Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms. She writes weird books in lots of weird genres like fantasy (Blood of Kings and Kinsman Chronicles), science fiction (Replication), and dystopian (The Safe Lands trilogy). Find Jill on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or on her author website. You can also try two of her fantasy novels for free here and here.
I’m having a CRAZY week. The rewrite of my book, King’s War, is due next Friday. I’ve managed to cut 30K from the beast (which totally surprised me), but I’m still not quite done. But yesterday was the release day for The Reluctant King, which is ebook Part Seven in the Kinsman Chronicles, and strangely enough, the first 1/3 of the book I’m editing now.
Talk about weird. Editing a book you can’t change the first 1/3 of…
So I spent yesterday wearing my Administration hat. We self-employed, entrepreneur writers wear A LOT of hats, and I’ve got to say, the Administration had is THE WORST! I hate this hat! It’s floppy and heavy and made of vinyl that makes you sweat. I can’t see very well when I wear it, so I have no idea what I’m doing. And everything takes five times as long. Perhaps I should write an Amish romance novel in hopes that it will make me enough money so that I can hire an administrative assistant. Ah, the dream… *happy sigh*
All that to say, this was not an idea week to go back to regular blog posts, so I chose to blog on something that would take very little brain power, since the Administrative hat is also absorbent from the inside and likes to suck away brain cells.
(Can you tell I don’t much like admin jobs? Boo to you, admin jobs! Boo to you SEO and web design and things I do not understand! Okay, I feel better now.)
So here is my lovely book release image. Hooray for Part Seven. Almost there!
And now on to business!
Books In The Public Domain
Retellings. They’re everywhere. Always. And readers never seem to tire of them! Well, I know better than that. Many readers are sick of retellings, yet they still sell. Like crazy. But after a while, publishers grow weary. “No more Beauty and the Beast retellings,” they might say. Or, “We’re sick of anything Jane Austen,” to which I would say they are crazy, but that’s just me.
Now it’s not only retellings. There are books like Wicked, which is a spin off on a character from another work. And there are publishers (and indie publishers) who attempt to make money creating their own versions of out-of-print books and selling them. For example, I could create my own line of Jane Austen books, typeset them, get covers designed, and self-publish them. If they sold, I’d make all the money. It’s legal. But there are so many versions of all those books out there, odds are I wouldn’t sell any. But that’s how the law works. Public Domain is Public Domain. We can do what we want with it.
When Does A Work Become Part of Public Domain?
I am not a lawyer. I just Googled things until I found the answers. If you’re serious about writing a retelling, do your homework and make sure your legal. (I link below to all of my sources for this post, with the exception of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg.)
Works Published before 1923: No copyright protection. Part of the Public Domain.
Works Published between 1923-1963 without a copyright notice: No copyright protection. Part of the Public Domain.
Works Published between 1923-1963 that had a copyright notice but did not renew the copyright: No copyright protection. Part of the Public Domain.
Works Published between 1923-1963 that had a copyright notice and DID renew the copyright: Copyright lasts 95 years after the publication date.
Works published between 1964-1977 that had a copyright notice: Copyrights on these works automatically renewed for a second term.
Works published between 1978-Present: Copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. If a corporation published the work, the copyright lasts 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation (whichever expires first).
Your brain is probably melting. I understand. Which is why if it were me, I’d stick with the REALLY old stuff, just to be safe. And if you don’t like playing it safe, do your research very well.
I stumbled onto a couple interesting discussions in my research for this post. One is the discussion that Mickey Mouse is getting close to the Public Domain. But it’s technically not Mickey. It’s the films Steamboat Willy and The Barn Dance. At some point, time will catch up to Mickey, but you’d better believe Disney is going to fight as long as they can. Read this blog post for more information.
J. R. R. Tolkien is another author people are champing at the bit to steal from. I found some of these discussions interesting.
Read the laws for yourself. Here are two links I found helpful:
–TeachingCopyright.org
–CopyLaw.com
–Cornel University Library
Where Things Get Fuzzy
I’ve read some fairytale retellings that are QUITE fuzzy in this area–where the authors have clearly taken from the Disney version of the story. Odds are Disney has better things to do that read every retelling out there, looking for possible copyright infringements, but you never know. Be careful!
What Can We Use?
I dug around the Interweb and made this list of works that are in the Public Domain. To make it easier on myself and on you, all of these are stories published before 1923. I listed a title or three that each author is well-known for.
Louisa May Alcott: Little Women.
Hans Christian Anderson: The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, and Thumbelina.
Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma.
L. Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre.
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights.
Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden and A Little Princess.
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through The Looking Glass.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote.
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales.
Dante: The Divine Comedy.
George Eliot (real name: Mary Anne Evans): Silas Marner and Middlemarch.
James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans, and The Deerslayer.
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, and Moll Flanders.
Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov.
Henry Fielding: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows.
Brothers Grimm: The first to pen many of our classic fairytales.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter.
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan.
Homer: the Iliad, and the Odyssey.
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Jack London: The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and White Fang.
Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince.
John Milton: Paradise Lost.
Herman Melville: Moby Dick.
L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables. (Though don’t try to sell any Anne dolls. There’s a trademark on that!)
Charles Perrault: The father of fairytale retellings.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven, The Pit And The Pendulum, and The Tell-Tale Heart.
William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew.
George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion.
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein.
Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Bram Stoker: Dracula.
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, and Anna Karenina.
Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper.
Unknown: Beowulf.
Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Voltaire: Candide.
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Johann David Wyss: The Swiss Family Robinson.