Most authors are aware of and familiar with the Authors Guild, a professional organization for authors that provides advocacy and assistance on a range of issues, including contracts and copyright. (Review our coverage of their recent Contracts Initiative.)
Fewer people know about the recently founded nonprofit Authors Alliance, based in Berkeley, California, with all board members in some way connected to UC Berkeley. This organization, too, is focused on issues related to contracts, copyrights, and reversion of rights, but with a more pronounced interested in open access, Creative Commons, and copyright reform. Its interests and membership lean toward scholarly publication and academic authors, and it favors initiatives such as the Google scanning project, while the Authors Guild actively pursued litigation against it.
Last week, the Authors Alliance debuted one of its first tools to help authors everywhere: a free online questionnaire that helps determine the rights status of your work. As any published author knows, it’s not always straightforward to secure a reversion of rights—which is becoming more important as valuable opportunities for distribution and sales open up to authors.
The tool steps you through a series of questions, such as:
- When was the work created?
- When was the work first published?
- When was the work registered with the US Copyright Office?
Additionally, the Authors Alliance also offers a free digital guide, Understanding Rights Reversion, which is a needed and helpful companion for any published author.
Bottom line: While this new tool isn’t a replacement for legal counsel, it helps point the way toward next steps. It remains in beta, and we hope to see improvements made over time to the friendliness of the language, which may be somewhat opaque to authors who are unschooled in publishing or legal terminology. We are no strangers to publishing contracts, but we still found the official name of this tool—“The Termination of Transfer Tool”—a strange and unfamiliar way of referring to rights reversion, at least for those of us on the commercial, mainstream side of the publishing fence.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
