A Writer’s Legacy Part 2

Posted on January 15, 2019 by mestengobooks

In November 2016, I posted a blog, A Writer’s Legacy in a Digital World, where I discussed the importance of planning for the future of your digital and intellectual property. I recently read two blog posts on the same subject but with a few more bits of information, like appointing a Literary Executor (separate from the Estate Attorney) to protect your intellectual property (IP).

To reiterate, it’s vital you prepare for the inevitable. You must decide what kind of legacy you wish to leave, if you wish to leave one at all. In this new digital world, our lives are complicated by our dependence on many devices, each with its own password and accessible only by you. The first step in the process is to take an inventory of your digital (online world) and intellectual properties:

Do you have a Paypal, Google Pay, or any account, in addition to personal banking, with monetary value? Who will have access in case you’re incapacitated, or worse, if you die? What happens to the money? Whom will you designate as your beneficiary?
What about personal and business email accounts, blogs, and podcasts? Personal and business websites? Do you want them up and running for people to read your when-you-were-a-breathing-starving-artist work?
Do you keep a list of logins and passwords to all of your online accounts? I keep an updated copy in one of those many cloud accounts, just in case. Update it regularly and make sure your designated Estate attorney has the most recent copy on file.
What electronic devices do you own that need a password for access? Do you have a laptop, smartphone, tablet, DVR/Tivo, Ring, or a home burglary system? How many apps do you access from your phone?
Do you bank online? What about mortgage payments, investment banking, utilities, and airline (or other) memberships? Which memberships automatically renew online? You’ll need to spell out which to cancel and which to keep active for your heirs/estate.
Do you have any online accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube? Any accounts to e-commerce sites (Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Ebay, etc.)? Check the policies of these companies regarding access by another person. You’ll need to legally designate someone if you want that person to clean up your online life.
How much of your work is unfinished? Do you want someone else to finish it? Or would you prefer your Executor/Executrix just heave every incomplete project, every potential novel/poetry book/best-selling short story into a shredder? What will you do with the work you have completed? Who gets the royalties?
Do you have translations of your book? Movie deals? Audio books? Who will oversee these if they become options after your death? Who will make the decisions about maintaining and growing your work after you’re gone? (Think: Elvis Presley estate.)
Will you leave the option to own, sell, or operate your business and control your intellectual property? Or will you decide so your heirs don’t have to? One option is to designate a micro-publisher to oversee your work so that royalties will be properly paid to your heirs.
What about cleaning up your personal information collected by those data-mining companies? If you think it won’t matter once you’re gone, you’re wrong. Someone could use your identity and gain access to your intellectual property and online life, and then your hard-earned money. This can affect any heirs you designate and their ability to oversee your IP or pay any monies owed. One site, My Life, mines all sorts of personal information; you’ll need to sign up and join to have access to your personal information and request they delete all of it.
You need to be concerned with writer scams popping up all over the web offering unauthorized copies of authors’ books or scamming writers out of money. Writer Beware is one of many sites that track predatory sites and unscrupulous people trying to steal our IP. Make sure all is good before passing it on to the heirs.

I don’t have children so I’ve been thinking about how to ensure my IP is safe so that whomever I designate as heirs (charities most likely), they will benefit properly. It’s mind-boggling for sure, but getting started is the hardest part. Start with making a list for numbers 1-4; those alone will take some time. Once that’s done, you’re more than halfway to protecting your IP. Nolo.com is a good site to find Estate and Literary attorney recommendations; you can also call or check online with the Bar Association in your state. You can find Last Will and Testament forms (as well as Healthy Proxy, Power of Attorney and other estate forms) online and at Nolo.

I’m not trying to be morose; this is a necessary part of owning a business (yourself) and smart business owners/independent contractors prepare for the worst. How many famous people left no Will for their estates, tying up legal proceedings for years in probate with family members each trying to get his share? Don’t let this happen to you – or your heirs.

Some links to good articles on this and other subjects:

Anne R. Allen on Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris
New Writing Scams to Look Out for in 2019
“As long as there are writers, there will be writing scams. Hungry predators will always be lying in wait, ready to pounce on any tender young scribe who strays from the safety of the mainstream herd.”

Maggie Lynch on Self Publishing Advice From The Alliance Of Independent Authors
Why Indie Authors Need Literary Executors & How to Appoint One
“Today I’m going to address how to make sure your heirs (whether that is family, friends, or a nonprofit) benefit from that and who makes the decisions about licensing future intellectual property rights (eg translations, movie or TV deals, audiobooks, etc.) that may not have been licensed at the time of your death.”

Chris Syme on Smart Marketing for Authors
Why Word of Mouth Marketing Will Sell More Books [Research]
“In this episode of the podcast, Chris reviews the 2018 Word of Mouth Marketing Report from Convince and Convert Consulting and how it can help authors sell more books.”

Scribbling

Posted on August 15, 2018 by mestengobooks

Clothesline Notes in Jack London's Country Cottage

Courtesy Jack London State Park, Google Images

Here in Northern California, we’ve been experiencing a spate of wildfires (15 statewide total) that have all but drained our firefighting resources. A local news station did a Special Report on the damage inflicted by these wildfires, including land, homes and lives lost. Terrible. As they looked back over the past seven years to show how fires have increased in frequency and size, they focused on the 2017 Tubbs fire, the most disastrous fire in California history. They talked about how it nearly decimated the Jack London State Park in Napa County.

For those of you who grew up reading great classic authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, etc., Jack London was a prolific writer and adventurer who settled here in the Napa/Sonoma region in the early 1900s. In fact, it was much of his worldwide adventuring that lead to the writing of some of the best works of the 20th century, including my personal favorites, White Fang and The Call of the Wild.

The newscasters shared details on how State rangers packed up his personal belongings in order to save them in case the fire reached his home and property (it came close, but thankfully missed), storing them all the way out here in Sacramento for safekeeping. Now returned to its former glory, his writing room still contains all of his writing instruments and materials, his desk, and other accoutrements: the twine strung across a closed-in porch, with a multitude of little notes clothes-pinned to the line. Jack scribbled these notes on small square pieces of white paper whenever something came to him (which was daily, evidently). He pinned them to the line for later use in his books.

And did you know that Jack London wrote ONE THOUSAND words EVERY DAY, BY LUNCHTIME?

The closest I come is a notebook marked “Write What You Know” on the front and it’s where I scribble when I need to unload. It’s not a journal; it’s simply a place to jot down whatever is rumbling around in my mind at a certain moment in time instead of pinning them around my house and looking like a crazy person. It’s where I scribbled the first chapter of my novel, a dark short story, and some senseless meanderings I tore out. I have never come close to a thousand words a day and likely never will. I’m not that motivated, even in a good month.

Out there on the world wide web you’ll find a plethora of expert advice by professional writers telling you to write daily. That’s nice if you’re fortunate to be earning a living from your writing, but what if you aren’t? And does it really matter if you write daily? I think not. I think we each should adhere to whatever writing principles fits our lifestyles, since one size surely does not fit all. Jack, like many famous writers, wrote daily (what else was there to do in the middle of a jungle at night?). I think it’s because he had so many stories in him to share it was the only way he could get to the next book.

Do we have any less stories? Perhaps, perhaps not. Some of us don’t travel or adventure as much as folks did back then, when it was easier and more affordable; you didn’t need a passport (until WWI), so moving between countries was much easier. And we’re busy working full-time jobs, part-time jobs, raising families, caring for parents, finishing a college education, etc. We have (modern) lives to live! Which brings me back to the point of the title – those lives give us fodder for our stories. So if you’re not scribbling daily, that’s okay (see Call of the Word); but it’s probably a good idea to at least have a place (notebook, clothesline, etc.) for you to scribble your ideas – the good, the bad, and the ugly, so at some point you, too, can turn them into a cohesive work. Like Jack.

Scribble on!

From Blog to Book: Turn Your Knowledge into Profit

Posted on October 10, 2017 by mestengobooks

I recently unsubscribed from a book publisher’s blog because I wasn’t getting much from it. So I took a chance and subscribed to Joel Friedlander’s blog, The Book Designer, and haven’t regretted it. Joel is an experienced book designer, writer, and publisher, and I highly recommend you check out his blog.

In his most recent blog, Joel offers his new book, Book Construction Blueprint, for FREE. That’s right – all 225 pages – for FREE. But that’s not the point I want to make. Something in his blog got me thinking about all the writing I’ve done over the years: alt med newsletters, articles, and a nutrition book, plus two other non-fictions sitting in my computer at the moment. He wrote that his latest book is really of compilation of all the free blogs he’s written for so many years. He wrote that this is actually his second book based on his blogging that he calls ‘booking my blog’ (I like this phrase). Joel writes on his recent blog:

This is a good example of “repurposing” material that was originally free when it appeared on the blog into a financial asset that will produce income for years to come.

If you’re a blogger with specialized knowledge, and you write in logical categories, you should be able to do the same.

It got me thinking: what if I took all that information I’ve shared over the last twenty years and put it all into a book? It could be a collection of some of my best work; most of the information has remained the same, albeit a few updates. I have to spend more time working out the details but I feel renewed from this recent post.

If you have specialized knowledge, why are you not doing this? I have a friend (come to think of it, I will send him this blog immediately) who writes weekly blog articles with intelligence and a wry humor. This would be perfect for him, since he once tried to recruit me to put together a book of his blogs (it didn’t pan out at the time). Why aren’t more people doing this? Sharing the wealth of their accumulated knowledge and specialty training? Get started now by going through your blog posts to see which ones would make it into your book. Start an outline, see where it takes you.

Book Sales Fraud or Smart Marketing?

Posted on September 12, 2017 by mestengobooks

Today is a day off for me so I decided to catch up on some online work and update my books’ Facebook, Lulu, and Amazon pages. I came across something on Amazon that I have encountered there before; I wasn’t happy about it then and I’m not happy about it now. Have you (authors) found someone, a third party seller, trying to sell your work for an unreasonable (and I mean ungodly) price? I published my first book, a creative nonfiction, back around 2007. A few years later, I retired the book (it was a personal memoir and I’d moved on by then) but Amazon never completely removes the page (their policy). There are probably two dozen or so copies of the book (yeah, I was a monster publisher back then, ha ha) in circulation, most of them signed by me at a book award ceremony back in 2006 (yes, I actually won an award for that little book). Not that my “autograph” begs that kind of money, mind you, but I do have to question the veracity of the seller when my simple paperback is available for ONLY $629.81!!!!!!

Unbelievable.

When I encountered this issue with my nutrition book (a third party seller was offering it for a huge, unrealistic amount, again on Amazon), I contacted a publicist and book marketing expert I’ve been following for some time now. She was nonplussed about the situation and told me I already got my money so don’t worry about it. Am I worrying too much about this? Or is this fraudulent activity? At the very least, it’s misleading since the seller lists the book as ‘new’ and there are no new copies available. What would motivate someone to price a book at that level? Have any of you experienced this? What did you do? Were you successful or not? I’d love some advice here…maybe it’s just me but I’m perturbed about some greedy idiot trying to overcharge for one of my works…and offering it as ‘new’ when it’s not. Not that anyone’s buying it at that price, I’m sure…but I did contact the seller via Amazon so we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, it’d be nice to hear from some of you about your experiences and how you handled them. In this Digital Age, I think, some illegal activities will be beyond our control…including when it affects one of us personally. Like I don’t have enough stress in my life…

Sheesh.

Update 09.18.17: the fraudulent offer has been removed! It’s sad to have to monitor our work so closely in this Digital Age; lots of scammers out there and people who ruthlessly take advantage of hard working writers. A flick on the forehead to them.