Tag: royalty free

Free Resources for Writers

FreeSelf-publishing involves so much more than simply writing a book. Whether you contract with various experts for help or go it alone, once you make the decision to self-publish you’re responsible for graphic design, accounting, marketing, formatting, and so much more. A person could go broke wearing all those hats.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post outlining several places to obtain free music and photographs under a Creative Commons license. Today, I want to introduce a few more sites that offer free resources for writers. As always, it’s good practice to give proper attribution even if the site doesn’t require it. See the aforementioned post on ways to do this. Continue reading “Free Resources for Writers”

Three Changes to Help Indie Authors and Publishers

New changes in YouTube, Facebook and TwitterSocial media platforms are always evolving. Here are two major changes that have occurred over the past few weeks that can help us as writers and publishers.

How many times have you posted to Facebook and later found a typo? Comments and likes have started to pile up, but you need to delete the post and start from scratch. You hate to delete it because you’ll lose the conversations. Fret no more. Continue reading “Three Changes to Help Indie Authors and Publishers”

Licensing Music for Book Trailers

Lord Russ and the Aloha SteamtrainYou just turned on the radio and heard the PERFECT song for your book trailer. Should you:

A) Stalk Beyoncé after a concert and ask her for permission to use it;

B) Use it without permission, because no one will find out until your book becomes a bestseller, at which point Beyoncé should be thanking you; or

C) Sing it yourself so you don’t have to worry about licensing — and because your mom says you’re as good as Beyoncé, anyway.

The correct answer is none of the above. At least in the United States, if you are going to link music to video, you need synchronization licenses both from the record label that owns rights to the recording AND from the songwriter(s)/publishing company(ies) that own rights to the music and lyrics. Even if you perform it yourself and don’t need the sound recording, you still need the sync license from the latter because the composition is copyrighted. BMI.com provides a good summary of the different types of music copyrights at http://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/types_of_copyrights. Continue reading “Licensing Music for Book Trailers”