Privacy, Defamation, Trademarks, Titles and Other Publishing Problems Authors Face | Livestream

Hello, Happy Tuesday. Happy New Year. This is our first live stream of 2022. And yeah, I'm excited for 2022. I think there's going to be fantastic books coming out. In fact, I think we have four different books launching this week, which is really, really fun and exciting. And we launched one book last week already. So 2022 is off to a fantastic start. As far as book launches we're doing at Book Launchers today, we're going to kind of go down a rabbit hole. And I didn't mean for this to be the topic of the day, but I ended up, as I was prepping for this and thinking about things to talk about, I was going through some of the issues and conversations that we've had behind the scenes at Book Launchers about. You know, we have a book coming out with Amazon in the title. We have another book that's coming out that shares the true story of what one person went through and names, names of people that were involved in what happened. And there's been questions that have come up behind the scenes about privacy and defamation and trademark issues, like, can you use Amazon in a title? And all these kind of things. And so I've been writing down these issues and I thought, well, let's cover them. Like, some of these things are questions that come up and, and, and, and my notes got into the weeds a little more than I intended. But it's going to be lots of great information and I know there's going to be people here that have even more to add to it. And when you're commenting, if you're watching the replay, you can add to it as well, because as I've said many times, I am not an attorney. Not even close. I have an MBA in finance and real estate. So I'm going to cover things as far as the generic advice that I give, with the caveat that if you ever have issues, you really should speak to an attorney. All right, so let's dive into this subject. Hello. Exotic Expression Dance Fitness. Welcome. And Angela is here, of course. Angela is our operations manager at Book Launchers, so she is in the house to help keep track of things. And Brian's here. Hello, Lakeisha. Welcome. Maria Vale. Oh, wonderful. I don't think I've seen you live. So welcome. And if you have, well, welcome back, Cloud Walker. Hello. We photogal. It's great to have all of you here today. So thank you. Let's kick in to this or dive in. Oh, but before I do, that Saturday, we're doing deep dive. It's going to be me and you and Angela, of course, writing. So if you are in the editing process or you're writing a book, join me. We'll do. We'll have prizes. As always, we're going to do some writing sprints together. We're going to have some focused writing time. And as always, I will do Q and A. So if you want to register for that, it's Saturday. That's this Saturday. I didn't write the date down, but Angela will put it in the chat for you at 10am Pacific Standard Time and it will go for two hours. So it's a great time to carve out some really good focus time and have a little fun while you're knocking out some words. And I'm working on a new book, so I'm going to be working away too. And I'll even screen share and show you the software that I'm using. It's Atticus. It's from Dave Dave Chessen at Kindle Printer, and for the most part I've been loving it. There's a few little weird glitches that are starting to bug me a little bit, but so far I'm loving the software for so many reasons. So I'll show you guys that and see what I'm working in. Because it's even got a timer feature so we can use that for our writing sprints as well. So that Saturday at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time to register book launchers.com forward/deep dive. So Angela will drop that in the chat and I'll make sure it's in the description after the fact. So you can join us on Saturday for another deep Dive session. So today I don't have a good title. Essentially this is like random publishing. Things you should know. Now one thing that came up recently, so I was having a conversation with an author who was interested in working with us for their their second book. Their first book was traditionally published and they had been using a chapter from that book in lectures that they were giving at high schools and colleges. And then their publisher found out they'd been doing that and was very mad at them. It didn't sound like it was a financial penalty, but it damaged the relationship and also shocked the author that they couldn't use this chapter for their own purposes. They were sometimes doing these talks for free, which could be part of why the publisher didn't seek any sort of restitution for it. But sometimes they were being paid for these lectures and they were including this copy, like photocopied chapter from their book or just printing it off from their book. And they were surprised to find out they don't have the rights to do that. The publisher needed to give them permission. And in many cases, the publisher would want to be financially compensated for that or would expect book sales instead of those chapters being reproduced. So this author was a little surprised and was not going to work with a traditional publisher for Book two because their business had expanded a lot in this lecture space. So it's one of the reasons I've become very pro self publishing, especially for nonfiction, is because a lot, unless you have a lot of negotiating power and you can really lay out the terms of your book deal, self publishing gives you so much more control than a lot of people realize. And I've. I've shared this before about my friend whose book was republished under somebody else's name, word for word. Only the introduction was changed because he was no longer promoting that book. That was in the real estate space. That's another great example of how when you self publish, you don't. That doesn't happen to you. If it does, you can pursue them because they're infringing on your copyrights. In this case, it was, it's morally gross that the publisher could do that, but it was completely legal because they own the rights to all that material in the book. And so I kind of, I'm not certain why I decided to start with that, but it really is knowing what your rights are and if you are, are pursuing any sort of a traditional deal is understand what you can and can't do with the materials. Because if you're thinking you're going to be reproducing a chapter for a freebie on your website, there's a very good chance the publisher will not be okay with that. But no matter what, you have to ask for permission to make sure that they are okay with whatever you do, which. So again, I told you I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. So you're going to follow me down this rabbit hole today, which as this author and I had this conversation with the author, I wonder, well, what about educational use? Because I remembered as a kid or as a student, I often got photocopied pages from textbooks or books out there as part of our reading material. Like you'd get reading assignments and there'd be a section from a book or a chapter from a book that was photocopied. And now the laws for this are different in different countries. So perhaps in Canada, the law was different than it is in the States, States. But my understanding is that there are educational uses that would permit this to be fair use. However, it is very clearly defined as nonprofit. Educational use would determine the fair use of a reproduction of some of the section of the book. So if you were to have somebody who produces a chapter of your book for their lectures, that is not necessarily going to fall under non profit educational use, they at least should be pursuing permission from you and likely should actually be selling your book or using your book or paying you in some way for those rights to be reproducing. Because that definition of nonprofit is a little. Again, I'm not an attorney, so if you're going into this, if you're ever going to be reproducing or somebody you find out has been reproducing your work, you definitely should consult with them. But the use of educational use isn't as broad as I thought it was. It is nonprofit. And so if somebody is commercially profiting from the reproduction of that work, so they're charging student fees, for example, it doesn't sound like fair use for reproduction is going to apply. So, yeah, it's quite a. Quite a interesting kind of world that you can dive into. Like I said, it's a bit of a rabbit hole. So. All right, Efren's here. Hello. And Tira. Hello. Let's see. This is the main reason I want to self publish. I have. This is from Exotic Expression Dance Fitness. This is the main reason I want to self publish. I have put countless hours into my writing and I don't want to give away the rights to somebody else. And I think a lot of people are waking up to the realization that most traditionally published deals are only coming your way because the publisher sees an exact path to how you're going to sell the books. And if you're the one selling the books, in most cases, you don't need that traditional publisher and you're better off without them, to a point. And that's why I said, if you can, if you have negotiating powers, if you have a big platform or your topic is really hot or something they really want for some reason, and you can negotiate, hey, you get the rights to this, but I get the movie and TV rights. Or you can have the rights to the print, but if I'm going to produce this internationally in any capacity, I keep the rights. And so that's what I mean by negotiating power. Because copyright in particular can be split up into all different rights. And so you can have rights geographically, you can have rights to different versions of it. And this is one area always recommend something negotiate is to make sure that you own the rights to the audio of your audio version. Because a lot of public producing an audiobook and if you don't have the rights to that, they won't produce it, but you don't have the rights to do it yourself. So you can negotiate in these contexts, all different geographic regions to the different uses of it. So it can. But if you are an author with a small platform and you're kind of just begging to get somebody to publish you, you're almost always better off to self publish because you're going to have no negotiation rights or no negotiation leverage points to use with that publisher and they're going to get a good deal for them and it won't be a great deal for you, even though you might feel like at the time you're getting published and it's a good deal. But if that gets traction or you want to do other things with book content in the future, you're going to be limited. Okay, we photogal self publishing lets you make the rules and call it and so much today a ton of work. And it is. But you know what? Even if you traditionally publish, it is a ton of work. You have a ton of work in your account accountable to somebody else that is calling the final thoughts on everything that's giving you the deadlines, that's telling you what needs to be done and where you need to be. So there's still work no matter what, and you're still doing the marketing no matter what avenue you go. So. Okay. Daniel says, is there such a thing as using too many pseudonyms, as in pen names? Yeah, I mean every pen name you have is another brand that you're managing. So you really. I wouldn't want to have too many. And it's really interesting. Joanna Penn talks a lot about this because she had, I believe she has three names that she writes under. One is kind of a sweet romance that she's done with her mom and she doesn't actively disclose or promote that because it's separate. And then she has her fiction where she writes her thrillers under. And then she has her nonfiction, which is her name, Joanna. She has three different brand names and she'll talk about the benefits and the drawbacks to having those three different names that she's writing under. And if you want to check that out, the Creative Pen, she has a great podcast and a great website full of resources for those things. Maria says, I am. It's a ton of work and I'M overwhelmed. But I want to do it right with Julie's advice as my blueprint. Well, it's wonderful to have you here. If there's any specific questions, let me know. And as we said at the beginning, for anybody joining in Saturday, we're doing a deep dive. It's going to be a writing session with me. We're going to do writing sprints, we'll do Q and A. So it's a great time to just start breaking the process down into bite sized pieces. And rather than thinking about all the things you have to do, just ask yourself, what's next? And focus on the big picture, your end goal. And then just always be like, okay, what's next? Because it is overwhelming. Okay, let's see. Oh, thank you. Exotic Expressions. And Maria already has the book. And if you guys haven't already, please do write a review. It is the greatest gift you can give an author. But thank you so much for your support and for being so back into our little rabbit hole here. So I covered educational use a little bit. I do want to cover. So I got this book. Some of these questions were coming up with some of these books that we were working on. I was like, I don't know the right answer. And ultimately my answer to all of our clients is, hey, none of us are attorneys. If you're worried you really need to get an attorney, it's usually get permission. If you can't get permission or you're not sure, you know, get an attorney. But I did pick up this book, so I'm just going to make sure you guys can see this. So it might be coming in backwards. It's called Law and A Legal Handbook for Writers by Jacqueline D. Lipton. If you're interested in this subject or you kind of want to go down the rabbit hole too, you can pick up this book. That was some of my light reading over the holidays. It's always a little side quest here. It's always fun. Angela, we haven't done this question in a long time, but Angela, in our daily huddles on Thursdays, we do a personal question and it's often, what are you reading? And everybody on the team is reading like these cool fiction books and like really great reads. And I'm, I'm always reading like the handbook for the legalities of publishing a book. Something really boring is always on my nightstand. So back to my rabbit hole. So this book, there was a really good section when I was reading it that I flagged that goes into the four factors of fair use and again, I don't want to bore you guys to tears because you're having fun, you're here for prizes, you're here to learn a few things. But I do want to highlight these four factors, because fair use comes up all the time, whether it's our authors writing or you guys asking questions about this, but you're writing and you're wondering if you can use something in your book under fair use. Or somebody's book is getting used and they're wondering if it's a legit and okay use of their material. My personal rule of thumb on other people using my material is if it's not deterring people from working with me or looking at book launchers, buying my other books, then I'm generally not going to waste time and energy trying to fight people on it. So, in other words, if somebody was to quote a section of my book, as long as I'm getting attribution for it, they're not taking credit for it, and they're ultimately sending a link back to book launchers as the source of this. I'm usually not going to be too upset because at the end of the day, I'm not as worried about selling the book as I am about building a brand and growing business of book launchers. But that's not the case for everybody. And, you know, what I do is not what I say everybody needs to do, it's just what I do. So the four factors for fair use. Well, the first one was purpose and character of use. And so this is where educational use comes up, of course, and that's where there is some level of fair use. But like I said, it's more clear now that generally if you're reproducing anything, you should be seeking permission of the copyright holder of publisher. And if you're profiting or someone is profiting from your work, so again, they're selling the end product that includes a chapter of your book that is probably not fair use. And the courts are less likely to say it's fair use. So that is not a great use. So that goes back again to the purpose and character of use. If somebody is commercially profiting from the use of your work, that starts to make it not fair use. That's not the final thing, but it starts to make it not fair use. The second factor is the nature of the copyrighted work. Where this really comes into play is if your work is copyrighted before you've actually published it, so you haven't had a chance to commercially benefit from the work. You've done the court is a lot less lenient once your book is out there into the world. There's some leniency applied to this, but if somebody has stolen your work before it gets published, have a pretty strong case in a lot of situations. The third factor is of course, how much got copied. But what she. One thing that came up in this book that I hadn't heard explained quite the way that she did it was it's not just the volume, it's the substance. And there was a quote in there about if it can be not that many words, but if it's the heart of the work, it can be deemed a bigger issue. So it is the, the amount, like you really don't want to be quoting large sections out of a book. You want to be using the minimal amount that you need to make the point that you need to make in quoting that work. But also you want to be careful not to be quoting the heart of the work. So that's one area. So how much is not just a question of volume, but the substance of what you're quoting as well. So that was an interesting thing, but that's the third factor. And of course the fourth factor is the effect on the copyright's value. So this is kind of my own thing that I just started off with is if it doesn't impact somebody from ever coming to book Launchers or picking up my book in its entirety or picking up another one of my books, then I'm less worried about it. And that's kind of how the court feels. If somebody is copying a chunk of your work and it's going to make somebody not buy your book, it's going to make somebody not take that commercial action that you were. You had set out to have them take, then it's going to be more likely to be an issue in the courts under fair use. And there was a question, I'm just looking at my notes. The question that gets asked is will the work be a market substitute for the original? So that was. That's something to kind of make note of. Is, is if you're taking like the heart of the work and now somebody doesn't actually need to go read that book, read the book, then that's a bigger issue than if you're just quoting like one of their. What are their seven steps? Like here's step six of their process. Well, now I need to know steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7. So that's kind of the claim there. And the market substitute is a big part of this. So those were the four factors. I thought those were really useful to know. I think they're good guidelines for yourself when you're quoting other people's work, you're using it in some way. And I also think it's a good guideline if you see somebody utilizing your work. So let's do a prize, shall we? Okay, let's see. Oh, I'm just checking your notes here. Oh, thank you, Maria, for the glowing five star review of Self Publish and Succeed. I really appreciate it. Mindful Eats. Welcome. Glad you could make it. And Julie's light read is so great. This was my light read over the holidays, actually. This. And I also read a book on SEO. I know. Riveting, right? I know. You guys are really jealous of my reading list. Okay. And yes, thank you. Exotic expressions. Remember to hit the like button. And that applies when you're watching the replay as well. All right, so let me head over to our prizes. Of course, if you're new, you may not realize that every Tuesday and Friday we have a video that comes out. Every other Tuesday is our livestream. When you comment the day a video comes out, you get entered to win some sweet swag or a copy of Self Publish and Succeed, which of course is at the bottom of my pile right there. So I can't hold it up very easily without causing a book avalanche over there. But you can get a copy of Self publishing Succeed or I think. Do we have mugs again, Angela? Otherwise we're doing T shirts at the moment. T shirts and magnets and mugs. So the first one will be for your choice of a copy of Self Publish and Succeed or a magnet or a T shirt. So that's what. That's what you three people. That's what you two people that are about to win are going to be eligible for today. So magnet Mugnet. It's a new word. Magnet mug. No magnet, T shirt or book. And then I'm waiting for Angela to confirm that we have mugs again. We have our famous no Boring bookmark. All right, so drumroll, please. Our first winner of 2022 is. Where'd it go? Is. Oh, sorry, my screen just froze. Alyssa Metastic. Alyssa Metastic. Congratulations and thank you for commenting the day a video was released. You need to email angelaeam t e a m bookwanters.com and let her know the prize that you want and where she should nail it. So congratulations and thank you. And our second winner today. Hopefully it doesn't freeze up this time. Hopefully it didn't Freeze for you guys. Hopefully it was just my side. Okay, and winner number two is Kit. So, Kit, thank you. That's your handle on YouTube. So if your handle is kit on YouTube, you have just won. So email us@teambooklaunchers.com and let us know if you want self publish and succeed, if you don't have it already, or if you want a T shirt or one of our lovely magnets. And I'll show you one of the magnets here because that I can maybe reach. There we go. I can reach without creating a. An avalanche. There we go. So we have three different versions of those. This one says the greatest gift you can give an author is a review on Amazon, which is what I just said. All right. Maria is narrating her book, which is fantastic. Hey, Misty. Welcome. Glad to have you here. And Cloudwalker is saying, does copyrighted mean actually sent into the government and paid for copyright or just published with the copyright by page? All work is automatically. All work is automatically copyrighted the minute you put it on paper. Which is kind of why that factor is the nature of the material that was used when we were talking about the. If you were there, Clyde Walker, about the four factors when it comes to fair use. The nature of the work is because your work can be used in at any point, right? So if somebody gets a hand, gets their hands on your manuscript in draft form, then they can use it. And so that's where that. That fair use factor comes in. And so if it's. But it's copyrighted no matter what. So you have copyright protections the minute you put it down on paper. Filing with the US Copyright Office gives you additional rights when you go to court. So if you have to defend your copyright in court in the future, you have additional rights when you. Because you filed for the copyrights. The other piece to note is as long as you file for copyrights within 6 months of publication, a lot of the rights apply. And so, you know, you can kind of see what happens. And you don't necessarily have to pay for that right up front. And I think you can file for any, anytime up to five years later. But it's the sweet spot to get. All the kind of rights and benefits of filing for copyright are in that six months. But no matter what copyright protection applies, it's really just a matter of what you can defend and do and what your rights are in court, which is why you would want to still file for US Copyrights. Again, I'm Canadian, not a US Legal expert, not even a Canadian Legal expert. But, you know, having gone down this road quite a few times in talking to people and doing the research and sharing what I've learned from other attorneys, that's my understanding. So hopefully that helps. All right, so back to our little rabbit hole of fun. So one thing that I looked up after, I was. Because I was looking at, looking up some of this stuff, and then I was like, well, when you make fun of something, like, I always think of Saturday Night Live, but even music, my son listens to a lot of music that kind of plays off of and makes fun of or has fun with other music that's out there. I was like, well, it seems like parody allows you to. To do whatever you want with the underlying work, so long as it's for kind of that fun purpose, you know, because parody, hopefully everyone knows parody, but it's basically the imitation of somebody else's work with deliberate kind of exaggerations to make it funny. So it's usually got a comedic purpose, but it really does essentially copy the underlying work, but then it takes on its own. Own kind of transformative nature, you know, in pursuit of a laugh. And I thought parody was generally just fair use and that it was okay because you're taking that work and transforming it and going for the laugh. But the. When you. When you apply that four factor test, it's not as cut and dried. And I didn't actually get. I didn't get a definitive answer on this because especially when it comes to nonfiction work, it's not so easy to really call something parody. It's more likely to fall under a satire category. And parody usually applies to more creative work. Like I said, music was kind of the example, or Saturday Night Live skits are a different example. So it's parody. If you're thinking your work would be parody for fair use, it's probably not going to fly in the nonfiction space if it is more so satire, there's. Which is basically when you use somebody else's work to make fun of something else that is not covered under fair use. So really, if you're going down those roads, there's certain things that I would say you really do need to talk to an attorney about or pursue the. The permission from the underlying rights holder on that. That's kind of my. My answer to a lot of these things is if you're not sure, ask for permission, and if they don't give it to you or they don't respond, you know, speak to an attorney. But one other. One other tip that I actually took from that book, Jacqueline Lipton's book. I don't know if it was specific to this piece or not or something else, but she mentioned, you know, whenever you're in doubt of something, she said, you can kind of search inside. Like, you can go into the satire or the parody section or the humor section in a bookstore and see what works have been used. And if the work that you want to use has been used repeatedly, then chances are they're not, like, litigious. They're not going after people that are using their work in those ways. So that can be a sign that it's okay. But I still think ultimately it's permission or attorney or both. So, yeah, trademark is one thing to note. A title can't be trademarked. You can't trademark an author name. I believe J.K. rowling's name is trademarked. But typically even a pen name can't be trademarked, generally speaking. But a title, Sorry, I shouldn't say title can't be trademarked. A title is not usually eligible for trademarks, but there are exceptions like Freakonomics, I believe, is trademarked. So if you come up with kind of your own version of a word, then you might be able to pursue trademark. But the reason I went down this road was because of the use of trademarked words in titles and in work. I think I mentioned at the start there's a book that we've worked on that has Amazon in the title. And I knew it was okay to use Amazon in the title, but I was kind of wondering, okay, what. What does that mean for trademark? Now, a lot of things that have TM beside it aren't actually registered trademarks. They're something that the TM actually indicates somebody is planning to pursue a trademark because you have to use something for six months before you can even apply for a trademark on it. So. So TM doesn't actually mean it's a registered trademark. R is the registered trademark symbol. And the TM is more that they intend to in most cases. Now, if anybody knows different, by all means, again, not an attorney. So feel free to post it if you know differently. But that. I checked that in a couple of places, and that was. That was my understanding as far as using trademark terms, which was kind of where I had gone down this, this. This research rabbit hole was to understand if it's okay. And for the most part, the defense of trademark is the responsibility of the trademark holder. So you have to consistently defend your trademark to keep your trademark active and live. But the. I'm just Looking for the exact phrasing that I found. I'm pretty sure it was essentially, it came back to, would it cause consumer confusion? I think that was the. The thing. I'm not following my notes at all. So I've lost my. I've lost my. Where. Where it says. But essentially the trademark issue was, would it cause consumer confusion? So if somebody is writing a book and it can. It could cause trademark confusion somehow, then that would be more of an issue. But if you're writing a book about, you know, five ways to make money on Amazon, it's not going to cause that trademark confusion. And if you're writing and you say, I was sitting in Starbucks, you know, wearing my favorite Nike T shirt, looking at my Skecher shoes, those are all things that are trademarked. You're fine. Like, there's no consumer confusion. You're setting the scene, you're setting the stage. And it's not an issue to use those trademarked words in the text of your book. So it's a little bit murky again. And it's really. If you look around and you see a bunch of books or a bunch of. I mean, that would be my test. Because you're writing a book. If you see a bunch of books that have Amazon, for example, in the title, you're probably okay. Kind of like she, Jacqueline Lipton, had said. Regarding. I think it was parody. You know, if you see a bunch of books that are doing that, you know, chances are that they're not pursuing this. They're not. They're not sending injunctions out. You know, they're not trying to stop it. So. But again, my rule of thumb, if you are in doubt or you are unsure, talk to an attorney. Okay? So the last thing I'm going to talk about is permissions in general and privacy and defamation, because this is something else that's come up as we've. We have a lot of authors who write memoirs which are true stories of their life, and inevitably other people come up and, and I've talked about kind of my rule of thumb for this in the past, but I wanted to touch on it with some of the research that I did as well. But let's see what you guys are talking about here. All right. Jean, hello. Glad to have you here, and glad to have here that you read my book. Thank you. Let's see. Somehow. Oh, I was like, somehow, I see someone talking about beef and pork. Oh, that's funny. We photo gal. I'm about to publish my cookbook, a beginner vegan book. I've yet to publish my children's book. That's awesome. I am not. I'm not vegan, but I don't. I'm kind of like exotic expressions, actually. I don't eat any meat at all. And I occasionally, but extremely rarely eat a little bit of fish. But yeah, that's funny. And I don't. My body doesn't like cheese or milk, so that's kind of out of the question. But that's funny. That's awesome. So let me know when your vegan book comes out because I would love to check it out. And. And Wendy. Oh, that's Wendy. Hi, Wendy. Okay. Doing a book on quotes, but. So Maria Vale said I'm doing a book on quotes, but I've been careful to quote people who have been dead greater than 70 years, such as Plato, Lincoln, Buddha, and I read. You don't need to get legal permission for that. No, most of the time you don't. And quotes are usually okay. Again, it falls under fair use. If your entire book is just quotes and you're not elaborating, you're not referencing them, there can be potential issues. The alliance of Independent Authors has a really, really great resource on fair use. So I would highly recommend grabbing that. I don't know if, Angela, if you're even able to get a copy because it might be in their members area or it might be for purchase on their website if you're not a member. But it is an excellent resource for anybody that's unsure of whether something is fair use or not. It goes into great detail and it was one of the resources I used when I shot a video on, you know, is this Fair use, which is on book Launchers, TV as well. There's a video I have on fair use and it actually might have the link now that I'm talking about it. I think we put the link to that resource in the description of that video. All right, well, we'll wrap up and then we'll do questions. So. And we'll do prizes. I have a participation prize, of course. So let's talk about permission in general. When you talk, when you're writing about real people or if you're a podcaster and you've done interviews, I highly recommend you get permission. Just get them to sign off that, you know, a lot of podcasters do this as part of their whole process. You're basically waiving whatever you say in that interview. They can repurpose it for. For their own commercial rights. So they might repurpose it into A book they might have, you know, something they sell later on a course from all the, the interview tips or whatever. So you. First of all, if you don't, if you're uncomfortable with that, make sure you're reading whatever you're signing when podcasters are setting you up for an interview. But if you are a podcaster, I do recommend you get that. If you think you might be using the material from these interviews in a future book, or if you're telling a story and it involves people that you're a little bit nervous about what you might say, you may want to get their permission to tell that story. I've said I've talked about this. I think I talked about it even in Self Publish and Succeed. I've written about a lot of people that I didn't ask for permission, but I'm usually saying something very positive about them. So I'm really not worried about them being upset with me. One person that always laughs about this is my friend, Coach Deb. She, she There's a story in my book the New Brand you'd about us in a Las Vegas penthouse trying to get pizza at 2 in the morning and, you know, being baffled by the fact that we couldn't find pizza anywhere at 2 in the morning in Vegas and. And then we ended up eating snacks in her bathroom in the, the Las Vegas penthouse. So that was the story. She didn't know it was in there. And when she was reading the book, she was a little stunned to find the story, but it became something. Whenever she speaks on stage, she talks about this story and how she was in the book and kind of funny, funny pieces about that. So you don't have to ask people's permission. But if you're worried about what they might think or what they might do when they're in there, permission is a good thing. The other thing you can do is blur the details so it's not obvious. One of my favorite strategies for this is just to change the gender or make it very gentle gender, gender neutral so you can't identify the person as easily. So I've done this many times. When I talk about clients, I'll say he when it's a she, or I'll say they so that there's no commentary as to, you know, any, any just giving clues as to who it could be. That's one thing you can do. And ultimately there's the other thing, which is speaking from your own perspective. So many of us have to talk about our family because our stories are rooted in what happened when we grew up. And my advice to people, because the main reason somebody will come after you are privacy concerns or defamation. And defamation is really when you say something about somebody that is false and harmful and then if they're in the public eye at all, then you also have to prove malice so that like you knew this was probably it might not be true and that it would damage their reputation. So there's a lot in a defamation case and privacy is weird because in the states anyways, there's no federal law overseeing privacy. It's all state by state. So it's kind of funky. And you know, because of the amendment rights, there's the, the law veers towards more openness than privacy when it comes to individuals. So that's not to say it's wide open season that you can say anything. There's other humans on the other side of these stories. So that's why I prefer to tell things from your own perspective. Don't, don't place judgment or don't assume somebody's intent. So if something happened where you were hurt, for example, like hurt emotionally, you don't say like he's greedy and was mean and you know, chose to ignore the fact that I was going to be hurt by this. You're making a lot of assumptions as to somebody else's intent, feelings and knowledge that you really can't know. So what I would say in a situation like that, you would just say like, this is what happened. You know, he did this. This, this, here's how it harmed me full stop. Like don't go into judgment. It's just like this is what he said or this is what he did and this is how it impacted me. That is really very careful, but really all your reader needs and many cases people will feel uncomfortable or they'll feel like you're coming after the other person, which doesn't always shine you in a, in a good light if you're saying all these things about somebody else. So that's my rule of thumb for that. You know, write it in a way where you're kind of protecting yourself. Seek permission or speak to an attorney. That's my advice on that. All right, so question time. Angela found the Authors alliance link, which is the, the resource on fair use that I mentioned, which is great. And Scully's House Thrillers is in the house. Hello. So great to have you here. Let's see. I told some not so pleasant stories that were found from published open source information. Yes, absolutely. If, if, if stuff is in like court records for Example, and you're, you know, citing whatever is there. That is fine. I mean, that's not. It's not private, and you're not. It's not defamation because it's in court records. So if you can prove something to be true and it's already in the public record, then there really is no issue. It's, you know, that's totally fine. I shouldn't say there's no issue because, again, not an attorney. But it. There shouldn't be an issue with that. Okay, Angela, what are our questions that we have? Well, I was. Sorry. I don't see why it was so expensive that time. Normally it was. I think Julie was overcharged. Oh, maybe that was the sending of the package. That might be what you guys are talking about. Yeah, the overseas packages, not so good. Okay, so the prizes. Here we go. So today's participation prize. See what. So we're gonna have two. One will be the 22nd person who said hello today. Because we're in 2022. So Angela will count who is number 22 to say hello. And then our second prize will be. I'm curious. What was the most surprising tip for you today? Normally, I ask your favorite tip, but I'm curious, what was your most surprising tip from my journey down the research rabbit hole. So let's hear your favorite tip while Angela's giving me questions and counting to 22. All right, question one is from Luke's, the Publishing. Luke's. I guess the publishing industry is very reminiscent of the music industry. Is it possible to get a traditional book deal with insight to sales logistics? I hear that is kept from the offer author. In terms of sales logistics, are you meaning, like. Well, I mean, my understanding. So I've never had a traditional book deal, and I've worked with a handful of authors who have, but my understanding is they're lucky to get quarterly reports. Most of them get annual sales reports with no granularity whatsoever. So you don't know what stores are carrying your book. But I mean, frankly, with Ingram, that's one of the things that kind of bugs me about Ingram is they say your book is distributed to all these stores, but they don't ever give you a list of where your sales have come from. Which would be really nice because even in Amazon, I at least get regional data. So I have an idea of what regions are. Are selling a lot more of my books. But with Ingram, we don't even get regional data, and we don't get bookstore data. But with a publisher, I don't think you you're lucky to get more than an annual report of total sales by product. But I don't know if that exactly answers question, so hopefully. Hello, Denise. Welcome. And. Okay, I'm just waiting for our prizes. So, Maria, you are number 22. So congratulations. It pays to show up for these live streams. So I never saw Angela if we actually had any mugs left, but I think we'll stick with our usual prizes for now. So I know you have a copy of my book, Maria, so you can get a T shirt, which. This is awkward. I've got a hoodie on, but underneath. Here we go. Let's see. Here's one of our T shirts. Here we go. Proud. No, boring. Book author. Okay, so that's one of our T shirts. We have them in red and black. I don't know if we have all the sizes left. So I would say right now you can't request red or black. You can just request your size, and then we can make sure we can get your size. So email teamoklaunchoes.com and let her know if you want T shirts. If you're in North America, you can get a T shirt. If you're outside of North America, you're going to get a magnet because of what Mindful Eats was talking about with how crazy expensive shipping and duty and all that jazz was outside of North America. Okay, so tips are coming in now. The most surprising tips. I'll give you guys a couple of minutes. Oh, Maria wants a hard copy of the book. That's easy. We can do that. Okay, cool. So these are good tips. I'm going to read them, and then I'll try to pick my favorite, which will be tough. So we photogal said trademark is interesting. Phrases are trademarked, like Virginia is for lovers. Remember Paris Hilton. That's. That's hot. Is trademarked. Oh, my gosh. You went down a rabbit hole too. That's awesome. So Paris Hilton owns that. Hot as a trademark. That's funny. Ramona Foster. That might be my surprising tip for the day, so you might win. Ramona Foster. Most surprising thing is that you can't give your opinion when you tell a story about someone. It's surprising because people all over social media are constantly judging each other. So, Ramona, it's not that you can't give an opinion. That's my rule of thumb, a guideline that I offer people to keep yourself on the side of safe. You can give your opinion, absolutely. But there's privacy laws and defamation laws, and your opinion is something that for most Nonfiction stories, it's not necessary to give your opinion in order to share the story and have the impact and the results on your reader. It varies like. And again, this is a general rule of thumb. There's exceptions and there's how, you know, a lot of our authors choose to do it differently. And that's their. It's their book, it's their choice, and we'll support them and just flag the things that we think they should look at and, you know, take action and make their own decisions. So that's the beautiful thing about self publishing. So you can do. And on social media, people do do all kinds of things. But ultimately, it's my own rule of thumb because first of all, I believe in erring towards kindness always. Kind of, that's my first, my own personal philosophy. But also, it just. If you're sharing the facts of what happened and how it impacted you, you're not judging somebody else for their actions. And I think that that puts you in a much stronger position in the eyes of the reader and in the eyes of the law. But please don't believe that that's a hard and fast rule, that you can't share your opinion, because you can't, especially in America. This is the land of the free. And some people need to share their opinion a little more loudly these days. Okay, let's see. Another surprise was TM doesn't mean it's trademarked. It just means it's out for trademark. It doesn't even mean they filed that. It's an intent to file. That's the big thing. And there's another question, which I'll come back to, and most surprising was that a name can't be trademarked. J.K. rowling's name is trademarked. It seemed like someone could use that one. Yeah, it could. So it is funny how that works with this, that anyone could use that someone's name. There's more law that I didn't go into that does protect some of the celebrity names a little bit, but it still doesn't. Because, I mean, think about all of the people like the Bruce Waynes of the world. And I had somebody else the other day, he signed up for my newsletter and he sent me an email and he was like, now you can say so and so, and it's a famous name is on your email list. And so there's a lot of people who are just named these names. But there is. There is something else, and I'm drawing a blank. It's like celebrity something, you know, so that you can't use that name for profit if it's not legitimately. Like you couldn't pen it in that. But again, rabbit hole. And I haven't had to dive down too deep into that one. We haven't had. We haven't had that come up at Book Launchers yet. Okay, quick question. Another one. We'll come back to that. Okay. I think that's cool. Surprising that substance matters as opposed to volume. It's both. It's not as opposed to, but substance matters a lot. I used to think it was just the volume. Right. So if you think if you only quoted two sentences, you'd be safe, but if you quote two sentences that are really substantive to work, that it might not be safe. So it's a great distinction. Okay. You know what? I loved the comment from we Photo Gal. So I'm going to give it to you. You guys all had great surprises here, which is awesome. But I just love that tot being trademarked. I think that's great. So thanks for sharing. You win today. I've said the list of prizes many times, but Angela can post them again if you need it, so email her at teambook launchers.com and I know I saw a couple questions here. Efren asks about song lyrics. Yes, I stay away from song lyrics completely. If somebody uses them in their book, we usually suggest they remove them. There is some. And I covered this in fair. In the book or not the book, the video on fair use. So if Angela has a second, maybe she can post that YouTube video link for you guys. And also that alliance of independent authors that their book on fair use covers song lyrics. It's better to stay away from them. They are very strongly protected. And it's, it's. You have to seek permission to use them. So that covers that. Hopefully. I saw another question somewhere. There it is, Myrote. Hopefully I'm saying that right. Will it be okay to compile books from different authors into your project? Merging dictionaries or expressions? I mean, this is one of those situations where if it's for not for profit education, nonprofit education, you might be able to do that. But depending on the volume and the use of that compilation, the transformative nature. We covered those four factors of fair use. I would probably talk to an attorney about that because it's going to depend on how you stack up in those four factors, whether it's going to be an issue. Because there is commercial intent there for the most part. Cool. I'm just reading your guys's comments. Efren. Says having a book implies our opinion. I think I agree. I mean my entire book on self publishing is. Is my opinion backed up by my experiences. So I think it, you know, that's why I say I wouldn't be afraid of sharing your opinion. It's just when it comes to talking about other people, you know, even then you're sharing your opinion is, is like I said, it's totally fine. And you're in states in particular, there's a pretty wide berth of what you can and can't do. My advice always just like I said, I veer towards being kind and really we never do know the intent or the knowledge that someone else has when they take an action. So it's better to just say what the action is and how it impacted you. What about common five word phrases? That's also the name of a song. I used it. Yikes. I don't know. That starts to get pretty nuanced for me. If it's a common five word phrase and it's also the name of a song, I don't if it's a common five word phrase. I don't know how it could be an issue. But again it's kind of, it's. The other thing to note is if it's a five word phrase and it's very common, they're not going to track down all the uses of it. Right. It's. It's one of those things where you got to look at the risks of somebody tracking you down and then what are they going to do? Most of the time they're just going to tell you to stop use of it. So you'd have to republish without it. There's not usually. There can be, but there's not usually a monetary fine in the first step unless it's deemed to have caused significant commercial impact to the original work. Then they might have some other case. But usually when somebody's defending a trademark or copyright issue, the first thing is to kind of that stop usage. So take it down. Okay, I think that's everything. John. You're welcome. Listening from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Thank you for all the great information. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. And Scully is sharing the author that reads to you. I don't know if that's your podcast or what that that is. I know you've been doing narration so but yeah. And Mike, you're here. It's always great to have you here, even when. Okay, so we'll be back in two weeks for the next live stream and of course Friday, if not Friday of Saturday, we will be doing our deep dive. It'll be two hours of writing with me. We're gonna do some writing sprints. We're gonna do some longer focused writing sessions. I'm gonna show you Atticus, the new writing software that I'm using, and we'll do some prizes and Q and A. So if you are writing or working on the editing part of your book, join me. It'll be a fun way to get a lot of work done together, a lot of focus work done. So book launchers.com deep dive I'll just type that in here and then we'll wrap up for the day. And I hope that you guys all have a fantastic rest of the week and you stay healthy because everybody seems like they're getting sick right now and I don't want that to happen to you. All right, so we'll see you Saturday at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time. Thank you so much for being here and we'll catch you guys in two weeks. Bye.