I recently had a gentleman ask me to do some ghostwriting for him, and I agreed to meet with him to see what I could do for him once I finished two other projects for deadlines this week. This gentleman has some great stories, but we hit a rough patch right from the beginning. He needed me to get some material to some local publications quickly for a deadline that conflicted with what I had already committed to. Still, trying to accommodate, I...

Contracting globally can be a bit tricky. Even if your contract is with a publisher based in the US, and your work is translated into other languages and distributed in other countries, there could be local laws, treatises, and the like that would override whatever you have negotiated in your contract. If you extend global rights to your publisher, always have a discussion about what that means to your publisher. Find out if your publisher has...

How many times have your heard expressions like, “if it’s too good to be true, it likely is”, or “you can’t get something for nothing” or maybe even, “nothing is ever really free –there has to be strings attached.” Now, there is something available to us that is absolutely free –and yes, there are strings attached, but they are strings you can live with. It’s open source software. But, even though it’s free of charge, the...

This is a big deal. Your work is your intellectual property, so you will want to do all you can to protect it. Whether you seek to copyright your material, or not, you own the rights to whatever you create from your original thoughts. It’s yours as soon as you put it into your computer file, or on paper. The tricky part is if someone brings a claim against you that you have stolen their intellectual property. Be sure to leave a paper trail, or...

My sister in law offered to loan me a Nicolas Sparks book. Most of what I read is non-fiction, but she leans toward works by this author, and its’ safe to say he is one of her favorites. Nicholas Sparks is definitely a great writer, but his work always disappoints me in the end, so I don’t even bother to read it. Everything I’ve read, and every movied based on his work that I’ve watched has a tragic ending, and...