Ames Sheldon's Blog, page 2

Copyright Conundrums

One of the challenges with independent publishing is figuring out for myself what’s in the public domain and what’s not as well as how the concept of fair use applies when it comes to the poems and songs I wish to quote in my novel. Apparently there’s no hard and fast definition of fair use. My copyeditor says I can quote 20 percent of the text of a poem or song without seeking permission.

If the songs and poems I wish to quote are not in the public domain, how do I go about getting permissio...

This is a Work of Fiction

They all say that, but to what extent is it really true? Over the years I’ve worried about whether some aspect of a character I have created will strike one of my many relatives as a thinly disguised portrait of one of them. And then they would complain or maybe they’d threaten to sue me. Thecharacters I create are completely imaginary composites of human qualities and histories.My writing is about real places as well as imagined ones and it pertains to and actual events in history.

My publis...

Self-Publishing–Do I HAVE to?

After many years of writing and rewriting a novel that takes place on the home front during WWII, I found an agent in New York to represent my book. She shopped it around for two years and after a couple of near misses, I decided I was done hoping for a major publisher. But I was sure there’s an audience for this book.

I started buying and reading self-published books and the more I learned about the process of becoming a publisher oneself, I knew I didn’t want to do that. Then I looked at a...