Readers- The New Superheros.

 In Publishing News This Week

I am back at my desk after three weeks away and looking through the news to see what I have missed. It is all London Book Fair with side issues of AI and ways to prove human authentication on your books. 

 

While I was away, I scheduled three articles on Copyright, Literary Estates, and Artificial Intelligence to appear on my blog. Thanks to readers who shared them with others. If you missed them and want to catch up, I wrote about 

What Copyright means and what it is worth.

Why you need to understand your Literary Estate.

How Artificial Intelligence can be used ethically.

Looking over the meaty topics discussed at the London Book Fair my articles reflect some of the discussions, which is gratifying.

 

One of the meaty topics discussed at LBF was Joanna Prior’s keynote speech. Joanna is chair of the UK Literacy Trust as well as being CEO of Pan Macmillan and her speech was an admonishment that the publishing industry is focusing on the wrong crisis. “The decline of reading is a greater challenge to our industry than AI could ever be.” Her speech highlighted the challenges we all face to keep our readers. 

 

Two great London Book Fair overview posts were from Tasmina Perry and Deborah Maclaren. Tasmina wrote about the publishing trends she saw at the LBF, short books are in. Deborah had a more considered overview on the big topics that were discussed, preparing for the next generation of readers. Both these articles highlight the need for publishers to be engaged with their readers.

 

Beside the keynote speeches, a protest book was published by 10,000 authors. Don’t Steal This Book was a direct response to the UK governments plan to allow AI companies to train AI models on copyrighted work without compensation.

 

Jane Friedman writes about her concern that author societies that are sponsoring certification models highlighting human authored books may be missing the point. What use is a sticker on the book if you can’t prove and AI was not involved in writing it?

 

Meanwhile, over in The Gambia Mark Williams writes about what it is like to be a teacher with access to AI but not printed books. His comments reflect Joanna Prior’s keynote on literacy and the challenges of keeping a reader. Without readers there is no publishing industry.

 

Publishing Perspectives reports on a panel discussion at LBF that highlighted the need for publishers to make licensing deals with AI. A bad deal is better than no deal was the comment. I’m not sure that should be a business maxim, but the arguments were compelling.

 

Recently Chelle Honiker of Indie Author Magazine interviewed Draft2Digitals CEO Kris Austin on How AI is affecting The Publishing Industry.

Kris talked about the flood of AI books in the nonfiction space that they reject. He is not so worried about fiction books authored by AI. We could be inflating AI’s ability to tell a compelling story.

 

Baker and Taylor have finally fallen on their sword and filed for bankruptcy. This surprised a few commentators that thought their recent fire sale of assets might have covered the creditors; however the bills were bigger than anyone knew. They owe some eye watering sums as Publishers Weekly reports.

 

Mark Leslie Lefvbre has an interesting article on being wide and how some authors have failed to understand what that actually means. Mark has done just about every job in publishing and is a great resource for how to run an author business. Are you publishing wide but shallow?

 

Ingram Spark has put together a free book marketing course. Each of the modules are under four minutes long and they cover metadata to publicity to websites to social media marketing. If you were looking for an overview on book marketing this could be for you. You get a certificate as well. 

 

Donald Maass has been an agent for a long time. He writes an interesting article on Writer Unboxed about Reading as an Agent. What he looks for might not be what you think. This is required reading if you are submitting to agents and editors.

 

In The Craft Section,

Awaken your creativity- Sarah Hamer- Bookmark

Learning about genres makes you write better- Andromeda Romano-Lax

Base your story structure on principles not systems- Tiffany Yates Martin

How to write dark stories responsibly- K M Weiland- Bookmark

Writing uncomfortable scenes- Jami Gold- Bookmark

 

In The Marketing Section,

2 excellent posts from Rachel Thompson- Understanding Social Media Followers and Book Giveaway subscriber marketing.- Bookmark Both.

Ten tips for Newsletter swaps- Gayle Leeson- Bookmark

5 ways to make your book relevant to media- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

7 Kindle keywords- Dave Chesson- (Updated)

 

To Finish,

While I was away, I did not check my email every day. However, when I did, I was looking through my lists for emails from real people not the next scam email. (There were a few of those.) Recently, Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware went down a Simon and Schuster scam rabbit hole to see how far they would go before they realized that she wasn’t a genuine mark. What I found interesting is that the AI scammer did not flag her name or her actual job which is to write about dodgy practices in the publishing world. If you are reading my blog, you are likely quite up to date on new scam practices, it’s the newbie authors that they target and whose dreams they shatter. A kind word from you and a link to Victoria’s blog might save a newbie from an expensive and embarrassing mistake.

 

Maureen

@craicer

 

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Artificial Intelligence

 

 

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 Artificial Intelligence.

 

Last week I mentioned the Anthropic AI court case and the claims we have to prepare on behalf of the Literary Estate we are responsible for. 

This week I want to talk about the tricky path we are all traveling with Artificial Intelligence.

Since I started writing about Artificial Intelligence in my weekly blog in early 2024, the specter of doom has been trading places with the angel of progress on my shoulder almost every week. I have tried to be as balanced as I can be in my weekly roundup.

All of us in publishing land have an up close and personal reaction to Artificial Intelligence, because our work was stolen to train it. 

 

Compensation for the stealing/pirating of our work is the basis of the Anthropic court case and the cases going through the courts now. The judge in the Anthropic case deemed that if the AI was trained on a book written by Author B, so long as Anthropic had bought a copy of the book, and Author B had been paid for it, then training an AI could be seen as fair use. 

When that judgement was handed down, there was a lot of soul searching among AI companies. Those that copied Anthropic know what is coming - potentially billions of dollars in claims against them for stealing pirated copyrights to train their Large Learning Models. 

Some AI companies immediately started to do deals with publishers, who were happy to provide access to their backlists. Publishers weren’t doing anything much with their backlist and they could earn a tidy sum from an AI training license. They could pass on some money to their authors who opted in to the license. HarperCollins was the first big publisher to publicly say they would do this. The others are quietly non-committal.

 

What is Artificial Intelligence?

I asked an AI and it said AI means creating computer systems that can think, learn, and make decisions in ways that feel human, learning from data to spot patterns.

In other words, the more data you throw at the computer system the better it is able to spot patterns and replicate them to think, and learn, and make decisions as if it were a human. 

 

Using an AI should not replace your own due diligence on research, because you can’t quite trust it to give you truthful advice. It is a machine. It can only respond to the prompt data you give it. Which is why the more you refine the prompt the more useful the answer you get back. If you ask an AI for ten problems in growing a plant, the AI will fixate on the number ten, give you three real problems and make up seven more. And you don’t know what is true or not. 

As everybody begins to see the flaws in these models the AI companies are scrambling to find better research training data. Microsoft has launched a Publishers Content Marketplace specifically aimed at acquiring quick churn news stories so that AI search can improve and be seen as more responsive and reliable.

 

The AI that is altering the publishing world is Generative AI. That is an AI that can generate new content based on the data it was trained on. (Where those court cases come in.) This could be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, Sora video generator, and others springing up like weeds.

We see generative AI in almost everything online, our email, our editing software, grammar, search, assistants on our smart watches, fitness programmes, etc. As soon as you start writing up pops the spell checkers, grammar checkers, manuscript assessors, instant sentence endings in your email etc. All this using some form of machine learning. 

 

How do we hold the moral high ground when we are using it, unwittingly in some cases, every time we log onto our computer? Trusted industry voices are saying how easy it is to use AI for all those really hard thinking jobs. Should we….

Use AI to brainstorm ideas.

Use AI to write your manuscript.

Use AI to write your synopsis.

Use AI to write your blurb and marketing material.

Use AI to create your covers. 

These are the real questions for authors and publishers. How do we reconcile 

the productivity short cuts that using AI brings against the way it was trained to help us. 

It leaves the authors feeling icky every time we use Chat GPT. If we look to publishers for advice they have been adamant that they do not want any work submitted that used AI in the creation. However, over the last year, all the bookfairs are holding seminars for publishers on how to use AI in their business. Bit of a conundrum there.

 

The discussions about AI use in a creative context have become quite heated. With extreme positions at both ends of the spectrum becoming a moral yardstick to beat people over the head with. Either reject everything and be called a luddite or embrace everything and be pilloried for stealing others work. The average writer is trying to find a middle path through the minefield of opinion, when the technology is rapidly changing the written landscape. This is where the author and the publisher need to have some clear guidelines.

 

In the last six months there have been various calls for some sort of licensing of AI content. The Authors Guild last year promoted their Human Authored certification logo which members can use if they register their work with the guild. Author societies around the world are looking at similar ideas. Media companies are making statements about their use of Artificial Intelligence on their websites 

Recently Dave Malone wrote on Jane Friedman’s blog about a proposed AI attribution and creative content license which he called a transparent framework for creators to use. Long time blogger and futurist in the publishing space, Joanna Penn, puts a sticker on her audiobooks that use AI voices. She has cloned her voice with Eleven Labs technology for narration. It’s an AI voice but she owns it because it is her voice.

 

AI and the law.

The European Union is putting laws in place to regulate AI use. From August 2026 you must label all work that used AI generated content and is displayed in the European Union. They are particularly concerned with deep fake videos, AI made images, and AI generated information that has not been signed off by a human. The fines are 15 million Euros or 3% of your worldwide earnings, whichever is greater. If the information has been vetted by a human and found to be misleading, then expect fines. Other countries are working their way through guidelines about AI use and abuse. Expect laws to change in the next few years following the EU’s lead.

 

Fake or Human

 

There is a backlash amongst the younger population who see AI as being fake. They call it out when they see it. The emphasis is on being real and creating real and in person events in all the spaces that young people are in. 

For writers that could be interacting with their fans and showing them that they are human. Most marketers are pushing some sort of engagement in a real context as being important for writers and publishers in the age of Fakes and AI. Book influencers and their engaging in person videos are taking the place of the critical review. Those writers who have carefully cultivated their fan base are seen as genuine. Just look at Taylor Swift and how she can rally her fans for a cause. 

Not every writer can be like Taylor Swift. Not every writer wants to be on a video. We are selling our stories not our souls. Joanna Penn’s says being a writer now is to ‘double down on being human.’ To somehow forge a connection with your readers whether that’s audio Q and A’s, crafting a fan competition in the real world, we must look for connection opportunities that are human centered. 

 

Is there an ethical way to use AI? 

 

Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence is not going away. It is disruptive technology, like the invention of the internet. As publishers license their back lists and with the first court judgement in favour of using copyright works to train it, we are going to have to live with it. AI is a tool, like a very smart dictionary. It can be the productivity hack you need. We just need to figure out our ethical guidelines in using it.

 

If you train the AI on your own work, you can use it to help you with blurbs, marketing copy and brain storming. Where I think authors could be on shaky ground is if you use AI to do the bulk of the writing for you. Your voice and your unique way of fashioning a sentence, explaining a concept or writing dialogue sets you apart from other writers. The machine recreates and smooths sentences to a uniformity. The messy take, the choice of words, the colour of the human life lived and expressed is what separates our writing from the machine. 

 

Training up your own AI assistant is possible now. You can upload your own files and set strict limits for the assistant to only work on your own work. Google Notebook LM is free to use in this way, or you can investigate paid plans with your preferred AI tool. Each one seems to specialise in a different facet of language. 

I would hesitate to use images generated by AI for covers. Already we have books being ruled ineligible in awards for AI images in covers. It is better to steer clear of using them for anything other than brainstorming. Translation is the next change coming with books being converted by AI into other languages. Again, I wonder if the translation will use the right words to keep the flavour of your style of writing.

Chelle Honniker has been doing excellent work around AI automations for authors and her recent article on time saving coding was revelatory. This is where training your own AI author assistant really makes a difference in your business.

 

What is coming and how we need to prepare for it.

 

Search is changing. AI is looking for trusted information so marketing your books can be as easy as writing some blog posts on who needs to read your books, the tropes, how you came to write it and making sure there are buy buttons everywhere. 

 

ChatGPT now have partnerships with Spotify and Etsy. You can search for a product or book within ChatGPT which can then buy it and arrange for it to be shipped to you. This technology is already available in Alexa as an AI assistant in the Amazon ecosystem. However, the future of AI assistants is to surf the whole internet at your command. Your own AI personal assistant could be the office secretary, researcher, part time collaborator and office supply buyer. This is the job junior publishing professionals hold in publishing houses and that could be a problem as publishing houses outsource to AI these inhouse jobs. The training grounds for publishing professionals is being outsourced to AI.

I see this happening in my own family, the scarcity of jobs for new publishing graduates who used to do this work for publishers. They were doing the marketing campaigns, writing blurbs and copyediting. These jobs are changing or disappearing as publishers start using AI. There could be a real skills gap coming in publishing houses. As the laws around AI use are changing, publishers need to think about the ways their staff provide a human oversight on what AI produces. 

As countries grapple with AI usage laws publishers and authors need to have a voice in how our industry is changing. We need to be involved in shaping these laws and making clear guidelines for AI use in creative work. If you have a voice in your own country let it be heard so that creativity is protected from the rise of the uncreative machine. 

 

If you want to read more about what is possible. Read Joanna Penn on the AI Assisted Artisan Author. Check out Chelle Honnikers Author Automations blog. Keep an open enquiring mind. We are at the start of the science fiction future we read about as children, now where is my flying car?

 

 Copyright Maureen Crisp 2026

@craicer

 

NB, I wrote every word in my messy human way. An AI fixed my spelling and helped clarify some research information.  

 

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Literary Estates

 

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

 

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

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Understanding Copyright.

 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 Copyright 

It is Summer down under and while my writing brain takes a break from the current Work In Progress (WIP from the Fiction Overseer-er) I picked up a book on the history of copyright. I then proceeded to bore the family with what I thought were fascinating facts about the evolution of copyright.

 

For example, when the printing press was in its infancy, the printers wanted to make use of the technology, i.e. earn some money, so they printed pamphlets from anyone who wanted to get their ideas out to the people. They bought the right to copy the idea in printed form. This brought the printers into conflict with the authorities. They didn’t want just anybody being able to print information to the public. The public might get the wrong ideas. Printers were told they had to print the names of these idea rabble rousers so the authorities knew who to go after, otherwise they would be prosecuted. As this meant execution or hefty fines the printers quickly complied. From this practice of naming the author, the printer was absolved and notoriety was bestowed. Fame and fortune usually followed, sometimes just ahead of the police. Thomas Paine made a quick buck in three countries printing his revolutionary ideas before skipping town ahead of the executioner. (See Thomas Paine’s life for all the details.)

 

What does the term copyright mean for us now? 

In its most basic form copyright is an intellectual property law that grants creators exclusive rights to their original works once they are recorded in a fixed form. The important parts of the previous sentence are original creator, exclusive right, once they are recorded and fixed form.

 

Fixed Form

Ownership of an ideas starts from the time it is written down. Print is usually the first fixed form. (If you want to be extra careful about when you created a character or novel idea, date your drafts.) Translations then opened up a pandoras box of problems as historically translators asserted copyright over the translated work. They sold the work as for their own profit cutting out the original creator. Eventually this was resolved by assigning only the copyright of the translation to the translator, and a license fee to translate was negotiated to benefit the original creator. 

 

In the twentieth century along came the invention of audio and visual media. With the invention of mass media entertainment companies needed Intellectual Property. Contracts with the original creators began to get complicated. A contract written on a napkin after a boozy lunch wasn’t going to be sufficient anymore. In the twenty-first century computer code arrived and was considered as equal to books, art, and music. The code behind the software of the screen you are reading this on is copyrighted. As technology advances copyright laws get tested. It is a very complex collection of rights and laws. 

Right now countries are grappling with works that are produced with Artificial Intelligence (or really complex computer code.) What laws should be in place to protect the creator of the code? In some early test cases the legal opinion is whoever generated the prompt to the AI is the copyright owner of what it produces. Artificial Intelligence is just a tool of production, similar to a pen. However, every country is approaching AI copyright works differently and what might be fine in your country won’t be somewhere else.

 

Exclusive Rights

As printers evolved into publishers and new ways of sharing the information became profitable, contracts assigning exclusive rights became more important.

Could the creator be tempted to assign exclusive rights to a printer publisher? What can the publisher expect to make from the exclusive right to the creator’s work. A good Return On Investment is at least 25% annually. The publishing model is a risky business. To make a profit a publisher needs a good performing piece of Intellectual Property. 

Choosing a profitable work is difficult. Which work will generate profit? Nobody knows, for the public taste is fickle. For every ten works a publisher might acquire only one may take off and earn lots of money. And you don’t know which one of the ten it will be. If you have a hit, you need as many exclusive rights as possible to get as much money from the work as possible. Contracts between publisher and author hinge on how many exclusive rights the publisher can acquire from the author just in case this work is the one work that will generate a profit or be the next Harry Potter franchise. (Bloomsbury was looking pretty shaky when they acquired Harry Potter. They didn’t know until the third book sold out how big the phenomenon was likely to be and it saved their publishing company.)

 

The best description I have ever found on what exclusive rights are is Dean Wesley Smith’s book on copyright, The Magic Bakery. Here he breaks down Intellectual Property and copyright as slices of the one pie that is the exclusive work of the author creator in its first fixed form. Dean’s book is well worth reading and will grow your mind and give you a much better understanding of what the author creator actually owns and why Intellectual Property is so valuable that corporations spend billions of dollars just to get access to Intellectual Property assets.

To show you the potential value of Intellectual Property let’s look at just one right, the exclusive right to the audio production of a work, (a novel pie.) This can be sliced into narrator only, translation narrator only, multi voice narration, translated multi voice narration, audio drama, translation audio drama, soundtracks, abridged audio production, audio serialisation, and on into radio broadcast rights which opens up another big pie of rights to slice. And this is just for the first time these rights will be used. If the book has an updated second edition, it starts all over again.

 

Once upon a time

The words, ‘once it is recorded’, don’t look like they are important, but they are. From the time of creation, and then publication, copyright resides with the creator. Every country has a law that determines the length of time a copyright is valid. For us here in New Zealand our government says fifty years after the creator’s death. In the United States it is seventy years after the creator’s death. This means that creators need their heirs to know what they are doing with Intellectual Property. Your literary estate lives on after your death. However, there is a much more immediate clause in your contract about time, and that is the length of time the creator assigns an exclusive right.

Many author creators are so happy that a publisher wants to take their book that they quickly sign a contract and send it back without realising some of the implications and rights they have signed away. The words ‘in perpetuity’ mean forever. The phrase ‘for the entire life of the copyright,’ means, if the publisher is in the United States, seventy years after your death. The words world wide or universal rights means in any other language than the original language and the term universal rights covers any potential publication on another planet. You might think it’s funny but lawyers who write contracts have thought of it. Project out seventy years from when you turn one hundred and think about space exploration for a moment.

Time can be a good negotiating tool. For example, you can offer a publisher exclusive rights for a set period of time and then the rights revert back to you. Amazon has exclusive rights for seven years to your audio book if you publish through their audio book platform. If your book is going to be the next big franchise hit, and that increasingly depends on the marketing budget to get the word out, five to ten years is a good rule of thumb and one that agents are now writing into contracts. Reversion of rights is important and putting a time limit on exclusive rights gives the publisher a reasonable time frame to exploit the rights they have to the fullest. They may choose not to do anything or to let some rights slide as not important to be bothered with. Brandon Sanderson’s publisher let Brandon keep the rights to special editions on his first book. He was an unknown writer. Fantasy wasn’t that big of a deal. The tenth anniversary of the first books publication came around, and Brandon decided to have a kick starter campaign for a special edition. He wasn’t expecting forty million dollars to be pledged by the end of the campaign, and neither was his publisher who didn’t get a cent. You can just imagine how carefully Brandon’s publisher’s lawyers are going over the contracts to see what else they can make money on.

On January 1^st every year a list is published of works that have come out of copyright. This can be a potential bonanza for publishers who can publish editions of famous books and not have to give literary estates anything. The character Miss Marple came out of copyright this year. Hopefully she won’t star in a slasher movie like Winnie the Pooh did the year following his copyright expiry date.

 

Copyright going forward.

The recent class action against Anthropic hinged on whether Anthropic paid for the books used to train their Claude Artificial Intelligence. If they had bought a copy of the book then, the judge said, it would be fair use to teach AI from it. After all students read and learn from textbooks. However, Anthropic programmers used a pirate site to get the books. Because they were using stolen property they needed to pay compensation to the copyright holders. With over 400,000 works identified as being copied, Anthropic settled out of court for one billion dollars, and the copyright holders are now working through their claim forms. The copyright holders of translated works will have to bring separate claims against Anthropic. The lawyers dealing with the claim are only dealing with works published in the United States and registered with the United States copyright authority for the purposes of legal protection. Unfortunately, a lot of authors found out their publisher had not registered their copyright claim (you can register anytime up to five years from first publication if you want to take legal action in the USA) and so they and their publisher are missing out on the settlement compensation. 

There are more class actions going through the courts against other AI companies. Some AI companies have decided it is better to pay for a license to use a publisher’s backlist, trusting that the publisher will pass on compensation to copyright holders. Contract lawyers might have got there first though with the phrase ‘and other means of publication yet to be invented,’ a nice catch all phrase that has been a feature of publisher’s contracts for decades.

 

Copyright is an important subject that gets glossed over. If corporations can spend millions acquiring the rights to music, or film, or games, or characters, or any sort of Intellectual Property then the original creator needs to understand the value of their work and protect it. You might wake up tomorrow to discover that your work is a runaway success, and you aren’t entitled to a cent. 

Your copyright is an asset judged by the courts. It is property and worth something. It can be used in a divorce settlement or a bankruptcy. If you understand the value of it first, you may save yourself an expensive mistake.

 

Hopefully, I have helped you understand a little more about the subject. I am always asking my young friends who want to be lawyers if they have thought about going into intellectual property law. It is the key to most entertainment law and where else can you get your name into the credits of movies, games, and acknowledgements.

 

If you are interested in further reading on the subject, check out Dean Wesley Smith’s book. The Magic Bakery 

Who Owns This Sentence by Alexandre Montagu and David Bellos - print copies at your local bookshop or on Amazon

 

Copyright Maureen Crisp 2026

@craicer

 

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Time For A Change?

 

In Publishing News this week,

I always tell writers that if they want to know what’s coming check out what the romance industry is doing. They are always ahead of the curve. So I was surprised when I read that Harlequin are discontinuing historical romances after forty years. Publishers Weekly looks into the reasons why. Have eBooks replaced mass market paperbacks?

 

Publishing Perspectives reports on research findings in Italy that suggest that piracy accounts for one third of the book publishing market. This is a shocking statistic, and the publishers have gone in depth to find out where and how it is happening that they have lost so many sales. 

If it’s happening in Italy, a sophisticated publishing market, what is happening elsewhere? 

 

Recently the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators held their winter conference in New York. There was an interesting panel discussion from Editors and Agents talking trends in children’s books. Humour is on the wish list.

 

Writing Australia has some money to play with and they want to invite small Australian publishers to spend it. Be still my heart. If only we had such nice things here. There is a dedicated travel fund to get to the bookfairs and other goodies. 

 

Eleven Labs audiobook company recently held their summit in London at the same time as the Independent Publishers Guild. Publishing Perspectives reports that both conferences talked about AI voices. Eleven Labs is moving beyond just audio books and into voice anywhere.

 

Publishers Weekly reports that the Minnesota Booksellers are not being nice to the ICE agents in their city. They are actively running campaigns to support the victims and harass the agents. It’s all part of the community service.

 

Mark Williams has a deep dive article into the merging of audiobook and eBook and how disruptive this technology is. Amazon has just launched their Immersion Reading feature. We are seeing the merging of book formats. Mark examines the rise of audio for populations that are illiterate. He knows first hand the struggles of access to literacy. He teaches in an isolated school in the poorest country in Africa.

 

Sara Hildreth has been looking at her reading strategy. In the midst of change she has found herself reading differently. She offers four shifts in focus that are helping her enjoy her reading more while navigating through family chaos.

 

Rachel Thompson has an interesting article on why We Can’t focus Anymore. The Hidden Cost of our Attention Economy. She offers a few strategies to cope. First, just breathe.

 

Gabriela Pereira has an article on time management. It’s not about time it’s about priorities and setting goals. This is something that I have been trying to do in my own life lately.

 

Dave King writes about the perfect novel. In his opinion it is Pride and Prejudice. He writes that in his forty years as an editor he finds it hard to read for pleasure, but he was recently reading P&P out loud and thought- this is the perfect novel. He looks at the way Jane Austen got it right.

 

In The Craft Section,

Are you making these four mistakes?- Anne R Allen- Bookmark

How not to write your novel- James Scott Bell- Bookmark

Which point of view should you use- Gabriela Pereira- Bookmark

Let’s be clear- Grammar fix its.- Jim Dempsey- Bookmark

Four act structure- K M Weiland-Comprehensive- Bookmark!

 

In the Marketing Section,

A 5 star email experience- Ines Johnsen- Bookmark

28 whimsical holidays for March- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

Voice options for do it yourself audio books- Indie Author Mag- Bookmark

Why writers need multiple practical marketing strategies- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

The submission package - Michelle Barker- Bookmark

 

To Finish

 

I have been busy writing long nonfiction articles. They are going to be appearing here over the next three weeks while I am traveling. I will try to pop in and check comments. 

I hope you will find the articles useful. I started this blog to educate myself in publishing and along the way it has taken on the structure you know and (hopefully) love. I don’t write deep dive articles often, so if you like my wild viewpoints let me know and I might consider doing it more often for you. 

 

Ciao

 

Maureen

@craicer

 

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

 

Pic Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash