Passive Income…
Passive Income: A Concept Critical in Copyright…
No smart writer sells any copyright. (Now this leaves out all stupid-as-a-post traditional writers.)
No copyright ever leaves the control of the writer.
Writer’s license the use of a story to another party. No copyright changes hands.
It really is that simple. But writers who do not understand copyright think they must sell their stories to make money. Nope.
All income from your fiction writing comes to you in hundreds and hundreds of ways as passive income, meaning you don’t have to do anything to the copyright to get it.
You have a reader buy your electronic book on Amazon (actually they licensed it from Amazon), do you have to go write another story to replace the one that the reader paid for? Nope. The copyright of the story that was purchased on Amazon still rests in your control and the money from the purchase is called “passive income.”
All licenses function in this fashion. Sure you may agree to not let anyone else use a story for a movie because you licensed it to Hollywood, but that license will expire and the entire time you still own the copyright.
No copyright ever leaves the control of the writer.
Maybe some of you might understand a stock market analogy. You buy a dividend-producing stock. Every month/3-months/6-months/year that company pays a percentage of its profits out to stockholders in dividends. Did you sell the stock to get the dividend? Nope. Passive income. In fact, if you sell the stock, you lose the dividend.
Copyright is like the base stock and depending on the use of the copyright, it can pay you passive income regularly for a very long time. And if you write enough and have enough passive income coming in from enough sources, you make a lot of money.
And this is about as basic as I can make this. And yes, this post came from a letter I got from a new writer asking how they should “copyright” their story to make sure they can sell the copyright to make money.
Some letters I just can’t make myself waste the time to answer. Delete is a wonderful function in my email.
2 Comments
Joseph Haines
Yup. I have one story, written in three hours, that has made me (so far) close to two hundred grand, that I still license out every couple years to somebody *else* and can continue to do so because I hold the copyright. When the streaming rights come in from multiple countries for the television series, the passive income continues to accumulate, all per the contract for the rights I licensened for a finite period of time to a Nordic Television producer.
And that’s one of the hundred or so stories I’ve sold over the years.
Most people have never heard my name. I’m a nobody in this business and am pretty happy with the extra income. Why? I listened to Dean and Kris and when I didn’t know what I was doing, I asked someone who did and spent a few bucks to get legal advice.
And then? I took the advice. Not rocket science.
dwsmith
Fantastic, Joseph. Got me beat. I have three stories now that have earned me over $20,000 each. Fun stuff, and thanks for the kind words. Well done getting the legal advice as well. Just super. Thanks!!