If you’ve thought about self-publishing or print-on-demand or any of the brave new technologies that allow writers to bypass the traditional, “New York editor” approach of publishing, you need to keep an eye on lawyer Joy Butler’s blog. She was recently on a Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) panel about self-publishing and she’s posting her remarks in a five-part series on her new blog, to include, according to her, “the pluses and minuses (in my opinion anyway) of the various approaches to publishing: (i) publishing with a traditional publisher, (ii) publishing via POD printing, (iii) using a subsidy press, and (iv) working directly with distributors and wholesalers.”
The first installment is up right now, and Part Two will be posted on Thursday on her blog.
P.S. If you missed it, Joy wrote up a great piece for Work in Progress about using copyrighted material in our work, which you can find here.
P.P.S. For the information every writer should know about copyrighted material, you might want to get her book, The Permission Seeker’s Guide Through the Legal Jungle: Clearing Copyrights, Trademarks and Other Rights for Media and Entertainment Productions, which is both comprehensive and comprehensible!