I took a little time off the other day from promoting my second Frank Adversego thriller to write the first chapter of the third. Needless to say, it was a lot more fun than lining up promotional discount sales and sending out more mindless Tweets.
The plot has been kicking around in my mind for several years, and I’ve even written up the central scenario before, as it focuses on what I believe is the most serious threat to its own existence that humanity has come up with since the atomic bomb. You’ll have to wait until I finish the book to find out what that is, but here’s a little something to hold you over until then.
* * *
Frank’s phone was not ringing. Neither was his email registering any activity. Even his much-despised Facebook page was devoid of likes and visits, not just recently, but ever. After three weeks of waiting, there was no way to avoid the conclusion: his new enterprise, Frank Adversego, Cyber Eye, was a failure.
He stared at the home page of his website with regret. He still thought it was pretty cool – very retro, with a clear Raymond Chandler/Dashielle Hammett vibe. And if forced to admit it, he thought he looked pretty sharp in a fedora and trench coat. But a pretty page design does not a business make, and he had not yet landed a single paying customer. That might have something to do with the fact that he didn’t have a clue about how to advertise, and recoiled in horror from the concept of engaging in normal business-getting activities, like networking.
But there it was. There seemed to be no alternative to doing what appealed to him least of all: he’d have to eat dirt and ask for George for work.
So he did.
“Hey Frank, good to hear from you. How’s the new business coming along?”
“Great! Having the time of my life! I can’t believe I waited so long to go into business for myself.”
George Marchand smiled. He was surprised it had taken this long for Frank to call.
“Wonderful to hear, Frank. I couldn’t be happier for you. Of course, we’re sorry we won’t be able to call on you anymore over here at the CIA. New threats are always coming down the line, and the challenges keep getting tougher….”
Frank cut him off. “Oh, well, I wouldn’t say that! I can always take on a little more work if it would help you out. You know, fill in the gaps between the really big, interesting projects. Sometimes they go cold for a little while.”
“Really? Well, that’s good to know.” He was positively grinning now.
There was a brief silence.
“Uh, George, you got anything right now?”
“Hmm. Maybe. But I don’t know if we have anything small enough to fit in between your really big, interesting projects.”
There was another pause. “Okay, George. Have it your way. Do you want me to beg?”
George laughed out loud. “Of course not. I was just jerking your chain. Every new business gets off to a slow start, so I’ve been keeping my eye out for something we could send your way. You want to hear what I have in mind?”
Frank uttered a silent thanks to the patron saint of small businesses. “Yes, George. I’d like that very much.”
“Great. Do you have time to get together tomorrow?”
“Today, tomorrow, the next day, you name it. I’m not exactly over booked.”
“Good deal. How about you meet me at 10:00 tomorrow. You know that donut shop in Dupont Circle?”
“Sure, but what’s wrong with our usual coffee place?”
“That’s enough for over the phone. I’ll see you there tomorrow.”
Have you joined The Lafayette Campaign?
Love it! I’m ready for # 3. Keep on writing Mr Updegrove 🙂
Your wish is my command, Adan. Pressures on….
Oh, come on, Andrew! Haven’t you teased and tortured us enough? I was rather hoping you’d got that out of your system in the build-up to Number Two, but here you go again . . . 🙂
Indeed I have. I’m also toying with the idea of posting my first draft here chapter by chapter (or at my other blog or perhaps at one of the specialty sites set up to host this process) as I write it, but I haven’t decided for sure yet.
I’ve always wanted to do that, post first draft chapters. But, and you’re probably more aware of this than me, there’s lots of folks whose experience says the work ends up plastered and used in other people’s work. Too bad one can’t register one’s in-progress work with Library of Congress as it’s created, and for the one time fee ($35).
ps – i have just recently put up a couple of snippets on FB, but heard from some mutual authors we know of their work being used without permission, so they quit posting larger portions, not sure about snippets.
Adan, while posting something publicly does raise the risk of piracy, that risk arises anyway once the book comes out. True, if you register the copyright in your book in Washington you qualify for “statutory damages,” which can be as much as $250,000 for each copy of the pirated work (!), it’s not necessary to file a copyright registration in order to protect your work from piracy. For some time now (since the U.S. signed an international treaty), it’s not necessary to register your work, or even to affix a copyright notice to it, in order to establish your copyright. Instead, in the words of the Act, “copyright subsists from the moment of creation.”
From that perspective, then, posting a chapter publicly helps establishes your original authorship (and copyright), because the posting date will support your claim that you, and not the infringer, wrote it. That should be enough for you to win in court if they can’t demonstrate prior authorship through similarly convincing proof. Although later filing your copyright registration won’t permit you to claim statutory damages for the infringement prior to the registration date, it will permit you to claim them if the infringer doesn’t remove the work.
The bigger problem is the terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which allows pirates to post your entire book on line, so long as they take it down when you ask them to. Of course, they just put it up at another site then, and so on and so on.
Snippets raise a different legal principle, the “Fair Use Doctrine,” which allows reuse under a test with multiple factors to decide how much or how little might be reasonable to copy without violating copyright.
For example, a book review might include most of a paragraph, while including one sentence in a story offered for sale without acknowledging the original author would probably not. Exceptions would include inclusions that need no attribution, as when a jazz musician “quotes” a dozen notes from the melody of a well known song.
There has been a lot of litigation, especially in Europe, over whether news feed services (like Google’s) that display a headline and a line or two of text, followed by a link to the site where the full story appears, does or does not meet the fair use test, especially where the service displays ads, and therefore makes money from the copying of the story excerpts.
Glad you’re here to explain some of all that!
And I am generally in line with Joe Konrath’s idea that any pirating etc only works to benefit the author, since those folks would never have paid for anything from anyone anyway. 🙂 Plus one gets the PR.
Yeah, my concern is re registering is what you addressed, being able to collect damages, plus, which may have changed, that most attorneys won’t take on a copyright case unless the work was registered at the time of infraction.
In other words, it’d be on one’s own dime to file suit.
And, from experience, the big issue is if someone takes the work and sells it to a media company and, without prior registration, one is left with no one to prosecute the case for him or her without monies up front.
But, as I say, no longer even sure if all that has changed. It’s been awhile 🙂
Thanks Andy. All and any info like yours is super welcome!
Adan, Although I’m not a litigator, my firm does prosecute infringement cases, so I’m well aware of the practicalities as well as the law. A lawyer will take on a case where they believe that infringement has indeed occurred, but they should also advise the client what the costs versus the recovery are likely to be. If the work was registered before the infringement, then statutory damages should theoretically be available, but there is still the question of whether a successful suit is possible, which includes considerations like where the defendant is (Byelorussia? Good luck), whether they are “judgment proof” (i.e., whether they have any money) and what the costs of the suit would be relative to the volume of infringement (i.e., how significant the statutory damages would be). So as you can see, even with a registered work, it may not be worth the cost and effort to sue. On the other hand, if the person is known and in the U.S., the picture may look very different, and a quick settlement may result.
Where the work isn’t registered (we’re only talking about the U.S. here, because registration isn’t necessary in most other countries), the picture changes dramatically, as you can only recover actual, provable damages. With a book, that means how many sales the author has lost. If the author has sold very few copies herself, it’s hard to prove that they’ve lost a lot of money, especially if the infringer hasn’t allowed many to be downloaded, either. So unless you’re already a successful author, it doesn’t make sense for the author to sue the infringer, unless they’re willing to pay a fair amount of money to recover almost nothing. And there’s certainly no reason why an attorney would want to take such a case on on a contingent fee basis, as they couldn’t possibly recover the value of the time they put into the case, much less make a profit.
Re your above comments, Andrew – heartfelt thanks. I was engrossed.
My pleasure, Marcus. I’m glad it was useful.
About publishing snippets of a work in progress: I posted what I called extensions while I was writing the sequel to my novel Green Comet. Each extension turned out to be about one eighth of the novel Parasite Puppeteers, which I’ve just self-published in full. I didn’t learn of anyone stealing my work, but then I’m pretty obscure. And I license it CC-BY-SA anyway.
On another note, Andrew, I just read your blog about Open Source Pharma on the ConsortiumInfo.org site. Great post. I’ve published a link to it on my greencomet.org site using Press This.
Jim, thanks for the nice words about the Open Source Pharma post and for the links back to both my blogs – I appreciate that. It is a good and important cause, and hopefully the concept will take hold. For those of you that may be wondering what we’re talking about, you can find that post here: http://tinyurl.com/pyzafrh
Going back to posting in process, did you regard that as a good experience (e.g., helpful comments, keeping you writing, or other)? And re piracy, it seems to happen no matter how you publish, so precautions like DRM seem to be meaningless. I’m not sure whether watermarking works better, or whether it’s easy to strip out. Both my books turned up on multiple pirate sites, the second one within a month.
It’s important to me, too. Both the open philosophy and affordable medicine. I’m always glad to point out something like that.
I found releasing the extensions to be a good experience. It helped to keep me connected to my readers, and their encouraging feedback. I wish my books would show up on pirate sites. I would consider that to be good feedback, too. If I were not the optimist I seem to be, I might get discouraged at the lack of attention.-) But then, my books are open and free, so I’m not worried about anything like lost sales.
Jim