— 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 