self publishing

hello
im trying to self publish but i have a few concerns..

can you self publish annymously?

whats the best self publishing service?

what about payment and copyrights?

thanks

 

You can self-publish under any name you want.

What do you mean by self-publishing service? There are a variety of services on offer. Or do you mean the best place to self-publish?

You own the copyright as soon as you write your story. If you publish and your book is successful, it's pretty inevitable that pirates will copy your book and share it with people who download pirated stuff. It's a never-ending battle to get these copies removed from the internet, and far too expensive to do anything about it, legally. Authors have to accept that it will happen and we can't stop it (which sucks!) Payment will depend on the platform you self-publish on.

 

Yes, you can self-publish anonymously. I mean, someone is going to have at least some information about you so that you can be provided with payment, etc., but from the reader's point of view, in terms of their book purchases, you can keep things pseudonymous.

As for best--I don't know about best, but Amazon is of course the dominant player so it is worth considering going through them. You set up your payment information with them.

You can get a copyright registration for a pseudonymous work. If you provide the copyright office with your real name people will find it. You don't have to give them your real name, but doing everything including copyright registration with no use of your real name could raise questions about ownership if you were ever going to transfer your rights.

 

In addition to this a "poor mans copyright" should solve the problem of ownership. Simply place the manuscript in an envelope with the USPS, mail it to yourself, and never open it unless or until validity is questioned.

 

That's so easy to fake I don't know how much value it would be. Might be worth more simply to have the document witnessed and signed by people who would be willing to testify in court. I can send myself an unsealed, or barely sealed envelope, which I've done, and then put whatever I want into it.

 

This is fairly explicitly invalid in the US. There's no assurance that it has any value elsewhere, but it's especially debunked in the US.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poor-mans-copyright/
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

 

Largely off-topic for this thread, but I ask anyway.

Let's pretend that for some reason my WIP turned out to be valuable enough to steal and to engage in a copyright battle over. (This is purely for the sake of argument. Not gonna happen.)

Every few weeks I print the entire WIP in tinytiny print and put it in a binder, because I don't trust electronic backups.

This means that that binder happens to contain a history of my revisions to the document.

In this imaginary world where the document is worth fighting over, would that qualify as evidence that I was the creator?

 

It would be evidence if you were in court to testify to having printed and bound the pages. It wouldn't necessarily be dispositive evidence. One might argue it could have been faked, or acquired improperly from the real author, and that it is self-serving testimony. But if the other side has nothing, maybe it's good enough. If someone saw you print it out every few weeks and you both signed the document, and they were willing to come in and testify, might be even better.

In the hypothetical, you said you don't trust electronic backups, but if you used a cloud service that had versioning where you could obtain, from the company, a complete version history, date and time-stamped, of what went to their server, it seems to me that would be pretty compelling.

 

Bingo....and I have covered my own ass with much success.

 

Authorship/ownership of the copyright has to be established, but in most cases I don't think that's going to be difficult If you've shared the work with someone and they steal it and claim it as their own it could be an issue.

As you said, a lot of piracy is overseas. Even if it isn't, it is expensive to pursue a copyright lawsuit. One advantage of timely registering the copyright in the U.S. is you can get statutory damages and attorneys' fees, which might induce a lawyer to take the case on a contingency fee if the infringement is rampant enough and it looks like the judgment could be collected.

 

I seem to remember a few cases of people downloading a successful writer's book, filing off the serial numbers, then publishing it themselves under a different name. Typically it doesn't work for long as someone will read the book and tell the original writer that it's a rip-off of their book.

Worse than that, though, there have been scammers who send copyright claims to Amazon for other people's books, and Amazon pull them and tell the writer to sort it out with the scammer. In some cases, I believe the scammer has demanded money to drop their claim so the book can be published again.

 

Yes, after producing the evidence mediation saw to it that it never reached court. There are officially positions, and then there is preponderance of evidence....it can still be used as evidence fit for dismissal.

 

I was thinking about websites where you can publish your books.

Okay that's good to know.

Yeah i was thinking something similar. I assume if you have proof that you were the first person to upload the books, you can prove that you are the original owner.

 

I would think, if you're worried about your work getting stolen, that the best evidence you can produce are umpteen copies of the many changes you made to the MS ...all separately dated, of course. Whenever I work on a chapter, I first make a copy of the existing chapter and put it into a folder FOR that chapter. Then I put the new date on the original, and get to work.

Another good reason to do revisions and heavy editing. So many copies!

For several years I have been sending attachments of my MS in its current state to myself via email—which is a web-based email service. These attachments are date-stamped, and I don't think they would be easy to fake. I'm not doing this because I'm worried about somebody stealing my story, but I do believe in not putting all my eggs in one basket, as regards backups. It's so I'll always have a copy somewhere if my computer dies and/or my house goes on fire and my pocket flash drive(s) I carry with me at all times suddenly don't work. Paranoid? You betcha.

Like @ChickenFreak , I also make paper printouts. I usually destroy an old printed chapter after I've revised it, but I do have three copies of formerly 'completed' manuscript drafts printed out, including my first draft copy. If the house catches fire, these will be goners, though. (Just as well, at least when it comes to my first draft!)

Anyway ...my book is currently over 200,000 words long—and the earlier versions are longer than that. Too long for traditional publication. Who in their right mind would want to steal it?

I think, for most people, the problem they'll face won't be keeping people from stealing their stuff. Instead, they'll be struggling to get people to notice their stuff.

 

Still must have been pretty expensive just to get to mediation! Was this for a novel, or something else?

 

It depends. Sometimes mediation can get somewhat expensive. Cheaper than arbitration, in my experience, because it is less formal.

However, it doesn’t sound like authorship was vigorously contested in this case. While you only have to convince a judge or mediator or jury about something like authorship, if it is a seriously contested issue it wouldn’t be hard to cast a lot of doubt on mailing something to yourself. It’s a matter of being safe about it. If a work is worth litigating in the first place then the cheap fee for registering the copyright is also worth it.

 

Registration probably costs, what, about six minutes of lawyer-time?

But while registering is prima facie evidence, it's not uncontestable, right? Like, if someone stole your stuff and registered it before you did, you could still use the other forms of proof to establish that you actually wrote it?

 

Logo/brand/original artwork proof.

 

If you register within 5 years of publication you get a legal presumption that the registration is valid and accurate (i.e. you’re the author). It’s not impossible to overcome but the presumption stacks the deck in the favor of the registrant.