ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… CHAPTER ONE

ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY

Copyright, Trademark, and Branding in the Modern World

Dean Wesley Smith

Chapter One: A Magic Pie

To start off with, I need to make sure this metaphor is totally clear.

When you finish a story (a short story or a novella or a novel), you have created a magic pie.

The pies are all the same size. The length of the work does not dictate the size of the pie in any way and I will explain that later.

When a real baker makes a pie, there might be 20 different ingredients put into the mix in a certain way and baked in a certain way for a certain time.

A writer in a story will put in thousands and thousands of ingredients, ordered in a certain way, with multiple levels of plot, character, theme, meaning, and so much more. So the metaphor sort of fails there.

And a real pie made by a baker will spoil in a short amount of time, while a magic pie made by a writer will last for seventy years past the writer’s death, and often even more. Metaphor misses there as well.

But I’m going to go with this metaphor because the creating of the magic pies and the business aspects of a bakery make this entire thing clear to writers.

So How Is A Pie Magic?

Each time you create a story of any kind, you create a magic pie.

On the outside, the pie might be identified by genre or series or other factors, but that is just surface flavors. What the pie is really made of is copyright.

And copyright can be licensed in thousands of ways, and even (heavens forbid) sold.

I will repeat this a ton of times, but you never sell copyright. You only license it. And you never allow any magic pie to walk out the door of your bakery. Ever.

So this pie that represents that current story you just created is sitting there on the counter in your magic bakery. Say it’s a peach pie that smells wonderful and is warm, even steaming, just waiting for someone to try a slice.

So you do a cover for the story, some sales copy, and license the electronic version of the story to Amazon, iBooks, B&N, Kobo, D2D, GooglePlay, and Ingram and other places around the world.

For those big seven, you have cut out seven minor slices of the pie for those electronic licenses.

Now, here is part of the magic. The pie looks exactly the same. Nothing has been removed.

And then a customer at B&N, three customers at Amazon, and two through D2D license your story to read. In other words, they take a piece of the pie.

But nothing has changed on the pie. It is still completely intact, but your cash register rang up six sales while you stood there.

Now that is magic. And the power of copyright and licensing copyright.

A magic pie can be sliced up into thousands of slices. Some will take a little dent out of the pie, most will not.

For example, I am licensing a short story to an anthology. The license says that they have exclusive use of the story for one year for the anthology in electronic, paper, and audio. So for one year, three slices of pie vanishes. The pie is still mostly there because all rights not associated with the anthology I retain, such as gaming, movie, streaming, and so much more.

But there three slices gone.

And then in one year those three slices just magically appears back in the magic pie. And I can license the same rights to a ton of other places.

Remember stories and magic pies do not spoil. They remain hot and fresh and smelling wonderful for years and years and years.

So you have created a story that is basically a magic pie full of copyright. You can slice that pie up into thousands of pieces and most will not need to be removed from the pie.

A thousand readers can come into your store and electronically get a piece of that magic pie to read and the pie will not change.

In future chapters, I will talk about more details of when a slice is removed and why, what your store is like, license limits, the value of brands to your magic bakery and why, and the reality of trademark to the magic.

And so much more.

Right now I am sitting in my office. Over the years I have created almost sixty short stories with the Poker Boy character (sixty magic pies), done numbers of Poker Boy collections, a Poker Boy Kickstarter, and licensed Poker Boy all over the world. Yet not one bit of any magic pie is missing.

And I sit here sipping iced tea from a Poker Boy mug.

I love the magic of this world. Stay tuned.