Klarinet Archive - Posting 000750.txt from 1998/10

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] copyright advice (was "attention composers")
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:44:11 -0400

Shouryu Nohe asked,
>How do you go about copyrighting something? >
As Mark Charette and Grant Green point out, mailing a copy to yourself (common
practice among freelance writers) is not a secure way to copyright something.
You'll probably hear about he other common practice: Take your music to a
notary public and get date and notarization on every page. That's not secure,
either, and the notary fees can add up, depending on local customs, to more
than the cost of a real copyright.

I'm not a lawyer and can't give you legal advice, but I'm a writer, so here's
another way to reduce the annual expense of copyrighting that I think is much
safer. Instead of separately copyrighting each piece you write, see if the
Copyright Office allows you to put all your unpublished pieces for that year
together as "Collected Works of Shouryu Nohe, Vol. 1" and so forth, so that
you can copyright the whole collection as a unit. I do that with unpublished
short stories and I think you can do it with music, too, by following the
rules about how to organize the collection.

You probably already know how difficult it is to sell new music, since you're
talking about self-publication, but professional or semi-pro publication, if
you can get it, saves you the time, hassle and expense of copying,
distributing and obtaining copyrights. You can find information about
contracts and other legal matters in the latest edition of an annual (a large
hardback), _Songwriter's Market_, published by Writer's Digest. It contains
instructions on how to prepare a music manuscript to send out, along with a
long list of music publishers with their addresses and any specialized
requirements. Also look for the latest edition of _This Business of Music_
and its supplements (also in hardback). Borders Books and Barnes & Noble
carry both. College libraries and most city libraries also will have them, in
the Reference section if not under Music.

If you do decide to self-publish, beware of subsidy presses, aka vanity
presses. The reputable ones won't steal your material, but real publishers
scorn vanity presses so much that getting published that way can kill your
career before it starts. Self-publishing is perfectly respectable, but a
subsidy house label on your work is like going around with a flashing neon
sign that says, "I'm A Loser! Loser! Loser!" strapped to your forehead. To
make matters worse, after paying all that money, you still have to do all the
marketing yourself. The general rule is that money flows from the publisher
to the author, never the other way around.

Good luck!
Lelia
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"Aaron Copland, describing Dr. Serge Koussevitsky, then leader of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra, has written: 'He has been profoundly disturbed at the
realization that the great majority of our composers devote the major part of
their time, not to writing music, but to the gaining of a livelihood. He can
never accustom himself to the thought that in this rich country of ours no
plan exists that would provide composers with a modicum of financial security
for the production of works of serious music.'" (Quoted in Shimel and
Krasilovsky, _More About This Business of Music_, 1974 ed., p. 58.
Koussevitsky died in 1951. Not much has changed in 47 years.)
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