Fiction Branding… Part 12

The Value of Copyright…

This will be very basic in this chapter. Very. And then in another post on branding, I will talk more about estates and so on which is very complex and writers need to think about it.

To start off with, many of you automatically defaulted to the…  “My copyright has no value. It really doesn’t sell.”

The problem is that statement is a belief that has no basis in any reality. Sort of like believing in a Yeti having babies with a an alien from space. It could happen, but more than likely your belief is just wrong.

Copyright is a form of property under the law and is treated in a very similar manner. Sales are not a requirement in copyright law.

With a contract, the ownership of a copyright can be exchanged in whole or in part. Like any business property, copyright can be depreciated (with great special rules), and it can be assigned a value that is based on possible earnings for the rest of your life plus 70 years past your death. That’s a lot of years of earnings potential, which more often than not is how copyright value is determined.

Potential.

Or someone throws a dart at a board and just makes up a value that sounds reasonable to the right suckers.

Kris and I own and control a vast amount of copyright. Over 50 years the value has continued to increase as we kept writing and creating more products. And with indie publishing we could get all the product on the market and earning at one level or another. And we can add merch now to increase value.

We also own and control a large number of trademarks. Trademarks are also a property right and have value, calculated in a different way than copyright. Sort of…

We also own and control a vast number of brands. Brands have business value, and are often made up of property such as copyright and trademarks, especially in publishing.

So you are going along just writing up a storm. You create a five book series, brand the series for readers, have two other branded series, a bunch of short fiction, some inside the novel brands, others not.

Say you are fifty-five.  So you have another 30 years to write and 70 years past your death for your work to sell. That is a full century your work could be earning you and your estate money.

There are a bunch of different ways and formulas to calculate what your copyright is worth right now. And these kinds of calculations are done all the time in music to price an artist’s catalog for sale.  And they are done for estates or bankruptcy in publishing.

So imagine you get to that goal (very possible) of making 100K a year with your writing. You now have more copyright, more brands, and more than likely some trademarks. (Pulphouse is a trademark and part of a brand.)

So is your copyright and brands and trademarks worth 100K because that is what you make in one year?  Or more?

The answer… How about a ton more if you have 100 years of earning power ahead of you. They figure that potential (evil word), smack it around with a bunch of different factors and come up with a number that would flat hurt anyone who tried to take your copyright over in an estate if not done correctly.

A single short story has value because it is a property. How much value? Depends on the neighborhood it lives. Really.

If it is the only thing you have ever written, not a lot of value, and more than likely will be just tossed when you die.

But say the story is one of my Bryant Street stories and lives inside a brand and a trademark and with a bunch of other similar stories, then that one short story has a lot of value and will hold value for a lot of decades if done right.

So, so, so many things to think about when it comes to copyright.

But first, before anything else, you have to realize you are creating property that has value and treat it as such.

And for most writers, that simple realization is the most difficult.