— Guest Post by Chuck Litka
Have you ever thought about what will happen to your self-published books once you’re no longer on the sunny side of the lawn? Have you ever talked to anyone about looking after your literary estate once you no longer can? Have you made actual plans and shown someone how it all works? Have you looked into the legal aspects of it? Do you have any idea as to what someone will need to do in order for Amazon and the other retailers to pay royalties to a new rights holders? Heck, do you actually care what happens to your books after you die? I probably would have to answer “No” to all of the above. So take that as your baseline. Do you care more than I?
This site’s Mark Paxson is a lawyer, so he might have some insight as to what you would need to do for your books to live on with Amazon and the like after you’re gone. I suspect that unless there is just one heir, or the disposition of your intellectual property is spelled out in a will, it might be a rather expensive prospect to transfer your intellectual property to someone else. Certainly in my case, the revenue stream would be unlikely to be worth the expense, unless someone makes a movie of one of my books very soon.
But that’s just one side of the coin. The other side concerns the ebooks you’ve sold. It seems likely that most ebooks will die with their readers. At the very least, all those books on a reader’s devices – ebook readers, tablets, computers, and stored in the cloud – will face an uncertain fate when their owner dies. Will the survivors even know the passwords to be able to access the deceased’s digital library? And would they have any interest in it, even if they could? I may be a little bitter, but I have a wall of books that I’ve collected since my youth, and neither my children, nor my grandchildren have shown any interest in them, except for the Harry Potter books, so I doubt that many ebook collections will be passed along – assuming it’s even possible. If they are stored in the cloud, it might take legal expertise to gain access to them. And if they have DRM, they may not be transferable at all. All of which to say, It would seem that ebooks are very ephemeral things. I doubt that many of our ebooks will still be around fifty years from now.
That said, pulp magazines were pretty ephemeral things, as well. They were read and perhaps passed along, but they were pretty much designed to be forgotten by the time the next issue was released. Of course fans saved them, and not all of them were tossed out by mom along with the baseball card collection, so that today some of them still exist – as brittle yellow objects in plastic sheaths on the shelves of several hundred collectors, various university libraries, and used book stores. And they still have fans, even 80 to 100 years later. Some of these fans are scanning them and posting the scans on the internet so that they won’t be forgotten. Perhaps something like that will happen with self-published ebooks as well. Maybe the young people growing up reading ebooks today will someday collect and post them on some site as well? Who knows, stranger things have happened.
Our paper books, on the other hand, will have just as good of a chance of living on, as any commercially published book. They will make their way down through history via boxes in the attic or basement, garage sales, thrift stores, antique malls, and used books stores. They’ll be very rare, of course, but who knows, 50 years or more from now, they might be very collectible because they are rare. And the great thing is that you don’t have to lift a finger to make it happen. They can look after themselves. So in the end, I think that it will be our paper books that carry the torch of our creativity, however humbly, into the future. We may or may not be famous after our death, but we’ll still have our name on more things than on a tombstone, which is more than most people can say.
Writers Supporting Writers 
I’m in the process of reading and editing a manuscript for an acquaintance. The story takes place about 400 years in the future, after the inevitable war destroyed civilization and as the human race begins to rebuild itself. The interesting piece related to this post is that a couple of the teenagers are extremely well-read and regularly quote from such historical writers as Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, and many others. Because they still, all those centuries later, have been able to locate and keep hard copies of books. And they treasure them. I have this feeling that in the grand scheme of things that those hard copies are going to have more staying power than what is available electronically.
As for the rest … any writer who wants to make sure that something happens with his or her works after death better make those wishes known in writing as part of their will or as part of some creative trust that places the responsibility in somebody’s hands. I don’t know if I’m going to care enough about it to make those arrangements, but maybe there is a reason to make the effort. How many writers and other creative people never saw any success while they were alive, only to gain fame and popularity after their death. Maybe there is value in making a small effort to ensure that the right people hold the legal rights to anything that may happen.
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All right, this post has convinced me I’d better work on getting my books in hard copy. 🙂
I remember reading somewhere that at least one of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories existed only as a draft scrawled in the margins of some other document. It was published posthumously when one of his friends (August Derleth, I think) found it and pieced it together. We should all be so lucky to have such dedicated fans!
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You don’t have paperbacks yet???? Oh Berthold. Please do. They’re a bit fiddly but it’s not rocket science, and apart from history, they make /me/ smile every time I pick one up. 🙂
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And there are still people who will only read a paperback.
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I used TheBookPatch.com for hard copies. Draft2Digital.com for all the ebook stuff. Smashwords, too, but that’s the default for FREE venue.
TheBookPatch is pretty easy, a cover image (formatted) and your manuscript formatted, and you’re good to go. No upfront charges. The trick for the manuscript was to use Draft2Digital’s manuscript formatter to get the right output size, 6×9″, and then ship that up to TheBookPatch.
I set my prices for hardcopies to just above cost, to make it as cheap as possible for folks to acquire paper-not-plastic.
Luck.
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I haven’t given much thought to lumbering anyone with my literary legacy, either formally or casually. But I have published every one of my books in printed form, and taken the trouble to format them correctly. In part that was to ensure they exist in a physical form and not just electronic blips, but it has occurred to me it might be an avenue (well, maybe a dirt path) to posthumous literary immortality.
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A dirt path… Audrey you crack me up
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😃
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Me too, Audrey. Me too. 🙂
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You make really good points here. What does or will happen to all those ebooks? Since the only book I ever published is a very small chapbook, and everyone I know has one, I’m not concerned but I do wonder about all the unpublished poetry on my hard drive. I know I need to pick someone to entrust it to, but frankly I’m the only one of my family that cares about my poetry. Sure, they read the odd poem that gets published but they’re not likely to do anything with them. Perhaps if I got famous, then someone would publish a book of poems posthumously. Oh and I do have this fantasy of going into a thrift store or a used book store someday and seeing one of my chapbooks that I gave to a friend on the shelf. Fun!
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I hadn’t thought of the life of my printed books… and I’m enjoying the image of them in yard sales, thrift stores, and the like. I’ve placed several books in Little Free Libraries, so maybe the books have already made it to yard sales 🙂
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I’ve thought of driving around slipping some of my books into the Little Free Libraries. Haven’t done it yet, but it may be time.
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There are no guarantees for anything but…I like the idea of one of my paperbacks turning up in an archaeological dig some day. My books are my version of ‘Foo waz ‘ere’. My little bit of immortality. 🙂
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Yes. I really think paperbacks are the way to immortality!!
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Years ago when we decided to update our wills, I had read in a writers’ magazine that one should leave both manuscripts and intellectual property to someone. The solicitor thought I was mad, so did my husband as I had not actually finished writing my first novel. It is all still left to my daughter – the only immediate family member who has actually read my stuff! There are nine self published books and many short stories and blog posts. She is reckoning on me being more successful after I’m dead, but will she be able to access on line stuff?
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As soon as all these electronic devices like Kindles and smart phones become obsolete and the electric grid goes down, no ebook will even be accessible. Paper books have proved to be much more durable, even if they weren’t printed by Gutenberg. Read in my future history about the Underground Archivists. And personally, all my estate is going to my college, and all my books to the college library, no strings attached (libraries don’t like to get collections of books with strings attached). My collection of books is mostly mass-market paperbacks, anyway, which tend to turn to dust in a few years of sitting on a shelf. Special Collections already has some of my personal writings on the shelves that feature the products of alumni, so at least those will be preserved. I’ve stipulated that my copyrights go to the college, too. I don’t know how much good it will do me – so far nobody has displayed much interest. Of course, I’m not as aggressive as I should be.
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I posed the question of how to handle the transfer of copyrights and royalties from Amazon on K-Board. Several people offered their thoughts. You can read them here:
https://www.kboards.com/threads/transfer-of-ownership-questions.334669/#post-3963361
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I love the imagery of future descendants fighting over my corpus corpse.
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Yes!!!!
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I updated my will recently and added my publishing accounts so that my intellectual property will pass onward to my kid. I agree that our ebooks will probably vanish with their owners accounts, but perhaps the paperbacks will linger for a while after I’m dead. Those are less important to me than making sure my kid can manage the accounts and collect royalties. We’ll probably do some of that work before I kick (hopefully). 🙂 I think you’re right that a lot of writers don’t think about this topic.
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