From Uncle Jim's Mailbag:
I don't mean to bother you with my dumb questions, but why is copyrighting your writing bad? I'm constantly told to copyright my screenplays by industry pros, why are novels different?
-- Lost in LA
Dear Lost
There are lots of reasons for this, starting with the fact that it isn't traditional in the land of Book. In films, as I understand it, ideas are more important because so many hands are involved in the finished piece; other writers, producers, directors, the composers, the special-effects team, the actors ... it's a big pot with a lot of ingredients and a lot of people stirring it. With stories and novels -- one-man band. The author does it all.
What does putting a copyright on your pages get you? It costs at least $35. So you write ten stories, and copyright them all. One of them sells (and one out of ten selling is
not bad in the world of short stories), and that story earns you $350 (a not unreasonable amount for a short). Congratulations! You've earned
nothing.
Or, the copyright on the work tells the editor how long a manuscript has been bouncing around the slushpiles of New York. I recall seeing one such, in the early 'ninties, with a copyright date in the mid-'sixties. This did not fill my heart with anticipation that this was an overlooked masterpiece.
Suppose the book is accepted, and goes out onto the bookshelves with a copyright date on it five years ago (rather than this year). Readers will assume this is an old book, perhaps a reprint.
Suppose you re-write your book, perhaps with editorial input. Change all the character names and move the setting to Cambodia. Huge hassle.
Copyrighting the book in your name is part of the publisher's routine workflow. Having a book already copyrighted puts a kink into that hose; rather than saving them a step it means the book requires special handling.
Okay, that's legitimate publishers.
The scammers and such -- what are they going to do with your book? Sell it? If they knew how to sell a book they wouldn't need to be scammers in the first place.
Sell it in India or China? Get real. The books that get pirated are already-published best sellers.
If, by some weird chance (perhaps a wannabe agent reads all the Internet rumors and decides that's how he's going to get rich) some agent does start stealing manuscripts and publishing them under a pseudonym, the odds that you won't find out are astronomically slim. The only way you wouldn't find out is if the book didn't sell a single copy. The word would get out, because writing about stuff is what writers
do. Your records, made in the normal course of writing, would be sufficient to prove your case.
How about publishers?
The scum-sucking vanity presses don't make their money from selling books to the general public. They make their money from huge up-front fees or by selling copies of the book back to the author. Where is one of those publishers going to find someone who will love your book so much that that person will send the publisher a couple of thousand dollars? There's only one guy on the planet who loves your book that much, and that's you.
Here's the truth: Agents and editors don't make their money off one book. They make their money off of careers.
Suppose that some unscrupulous person had gotten Stephen King's first novel,
Carrie, given the idea to some other writer, and said, "There you go, sport. Write me a book!"
First thing that would happen: Some other publisher would have bought the original
Carrie and gotten it to market before the knockoff was written.
Next thing that would happen: The two books would be so different that no one would have known they came from the same idea. Telekinetic teenagers? It's been
done.
Third and most important thing: That unscrupulous agent and/or editor would never have even seen
'Salem's Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, The Stand, etc. etc. etc. The gravy train would have pulled out of the station without them on board.
Also: Writers who are capable of writing publishable manuscripts already have so many ideas that they don't need yours.
Why should publishers steal stories? They can get all the stories they want, from world-famous authors, by offering five cents a word.
Here's where genuine plagiarism comes from: The works that are stolen aren't unedited slush, they're previously published books available in bookstores everywhere (and all of those have copyright notices paid for by the publishers). The only times I can think of where unpublished material was plagiarized was in cases of collaborations gone horribly wrong, when one partner was unsure of what the other had agreed to.
Yes, there have been high-profile cases of famous authors being accused of stealing material from ... let's call them minor writers. Stephen King was accused of plagiarizing a book published by PublishAmerica. Read all about it
here. Others include
J. K. Rowling.
Twice. And
Stephenie Meyer. You hear about these things. But what you (the collective-you of the new-author zeitgeist) may not recall is that all of those suits were found to be
baseless.
So: Don't waste your time and money on copyrighting your unpublished manuscripts. Don't waste stomach lining on worrying about someone stealing your unpublished manuscript.