May I Have Your Permission, Please?

Writing a textbook, no matter whether this is a first edition or a later edition, is a serious undertaking as well as a labor of love. Once you have an interested publisher, you need to negotiate a contract. Contract terms include how you will be paid, how much you will be paid, what fees are to be deducted from your payment, deadlines, and a myriad number of other issues. In the interest of saving money, you might decide to collect your own permissions rather than have the publisher do the job.

Think this through carefully before making a decision. Your expertise is the area about which you are writing your book. Permissions work requires serious attention to details and can be time-consuming, especially if you have to request over a dozen permissions.

If you do decide to do your own permissions work, I can only urge you to continue reading my blog and follow the steps I outline. If you make mistakes asking for permissions, you could be losing valuable rights as well as costing yourself additional fees, and quite possibly setting yourself up for legal action.

What rights should you request? Did you ask for use of the material for this and all future editions? Will you need electronic rights because your textbook will be online? Will you be using portions of your book, perhaps some cartoons, in PowerPoint presentations? In which countries will your text be sold? Only the United States? The United States and Canada? Any other foreign countries? You may need to send permissions requests to multiple copyright holders when your book is being sold beyond the borders of the U.S.

Make no mistake about this. If you use copyrighted material without acquiring the proper permission or without having an acceptable paper trail, you can be taken to court, and the odds are against you. This is what copyright is all about-protecting the creator of an original work from having the work used without explicit permission being granted. Sometimes it is cheaper in the long run to have the publisher handle permissions rather than doing it yourself!

© 2009 Anne Wallingford. All Rights Reserved.