers and trusts come in.
There is a lot to figure out with this estate and it’s not one of the high-profile ones. Our author was a successful midlist author, often invited to contribute to anthologies and textbooks on writing. When they stopped publishing, they didn’t have an agent. It is down to their family to manage the reprints, the new publications, the requests for quotes or poems. If an agent was still involved, things might be very different. In agent contracts there is sometimes a clause granting management of author estates to the agent. The agents have a stake in the literary estate because they get paid a percentage for every contract they negotiate for the life of copyright. For some, managing an estate for the heirs is their sole job. Literary agencies are often bought and sold based on the Intellectual Property they manage. Based on some of the contracts I have read, a slice of royalties can still be going to a long swallowed up agency for years. The Authors Guild supported Harper Lee over just this problem.
Heirs don’t necessarily mean family members. Beatrix Potter’s literary estate went to Frederick Warne, her publisher. They stopped publishing other authors and concentrated on Beatrix. That is the sole reason they are still in business, just to manage the Beatrix Potter literary estate.
In some wills the literary estate can be settled on trusted friends, an institution, a charity or to a trust to benefit a particular cause. In the UK the author of Peter Pan, James Matthew Barrie signed over all proceeds from Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. When the end of J M Barrie’s copyright drew near, the trustees of the hospital petitioned the UK parliament to allow them to keep the rights. (It helped that the Prime Minister’s wife was a hospital trustee.) A special law called The Peter Pan law was passed granting the hospital all rights in perpetuity.
Sometimes literary estate heirs can generate a lot of controversy as in the case of Harper Lee. Many called into question the actions of a lawyer who said they were the sole beneficiary of the Lee estate. It was noted that Lee was medically incapacitated and somehow granted permission for a hidden manuscript to be published sixty years after her only book To Kill A Mockingbird was published. Of course, the sales were excellent for the publisher.
Our experience shows the need for writers to be thinking about the work that they are leaving behind. We are lucky that the contracts were filed in folders and boxes and clearly labelled as contracts. We are also lucky that there are family members who have some knowledge of publishing and what these contracts represent. The family member in charge of finances looked quite sick when I had to explain that accounts needed to be kept open and why. Everybody now understands the amount of work involved.
We had already started getting the estate in order when the Anthropic AI case came along. The literary estate has to file claims for all the books that were scraped illegally. Only a fraction of these books were registered with the US copyright office. The amount of money that could have been claimed if the publishers had registered all the books just from the literary estate we are dealing with, is an eye watering sum. There will be author estates whose heirs have no idea that they are eligible for compensation. Publishers may be dealing with compensation claims and have no way of finding beneficiaries. And this is only the first of the AI scraping of copyrighted works to be settled. There are more coming.
If you want to find out more about what you need to do to prepare your literary estate- Check out the two excellent books by Michael Le Ronn, who is an advisor to The Alliance of Independent Authors. The Author Heir Handbook and The Author Estate Handbook by M L Ronn. They are excellent guidebooks in thinking about the future of your literary estate and preparing for the future.
Your heirs will thank you.
Copyright Maureen Crisp 2026
@craicer
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