- What Is an ISBN?
- What Is an EAN Barcode?
- Who Holds the Copyright to Your Book?
- Who Owns the Exclusive Rights to Your Book?
- What Is Plagiarism, What Is the Penalty for It, and Why Is this So Important for Authors to Understand?
- What Is Documentation in a Book?
- What Is the Purpose of a Copyright Page?
- What Are Royalties and Will You Receive Them?
- What Does a McDougal & Associates Publishing Contract Look Like?
1. What Is an ISBN?
An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number. This is a system set up to identify books worldwide. All books handled by bookstores must have a unique ISBN. Each edition of a book — a hardback edition, an e-Book edition, an audio edition, etc. — must have a unique ISBN.
McDougal & Associates has been assigned a block of ISBNs by the agency controlling their issue and we assign one of our numbers to each book during the production process. Once a book is published, the details for that title are provided to the agency so that they are then known everywhere.
An EAN barcode is a machine-readable code used to process books in bookstores worldwide. Distributors will no longer handle a book that does not bear an EAN barcode on its back cover. If they have to place a sticker on the book with the corresponding barcode on it, they charge extra for that service.
Secular books, sold in supermarkets and drug stores, bear a different barcode. Sometimes a second barcode is printed inside the front cover. Since the EAN barcode is the most widely used barcode in the book industry, we use it exclusively.
Although we have the ability to produce our own barcodes, Lightning Source does it for us, as part of their cover template service, and this assures us of accuracy. Some barcodes, if not properly designed and printed, will not work.
Barcodes not only identify the ISBN of the book. They also identify the country that particular book is authorized for and the retail price. Since our books sell in many countries, we use the code which indicates that they are for sale anywhere, and we also do not place any retail price on them because:
- It allows retailers to set their own price.
- It allows for a later price rise without the redesign of the cover.
- It allows the author to charge more in ministry situations.
3. Who Holds the Copyright to Your Book?
You hold the copyright to your book. When it is published, it bears the copyright symbol on the copyright page, and that protects you. For additional protection, we file a copyright application in your name, presenting two copies of your already printed book to the U.S. Registrar of Copyrights. Within a couple of months after publication, a certificate of copyright is returned to us and will then be mailed to you for your files.
4. Who Owns the Exclusive Rights to Your Book?
Unless otherwise specified in your contract, you hold exclusive rights to your book, meaning that you can, at any time, withdraw it from circulation, make a contract with another publisher, decide to do some other edition of it, revise and reprint it, etc.
5. What Is Plagiarism, What Is the Penalty for It, and Why Is this So Important for Authors to Understand?
According to Wikipedia, the online dictionary, plagiarism is “the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else’s written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one’s own without adequate acknowledgement.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism). In more simple terms, plagiarism is copying someone else’s material without acknowledging them as the source. This is a serious criminal offense with serious financial and criminal consequences ($100,000 fine for the first occurrence and fines for every copy of your book that contains plagiarized material), and therefore each author needs to know what is involved and how to avoid it.
What does this mean in practical terms for your book? It means that when you quote from someone else’s material found in books, magazines, or online sources, you must enclose the material in quotation marks and then document it. Because so much material is now available for study on the Internet, many well-meaning people incorporate parts of it into their own writing, without documenting where they got it. This is VERY DANGEROUS and puts you at potential legal risk. (For information on how to properly document quoted material, see the next section.)
6. What Is Documentation in a Book?
When you quote someone, you must document that quote. That documentation gives the person who said it credit for the quote, and this protects you from lawsuits.
For a quote from a book, for instance, you must give the author’s name, the title of the book, the publisher, and the year and place of publication. For a magazine, you must give the author, title, number of the issue, etc. For online material, you must give the website address, with all of its extensions.
Even Bible verses must be documented. If you use the New King James Version of the Bible, for example, and your principle version for the book is some other version (the principle version is the one you use more than any others), then on the page where the New King James quote appears, you must identify it as being NKJV, and on the copyright page, you must include the copyright information for the New King James Version of the Bible in your legal information. This not only protects you; it also lends a certain seriousness and credibility to your writing.
Documentation can appear within the context, as footnotes, as chapter endnotes, or as endnotes that all appear together in a special section at the end of the book.
7. What Is the Purpose of a Copyright Page?
A copyright page is a legal page, required by law, and it serves several purposes:
- Identifying Your Rights: The copyright page establishes your rights as the author of the book. The term copyright and the copyright symbol © protect you under American law, and the term ALL RIGHTS RESERVED protects you under international law.
- Recognizing Other Sources: The copyright page legally recognizes any other sources used in the book, especially, in our case, Bible versions. When there are too many references from other books to cite on the copyright page, this can also be done in footnotes, chapter endnotes, book endnotes, or another such special section.
- Establishing the ISBN: The copyright page must list the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), the unique identifier of each book by which bookstores and distributors will recognize it, register it, and sell it.
- Identifying the Publisher: The copyright page identifies the publisher of the book and his contact information.
- Setting Forth Any Other Legal Matter: The copyright page holds any other legal information about the book, such as Library of Congress Cataloging Number (if applicable)*, country of printing, number of the current edition, etc.
*Since to obtain a Library of Congress Catalog Number you must apply 6 months before publication of the book, and since most libraries do not handle Christian books, we have never found it convenient to use this feature.
8. What Are Royalties and Will You Receive Them?
Royalties are what is paid to an author when a publisher owns the rights to his or her book, publishes, promotes and sells the book, and then pays the author a small share of the profits. Usually that share is very small, less than ten cents per copy. Since, in our case, the author owns his own book, there are no royalties and can be no royalties.
We do have, however, what is known as “sales forwarding.” When someone else sells a book owned by the author, deducts a fair share of the sale price and forwards the rest of the payment to the publisher (to be forwarded to the author) that process is known in the book industry as “sales forwarding.” So instead of royalties, we have sales forwarding.
We do not keep a physical stock of any author’s books. When we receive an order for your book through our web site, we forward that order to our printer for fulfillment. We then pay you for that sale, the same as any other retailer. Books are also sold by LSI and digital editions by other agencies. When the agencies pay us, we forward 90% of the payment to the author, keeping 10% to cover our related expenses. We report sales from all agencies (including our own sales) and disburse monies to our authors quarterly. Since LSI pays us 90 days after they report the sales, our payments to authors are one quarter behind the corresponding sales reports.
As noted elsewhere, we have partnered with Lightning Source International (LSI), a company that makes your book available to the largest booksellers in the world. If you missed that section, here’s how it works. We register your book with LSI, setting the retail price and the wholesale discount. (Our normal bookstore discounts is 40%.) When LSI sells a book, they print the book, ship the book, and collect from the customer. Sales reports are sent to us monthly and at the end of 90 days, we receive payment for those sales. The amount forwarded to us is the difference between the wholesale price of the book and the cost of producing it. We then forward these funds, minus 10% to cover our costs of managing so many titles, to the respective authors
9. What Does a McDougal & Associates Publishing Contract Look Like?
A SAMPLE PUBLISHING CONTRACT
This contract will be between PUBLISHER, McDougal & Associates of 18896 Greenwell Springs Road, Greenwell Springs, LA 70739, and AUTHOR, (name and address). Whereas AUTHOR has a book tentatively entitled (TITLE) to be published and disseminated, the two parties hereby enter into the following contractual agreement concerning that book:
1. PUBLISHER and AUTHOR agree to a price of $1,099.00 (one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars) for all setup costs to be paid in full with the return of this signed contract. This setup fee will include:
- A professional editorial evaluation of the manuscript
- Professional typesetting
- A custom cover design based on the author’s ideas, if any
- Complete copyright filing
- ISBN (International Standard Book Number) assignation and registration
- An EAN Barcode printed on the back cover
- Worldwide distribution from the McDougal & Associates website
- Placement in the ISBN database (making the book available to thousands of book retailers around the world)
- Placement of the book with the LSI POD system, making it available to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and many other online retailers and to the book distributors, Ingram Wholesale and Baker & Taylor, all for the purpose of wider dissemination
- Publishing and dissemination under the appropriate McDougal & Associates label
- Back cover text polishing
- An eBook option (some additional processing fees apply)
- A hardcover option (additional fees apply)
- On-demand printing (any number of copies at a time).
2. AUTHOR agrees to pay PUBLISHER an additional fee of (US$ AMOUNT) to edit the current manuscript, converting it into a more popular format, said fee to be paid as the work is completed to the author’s satisfaction.
3. PUBLISHER agrees to upload the book to the LSI POD System and to order as many books as AUTHOR desires, and also to reorder books when desired. In each case, AUTHOR will pay only actual printing and shipping charges, plus a 10% publisher’s surcharge over printing costs.
4. PUBLISHER agrees to pay AUTHOR, just like any other retailer, for any sales that come through its Internet site and 90% of all sales that come through the LSI System or other agencies (for digital editions), payments to be made quarterly.
5. Aside from these costs, no other charges will be made … unless (1) AUTHOR should decide to add too much additional material to the agreed-upon manuscript, (2) Too many last-minute changes are made, or (3) The book becomes larger than originally contracted.
6. Whenever AUTHOR decides to print additional books, the only charges that will be made above actual printing and shipping of the books themselves, plus the 10% publisher’s surcharge, will be changes to the text and or cover of the book required by AUTHOR. These will be billed to AUTHOR at a cost of $35.00 (thirty-five dollars) per hour. In addition, LSI, our printing partner, has a revision fee of $40 per revised file to be placed. This represents 1/2 hour of tech time at their going rate of $80 per hour.
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