Posted on April 1, 2023.
Watch on YouTube.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More
Copyright is challenging. Even more so is knowing how to protect yourself and your IP when collaborating creatively. In this episode, Eric Farber, the Founder and CEO of Creators Legal, shares his insights on legal issues for authors.
Note: This is not legal or financial advice and we encourage all authors to consult the services of a lawyer for any legal advice and questions.
Check out Creators Legal for contracts for everything self-publishing: https://creatorslegal.com/?via=subscriptionsforauthors
Note: The above link is an affiliate link.
#29 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction and Context
0:02:38 What Authors Should Know About Copyright
0:06:39 Should Authors Register Their Copyright?
0:12:03 Legal Considerations with Fan Fiction
0:18:50 How Authors Can Utilize Their IP Assets
0:21:15 How Eric Sees the Creator Economy Changing
0:24:22 Hiring Contractors as Authors
0:32:15 Contracts with Collaborators for Authors
0:43:04 Getting Started in the Passion Economy
#29 Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Evans: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Subscriptions for Authors podcast. My name is Michael Evans. I’m your co-host Emilia Rose, six figure subscription author is also another one of our co-hosts. And today we have a very special guest I’ll talk about in a minute, but I first wanna share what we’re gonna be talking about, which is how to do collaborations, right?
[00:00:21] Michael Evans: As an author, how to make sure that all parties are on the same side, whether you’re working with an. Whether you’re working with someone who’s gonna design your tier images, if you’re starting a subscription, or whether you’re working with a co-author, design your own tier, an artist that’s creating art or merch for you as subscription authors, we want to create worlds for our readers.
[00:00:39] Michael Evans: We wanna build community with our readers and be able to collaborate and make awesome experience The. , but also means it’s nice we have to collaborate with other professionals. And in that process we wanna make sure that we have the legal side of things right. We’ll be diving into that today. We’ll also be talking about copyright.
[00:00:54] Michael Evans: Copyright is really important, and we’ll be talking about the things that you must know about copyright as an author. And [00:01:00] this is really important for when we’re collaborating with people. And today we’re also gonna be talking about how we can make this all easier. Cause I know legal can seem like a headache for authors.
[00:01:09] Michael Evans: we oftentimes don’t talk about enough, but that’s exactly why we brought on our guest Eric Farber. He’s the CEO and founder of Creators Legal, and he’s been an entertainment lawyer for decades now. He’s repped some of the biggest people in the industry and now he’s trying to create platform that makes it easier for us and cheaper to actually get the legal help that we need as authors.
[00:01:29] Michael Evans: It’s something I’m super excited about and he’s someone I’m super excited to talk with, and before we get into the podcast, I just wanna let everyone know upfront that. , although we get into some legal topics and we talk about some really important things, and hopefully give you at the end of the day some really important insights that can help you in your author career as a subscription author, but also even if you don’t have a subscription, let me tell you these insights will be helpful.
[00:01:52] Michael Evans: But I do wanna know that unfortunately we’re not able to give legal. But I do wanna note that. In this podcast, we’re [00:02:00] not giving any legal advice, so if you have any serious legal questions, we do recommend that you consult a lawyer. In addition, if you wanna join our community and collaborate with us, No, no legal issues.
[00:02:11] Michael Evans: You just have to join a free Facebook group. You can do that. We have a free Facebook group called Subscriptions for Authors. There’s over 1600 of you in it, and we’d love to have you in it if you’re not in it already. And you’ll learn a lot about how to start your subscription, about how to grow it and meet a ton of awesome authors some just started their description and some who are making six figures a.
[00:02:30] Michael Evans: In subscriptions. So anyways, that’s enough from me. We’re gonna get into this podcast. I hope everyone has a great time listening to this one. Let’s do it.
[00:02:38] Michael Evans: Eric, I just wanna start with chatting with you about what are the areas when it comes to the legal side of being an author, of being anything in this new world that we call Making a Living on the Internet. What are the legal sides of this that you see people overlook the most that we should be looking at?
[00:02:55] Michael Evans: I think it’s copyright is first, [00:03:00] right? People ignore the copyright very often and people need to understand what it is to have a chain of title in the work that they produce. So if you’re producing formal work, and even as this kind of informal work, you’ve gotta think about the copyright issue and the chain of title issue.
[00:03:18] Michael Evans: What does that mean? That means if you have people that collaborate into the work that you. , the end work that you produce. If you do not have them on some sort of contract, like a work for hire contract, then they have an ownership interest in the copyright of that work. I create a film, I create a book. I go and hire an editor.
I go and hire a script writer. I go and hire somebody to work craft and serve food. Anybody who touches in any manner the the result of the end work is going to have a copyright interest. And what a lot of people don’t [00:04:00] do is get stuff signed off prior to start working on it. That contains a transfer of all ownership rights.
And I always use this as an easy example. I represented an extreme athlete for many years and I was actually a producing partner with him as well. We produced several shows together. He would use these cameramen to film him as he was flying through the air in his squirrel suit. And he had hundreds of hours of footage of this stuff.
And this stuff is the, it’s the type of stuff. You go to a bar and you see it, broadcasting, airlines would buy this stuff. They lots of different places to do these outlets. And the issue was, and it became a very big issue, was he didn’t actually have the cameramen sign off on the ownership.
And at one point so there’s a lot of footage that was sitting out there that was just became unusable because he couldn’t distribute it. He couldn’t prove his chain of [00:05:00] title of the work. And so when it came time to try to sell it or license that footage, they would buy it. They just said, sorry, we couldn’t do it.
[00:05:10] Emilia Rose: I was just gonna say, that’s that’s very scary to think about.
[00:05:13] Emilia Rose: How quick that can turn around on you if you don’t have the right paperwork.
The big issue was that there was we had, a company that was ready to buy it or license it for some pretty big bucks actually. And the the, and as we were in the process of getting this done, the Cameron met with an accident as a lot of extreme athletes do, and his widow wouldn’t sign off.
It’s Murphy’s law and all of this stuff, right? So it’s if you think it won’t happen, it will happen. And I love the old, oh, I’ve known that guy forever. There won’t be any problem. Okay you take that chance, but you can’t claim an entire piece of copyright.
if you don’t have all the [00:06:00] signatures and work for hires can’t be verbal. They have to be written and they have to be signed off on. And until you do that you’re not gonna have all the copyright and that’s gonna impede your ability to monetize. And
yeah, and that’s what it is. That’s why we built, we actually built creators legal in that very specific way. So you would have all of the documents you needed in one spot. This isn’t even about registering a copyright. You can always register a copyright. Registration of a copyright is about copyright enforcement.
[00:06:34] Emilia Rose: So I have a question. Do you. Suggest that authors register their copyright once they’ve written their book or before they publish it? ,
[00:06:43] Eric Farber: Sure. Yeah. It’s very easy to do that. I think it’s $35. I haven’t registered a copyright in years, but pretty simple stuff. And books are one of those things. The copyright is very interesting because it’s not about an idea. You can’t copyright [00:07:00] an idea. A lot of people say you can’t copyright a script.
I think a lot of people send them in and do it anyway. But you can’t copyright a script because a script is just an idea. It’s the expression of the idea. It’s the play, it’s the movie, it’s the actual song recording. Those are copyrightable things. Okay. So once you’ve got that book, but, and I would bet that my publisher of my book registered the copyright.
I don’t recall that I did, but if somebody wants to go and it is about copying, we don’t think about this in cer in these kind of terms. We think of copyright infringement and copyright issues more in the scale of that. Somebody took a portion of it. Somebody created a new script that’s really similar to the one that I wrote, but that’s not really copying.
When I worked for the Tupac estate,[00:08:00] I worked for the Tupac State for 20, for 18 years and Figgy and you name it. That stuff was about actual copying. Somebody took a copy. Somebody took a song and copied it and put a portion of that into their song. Somebody took the album and made bootlegs of the actual music.
That’s what you have to think about. That’s where you start with copyright, right? I own that recording. I own those lyrics. I own that underlying music in books that it’s the same thing, right? So it’s, I own that book. I own all the words on the pages that make up that book. And then somebody took pages of that and put it into their book.
Somebody took pages of that. Or it’s a really famous book. Take the most famous books you can think of, right? Before the copyright expires, take Moby Dick [00:09:00] and pretend the copyright still exists. and you literally send it to a printer and say, reprint this for me. I’m gonna go sell it on the street corners.
I’m gonna go sell it. To other people, that’s the origin you have to think about when it comes to copyright. Then put all that stuff aside and start talking about creating new character, creating a new book out of the same characters. You’ve taken Captain Ahab and put him in a different situation.
And I think you start moving into fan fiction at that point, right? Yeah.
[00:09:33] Michael Evans: Yeah. Yeah. There’s, oh, there’s a lot of rich stuff to dive into here. The first big question I have is around what if I’m working with an author in collaborating on something, How does copyright work in that situation?
Absolutely. Yeah. Take hip hop for instance. You can have 16 people, right? So many people actually collaborate on that song or just a [00:10:00] big band, right? But yes you are now into the collaboration and they, there would be a joint work unless they transfer it to a company that they may own together, two authors that they may own together.
Now, where you get into the difficulty of these things is that when you have joint ownership, one person can actually license that out without the authorization or the sign off from the other joint owner. If you’re licensing it out for less than all, meaning that I say to Amazon, you get an exclusive to distribute my book.
If you’ve got two people involved and it is an exclusive license, then both people have to sign off. If it is a non-exclusive license, then one author can sign off. One, one joint owner can sign off, and you don’t need the [00:11:00] other person’s permission.
So it’s really important to think about the collaboration agreement that you actually create with somebody.
[00:11:08] Michael Evans: Yeah. No That’s really important point.
[00:11:12] Michael Evans: And I’ll just say that we definitely share this in the introduction, but nothing we share on this podcast is legal advice. So we definitely recommend people consult their own resources and we can talk even a bit more in the end about specific tools that maybe people can utilize to help through some things like this.
[00:11:27] Michael Evans: But when it comes to fan fiction, this sort of derivative works. Yeah. What I’m curious about is if I’m an author who has fans, which we talked to many authors who are building communities of their fans, it can be like useful to encourage them to express themselves in the community. And potentially that might mean drawing things like fan art might even mean creating fan fiction to a certain extent.
[00:11:52] Michael Evans: And many authors who come from the traditional publishing world, they’re told like, do not encourage fan fiction. , cut it off basically. But a lot of authors who [00:12:00] are coming from the indie publishing world may have one day already have written fan fiction in the past. Sure. May be coming on platforms where fan fiction is actually popular to read, not to monetize of course, but if I’m an author who has fans who wanna create fiction is that something that you should stop?
[00:12:15] Michael Evans: Is that something an author shouldn’t recognize? What should be the relationship between an author and derivative works that people may create?
Let’s just start with the basics, if they are not characters that you created, that somebody else created, and there’s a copyright arm, ’em, unless they’re, out of copyright, Shakespearean characters are now out of copyright, of course. As an example, it’s not your copyright to create derivative works.
So that’s the starting place. There’s lots of authors who who have no problem with it. There’s some authors and it also depends on what are you creating, right? If you’re gonna go create a, a porn movie off of the characters of Harry Potter, you can’t do it because the author is basically said, no, you can’t do that.
But [00:13:00] apparently she is fine with other types of fan fiction. It really just depends on the author. I was reading earlier today Sort of brushing up on some of this stuff in preparation for the podcast. And apparently Sylvester Stallone who wrote Rocky, right? So they’re his characters sued somebody who created a fan fiction piece of work based on the Rocky characters.
And which is a little bit surprising to me because maybe they tried to create a book out of it or do something. But from what I was reading, it was really a script which not okay, apparently. Even though the script is nothing, it’s just a script, right? They’re not selling the script. But many years ago, I represented a guy named Andre Ward, who was a Olympic gold medal boxer and a champion boxer for many years.
And he was in the movie Creed and Ryan Kugler had written Creed. [00:14:00] and I had dinner with Ryan coo, this is probably eight or nine years ago when he was prepping for Creed which was going into production. And with mgm, of course, I believe it was MGM because it was Sylvester Sloan who was in the movie, which was based on, the original rocky characters and new ones.
But he told me that he came up with that script and that idea when he was like 10 years old or 11 years old. In many ways that’s quote fan fiction, right? But as long as it’s okay with the person that has the original characters. But this is where I think that NFTs Web three, the different places that we’re seeing stuff these days is so intensely fascinating.
It’s a group called Deadheads NFTs. They have an animated show on YouTube. It’s really good.
[00:14:52] Michael Evans: Are they connected to the band?
No. Not at all.
[00:14:55] Michael Evans: Okay. Okay. Yeah, I heard Deadheads. I’m like
So they created this show this [00:15:00] animated show. It’s fricking brilliant. It’s a great show. So what did they do? They sell the n f t ownership rights of the char of the individual characters that are in the show.
And then you can take that. If you buy a character, you buy the you buy the license of the character, you can go and create your own works, and you’re creating derivative works from the character, but you’ve licensed it. You’ve essentially bought it right? By buying this n. Super interesting, right? And then they have great things like they’ll have casting and they come back and they say, Hey, we’re having casting.
And you bring your character that was originally created by Deadheads that you now own, and you bring it back into the pool and say, Hey, I wanna earn some money on my character. Put ’em in this episode. It’s brilliant. It’s so brilliant.
[00:15:52] Michael Evans: Yeah. I can see that being something very interesting. Yeah. For authors who. , [00:16:00] especially as these technologies and just the ecosystem around it evolves. Cause I can imagine being like I’m done writing this series, I’ve written, the six, seven books in it, and maybe they’ll be spinoffs and other things, but now I’m gonna take these characters out.
[00:16:17] Michael Evans: You could almost, it could be a very innovative way to have co-author like relationships in a sense.
You also have to think about quality too, right? You gotta think about the quality of this stuff. I am, let’s pretend I’m games of a Game of Thrones, creator and I, now, I have a work that is that is, I don’t know how many people how many characters are in Game of Thrones?
300, right? And now I’ve nftd them out for licenses. And now there’s all these works that are coming out, that are being written around it. . Let’s face it, most people are not good writers. , and, who knows that you’re actually gonna end up with some really good stuff out of that, or think of, the first thing that popped into my mind [00:17:00] partially because I spent, I’ve been spending so much time in Columbia, is Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, right?
Like a hundred years of solitude, loving the time of cholera. Like they have so many people. I think they’re, I haven’t read it in years, but I think there’s even a map of the, the family trees and who they’re talking about, right? You go take Gabrielle Garcia Marquez’s various characters and rewrite, a storyline to those, but who says the quality isn’t a good?
Are you diminishing the quality of the storytelling by allowing other people to control those characters?
[00:17:36] Michael Evans: I think that would be the big worry that everyone, that’s like the thing you have to battle with, right? Because you could increase distribution by having more creative people behind it.
[00:17:46] Michael Evans: But, Marvel, is a massive franchise that reaches everyone and, they put a lot of money into one movie to make it really good and Yep. Yeah, that is an interesting topic and that [00:18:00] kind of takes me to, web three, something that’s talked about in the publishing, Kenny, but it’s something.
[00:18:05] Michael Evans: I think has really, and maybe to sometimes not amazing experiments have happened in the broader creator at CUNY . There’s been a lot of people who’ve had some interesting ideas that maybe are early days of testing, I’ll put it that way. Some are maybe less genuine testing and more other things.
[00:18:21] Michael Evans: But when it comes to ideas and businesses that are operating broadly in the creator economy, a lot of times authors view themselves as only being able to sell books, right? That’s what we do. We sell books just I guess a YouTuber might say, I only create videos. That’s all I do. Yet, a lot of times creator businesses, their IP is one part of the business.
[00:18:44] Michael Evans: And I’m curious both from observing the broader creative world, but also your timing entertainment world as a lawyer working for top creative people, what is it the way that IP can be used to create other assets or other businesses around what someone’s doing? What are some of those things?
That’s [00:19:00] everything. It’s about how it doesn’t matter what you do, right? Whether you’re a business person whe whether you’re truly, an artist, you’ve gotta have range. You’ve gotta have range in what you do, right? So it’s not just about writing books. Somebody who says, I can only write books is not a writer.
They may, but my guess is that they have an ability to. Screenplays. They have an ability to write plays, they have an ability to write articles and journalism, and blogging and marketing copy whatever it is. But what I saw was that the talented people had great, amazing range, and especially classically trained.
They probably ended up in some performing arts high school where they learned how to play the piano and tap dance too, right? And then they end up on the stage as a comedian. They are drawn into whatever their core passion is. What are some of the other things? We’re living in a time when I have a very good, I have a good friend who is a writer [00:20:00] fairly famous writer, Laura Albert who went by the pen named jt.
JT Le. and wrote some fairly fairly famous books. And, she does podcasting and she does she goes out and does, modeling stuff and she writes tons of articles and for, for various magazines. And she’s you gotta be all in, right? There’s no such thing as dipping your toe in.
I think I I’m probably a good example of that, right? I wrote a book at the beginning of, I wrote a book that came out at the beginning of the pandemic and, I was going on this, speaking stuff to to go promote it. And and, all of that stuff got canceled. It literally came out in March of, I think it was last week of February, right?
I moved on to other stuff and the publisher said Are you gonna write a second one? I said, no fricking way. This was way too much work for me and I’ve got other things that I’m doing. No, I’m not a full-time writer in any sense of, in any sense of the word, full-time people.
If that’s what they want to do. And [00:21:00] that’s what they want to that’s how they wanna make their living. That’s what they have to do. They have to write a write or write a painter paints. This is about going all in.
[00:21:10] Michael Evans: In today’s day and age, with what going on in different areas that creative people can get discovered, different ways that stories are able to be produced in the world, what are some of the things that you’re looking forward to in this changing?
[00:21:29] Michael Evans: I heard before this call, you called it the passion economy. I’m just curious what you’re looking forward to and how this space has evolved, because whether it’s publishing or video making, this is unbelievably changed in the last 20 years, and what are you looking forward to when you see the next 10?
I’ve gotta tell you, I’m just looking forward to seeing how it evolves. I’m not gonna say that I’m a futurist in running my business, I like to say that I can see around corners a few months in [00:22:00] advance, but I don’t know all the things that are gonna happen. I think it’d be really difficult to know. I think that there’s, there are amazing things coming down the pike, right?
Chat, g p t is the game changer. that we’ve seen. It’s clearly showing us that the future is here. Somebody much smarter than me said the new jobs are not are not about writing. Let’s, people are saying, oh, it’s not that good. It’s not perfect. It’s been around for three months.
It’s to say it’s in the infancy. It is a kernel of an idea and nothing more, right? That’s working. It’s pretty unbelievable. But the jobs that are gonna be out there, cuz we’re gonna see a lot of job lost to this stuff, the jobs that are gonna be out there is about the management of the ai.
That’s truly what it’s gonna be about. The person who says, I don’t like this. They, they, you better something cuz you’re [00:23:00] gonna be, selling hotdogs on the street corner. The person who embraces the change, and this has always been this way throughout history, who embraces the change and learns how to manage that change is the person who will succeed in a major way.
You, I heard a long time ago, years ago, somebody said the the factory of the future is one man and one dog. And the man is there to reset the power in case it goes out to get the robots to keep working and the dog is there to make sure they don’t touch anything else.
[00:23:32] Michael Evans: I think there’s a really interesting thread you’re pulling
[00:23:35] Michael Evans: at here, which is, , before the rise of the passion economy, as authors, we only had publishers really, that we could realistically make a living through.
[00:23:44] Michael Evans: But now we could be independent and we could still work with publishers and we could talk a bit about that in a later portion. What I’m curious about talking to you now is that clearly a creative person can’t do everything alone. And these sort of software and managing software can be a great [00:24:00] thing to help us do more and help us create more awesome things, but also people are too, and both in relationships with software, but also particularly people, what is your advice, especially cuz I know you’ve worked with and hired literally dozens and dozens of people, if not hundreds of different people.
[00:24:16] Michael Evans: What would be your advice in working with people, working with a contractor as an author?
look, it’s, whether it’s an author or whether you’re an accountant, right? You’ve got to first set out what are your core values and make sure that those values match. And then when I’m looking for people, when I hire people, I’m looking for a few different things. One is grit. Hire for grit.
There’s a there’s a great book called, and it really is, are people gonna give up? Are they gonna, keep going? Are they gonna get through that project? Whatever it is. The other is open-mindedness, trying to find somebody who is very [00:25:00] self-aware. I was gonna put self-aware sort of third, but I’ll combine it, who’s very self-aware in what they know and what they don’t know, and how good are they at learning something and figuring it out and getting it done when you’re hiring contractors from a pure legal standpoint, I think that we’re really talking about, just from a hiring standpoint, make sure it’s somebody that you wanna work with.
Make sure it’s somebody that that can get the job done. But there’s a big difference between when you hire for. When you hire for soft skills rather than simply hard skills, you’re getting somebody who can probably get the job done because the skills that are required to do the job are probably gonna be different six months from now than they are today.
So when you hire for soft skills more than you hire for hard skills, that’s an important piece. I like grit and self-awareness are the most important things that I look for. And self-awareness is really hard to find , right?
[00:25:56] Michael Evans: , how do you even know if someone, [00:26:00] how are you aware of someone’s self-awareness? Especially in like Zoom world when we’re interviewing someone, especially a lot of authors are like finding contractors online and trying to sniff people out through a few emails.
[00:26:09] Michael Evans: How would you be able to detect someone’s self-awareness?
I think it’s good, how full of themselves are they? You could usually, that, you can usually tell that pretty quickly. I, we actually have a very strict hiring. Both at Creators Legal and the law firm that, you know, that I ran for many years. And I actually used a, it’s a method through a book that I’ve read and I’ve read a ton of them called the Best Team Wins.
And it’s a great book for hiring anybody. And whether that’s executives or people you know are gonna use the Pizza store because, he builds he uses that as an example, right? There’s, there is, there’s some self, some self-depreciating language, so to speak. When they talk, are they, are they overly full of themselves?
I’m a big fan of Daniel Pink. [00:27:00] Daniel Pink wrote the book Drive. He wrote the book. When the science of timing but my favorite book that he wrote is called To Sell as Human. And the best p everybody is a salesman these days, right? If you’re an author, you better be a salesperson, especially a self-published author, because if you think you’re just gonna stick your book on k d p with a nice cover and a good description and sell a bunch of ’em, you are sorely mistaken.
That doesn’t happen. There are so many, there’s so much competition in this. So you gotta go learn to sell. And a great salesperson is not what we think of as a salesperson being on the, the car lot, selling you a car and, using all the fancy words, but it’s somebody who gives the proper information.
The world has changed and it, it really, it’s about psychological movement, right? And when I’m hiring somebody,[00:28:00] I am not just looking for the hard skills. When people are hiring off of fiber, that’s all they’re getting. And I would hope or think that it’s probably very small transactional transactional things.
Please record this voiceover for me and you’re done. Please do whatever it is and you’re done. It, that’s not a long-term thing. That’s you’ve just gone in and you’ve chosen your double cheeseburger and your fries and you’re done. Hopefully the people do a good job, but it’s one simple transaction that.
when you’re hiring somebody long term you’ve got a lot more things to think about.
[00:28:41] Michael Evans: I think that’s incredible advice and really important people to hear, especially cuz I can’t even tell you how many authors I know now who have PAs and they’re personal assistants. It hasn’t gone well. It has not been a good relationship and you work with someone and pay them for months trying to mend it or make it work because when [00:29:00] you onboard someone, which is onboarding a PA in specific takes a lot of time to integrate someone into your processes.
[00:29:07] Michael Evans: Oh yeah. And then you realize that they’re not good. That’s, or at least good for you, then that. Whew. That’s a big one. And on this same conversation, so that’s trying to find the right person, but then for lack of better words, how do you make that deal? How do you actually make that relationship work in the form of a contract, whatever that thing would be to bring someone up?
Sure. That’s basically a, it’s a hiring contract. Here’s what I’m gonna say about contracts, right? Most people who sign a contract with another person or companies they don’t end up in court, right? They don’t end up, they just it is the, it’s the rules of the game.
That’s what a contract is about. I come to you and I say, Hey, I’d really love it if you joined our company and did marketing. And I say nothing more other than I’ll pay you a hundred dollars a week to do it. You supposed to be there 40 hours a week, you supposed to show up [00:30:00] somewhere. What are you actually doing for marketing?
What are your actual guideposts? The contract is really, especially in when you’re coming to creative stuff and doing collaborations, is really the rules of the game. It sets out before everybody starts, what is actually required, what are the expectations of the parties before it even gets started. And when you don’t have that in place, stuff always goes bad.
And there’s two sides to that too. One is the flexibility to it. Everybody knows that sure, things might change, et cetera. I will tell you that I hired somebody not too long ago, probably about a year ago, and we spent so much time on the details, like the intricate details of the job description of what they would be doing about halfway through.
I just thought, this is never gonna work, right? , this isn’t gonna work. And it [00:31:00] didn’t, and it didn’t last long. I let it go on for longer than it should have. I should have stopped it right during the contract part. Because when it, when you get down to that level of detail, it generally doesn’t work. But you gotta have the basics and you better have real expectations.
One party, it’s basically what are you gonna do? I’m going to sell you my car for a thousand dollars. And the other person comes and says, great, I’m going to buy your car for a thousand dollars. And they think they’re getting the late model Mercedes. And you really had an old broken down, 1972 Toyota in the backyard.
And when they show up to pick up the car, they say, I hope you brought your tow truck . Have that detail in there
[00:31:51] Michael Evans: No, that’s and that’s a good one. That analogy I think really fits because so often those expectations aren’t clear, and that’s what [00:32:00] makes it hard to actually end a relationship when it’s going poorly, because you don’t actually have the metrics defined when it’s going poorly.
[00:32:07] Michael Evans: And on this, what I’m curious about is an author’s first instinct when they wanna make a contract. In fact, even my first instinct is, first of all, that’s way too much work, so maybe I’m just not gonna do it. And second of all okay, maybe I have to do this, but. That sounds really expensive.
[00:32:24] Michael Evans: So talk to me about this. How can you have a contract that isn’t going to break the bank?
Basic contract stuff, obviously I started creators legal because I saw the need. Most people aren’t gonna pick up the phone and call a lawyer because they’re so expensive and most of those contracts are just not necessary, right.
To have. Really expensive contract. We star creators because we wanted artists and creatives and filmmakers and musicians to be able to have a place that they could go and not just get contracts really [00:33:00] inexpensively, but be walked through really quickly and have a place to storm and have a place to manage them.
And to be able to have that chain of title right there when you’ve got it right. Doing a children’s book using an animator somebody else to write, help me edit somebody else to design the cover, et cetera. It’s actually interesting, probably of all our contracts, the book illustrator agreement is in definitely in our top five.
We probably sell probably in the top five of book of contracts that we sell across the board of our 200 and something contracts. Book illustrator agreements are way up there. . Yeah, it’s interesting. And so it’s very inexpensive. Right now we’re at $20 a contractor, if you’re prolific, grab a, a hundred bucks for an entire year for everything.
We’ll change that stuff at some point. Really being in this beta version of Creators Legal has taught us a lot of what’s going on. We really it’s very interesting. In fact, we just started cuz we have [00:34:00] thousands of people in our system now, and so we we just put out a creator economy survey.
So we’re starting to get, we’re just starting to get the results back. We’re just starting, just came out the other day
[00:34:13] Michael Evans: Very interesting. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve personally used creators, legal, and really enjoyed the process in terms of Seamless. It took a lot of the stress out because you know that it’s important to do this thing. But especially for most authors, like me included, we’re not hiring someone full-time for a full-time salary for the next year.
[00:34:30] Michael Evans: Where it’s okay, like maybe you do get a lawyer and it’s fine to have this huge expense for the contract cuz you really wanna, whatever that situation is. But in this case it’s no, I’m only, this is a one-time job or maybe it’s recurring, but it’s really only like a hundred bucks a month.
[00:34:44] Michael Evans: So spending like hundreds of dollars upfront on a contract doesn’t economically make sense. And the time too, because the stress of being like, okay, I already barely have time. Why am I gonna spend five hours trying to get the contract right? Like that sounds bad. So I’ve really [00:35:00] appreciated your service and it’s why I appreciate you having your friendship and knowing about it now for over a year, which been really cool to see it grow and evolve.
[00:35:07] Michael Evans: And I’m curious for you what you see. with creators Legal, having that kind of maybe broader view of additional legal and or problems that you might think you’d be interested in solving for creators or that authors and creative people specifically have. I don’t know if there’s something else that you’re like thinking about with creators Legal.
I think about this stuff all day long. What do creators need? What I look at it from is trying to anticipate some of the stuff that’s coming out. And we designed ourselves for speed because this is a huge pain point with creators. One, they don’t know what they’re looking.
And so they’re heading to Google, trying to find whatever. They’re not gonna pick up a phone for a lawyer. You said, you’re gonna pay $1,200 for somebody for an entire year of work, hundred bucks a month to do very [00:36:00] specific things. Nobody’s looking to spend $1,500 worth a lawyer.
The average contract in America is $6,900 worth a lawyer, 6,900 from start to finish. The average.
He’s the dog center. That’s right. I know. The average the average lawyer in America is charging like three si, $375 an hour. That’s not somebody who specializes in any kind of creative work. You start getting into that stuff, you’re getting into the 507 50. , I was $700 an hour and that was the last time I did that stuff was like 10 years ago.
Excuse me, 10 years ago. A really good entertainment lawyer is gonna be 1500 bucks an hour. So 1200, oh, it’s let’s be around there. That’s why for us, what am I seeing? I’m seeing this need, that people need this stuff and they skip it because one, they don’t trust, what they’re finding on the internet and they don’t want to pick up the phone and spend that kind of money [00:37:00] too to go to a lawyer.
I see the need for this stuff growing more and more because the passion economy. Is about these general collaborations, and I think one of the things that we’ve seen over the last 20 years in the advent, we were talking even before, and you, Michael you and I talk all the time, right?
About various this various stuff. We’ve seen the evolution of technology to be able to, create, have, be able to author a book from home easily. You’re no longer on your electric typewriter, right? Your b m you’re you can create music straight from your from your computer. You could do so many things and don’t need to be in a big studio and the quality of this stuff, what kind of microphone are you using?
It’s the, one of the blues. Yeah, I have a professional grade Yeti sitting over [00:38:00] on my shelf. Right there. This I paid $14 for in Columbia
[00:38:05] Michael Evans: Wow. . Oh my gosh. Okay.
And my my podcast editor said Much better than the Yeti.
[00:38:13] Michael Evans: Wow. Wow
Yeah, okay. So it doesn’t even have a name on it, like off the shelf at the electronic store. By my gym down in Meine. And so it’s really funny, right? But the tools have come down in price so much that it allows us to be creative.
You’re using Riverside, right? We’re gonna plug all these different things, right? You’re using Riverside, you on the free or paid version. .
[00:38:45] Michael Evans: We’re on the paid version, I believe..
20 bucks a month.
[00:38:49] Michael Evans: I’m actually sharing it with someone where I’m, we’re paying like $70 for the year to access it.
[00:38:54] Michael Evans: Geez. Okay. Because we got an education plan and then we shared it with someone. Yeah. I’m like, sorry, [00:39:00] Riverside. Sorry,
I’m like 20 or 40 bucks a month for our stuff. Okay. Use descript
[00:39:05] Michael Evans: yeah, I pay $5 a month.
$5 a month. You bought let’s say you didn’t go out and buy the the blue ice ball. You you bought the $14 microphone from Columbia. That works better than the Blue Ice Ball..
[00:39:19] Michael Evans: This was like 45 and I bought it five years ago.
All right.
Well, 45 bucks. But that’s still you bought a five years ago. You I know you, you were working fast food, weren’t you?
[00:39:29] Michael Evans: I was for a bit. I was working like same pay rate it was Right. Cool towel.
Okay. All right. Okay. So that cost you a couple of days of work.
[00:39:39] Michael Evans: Costs me about six hours of work after taxes.
Okay. All right. Got it. Okay. The blue, this thing was still only 14 bucks I’ve got the ring light, which I’ve got so many different versions of lights. I’ve bought so many different things and at the end of the day, I always end up with a basic ring light. But that was $15 on Amazon.
[00:39:58] Michael Evans: That’s crazy. That’s crazy. And with [00:40:00] editing software, this is happening too. Like for authors who are not using software like Grammarly or Pro writing aid, like this is just editing software is free, Grammarly is free.
[00:40:10] Michael Evans: And then Pro Writing Aid, if you use it, the paid version that you can get like lifetime access to is $400 and a year is a hundred dollars or 120.
Grammarly’s free. Yes, you can get it right. You can get that stuff right. But the point of this is. Cameras are available, cheap microphones, software, all this stuff is so affordable, where, when I was in high school, when I was in college, this wasn’t cheap, right?
This was still, if you were gonna make an independent movie, you could make an independent movie on your iPhone. You and people have done it. Lots of people have done this stuff, right? It’s about the creative. The reason that this, that the passion economy, that the creator economy exists is [00:41:00] because of two things.
One is the cost of the equipment to create has dropped drastically. The other is that we have plenty of places to go distribute it without the need. For somebody in the middle to say, okay, you get to distribute traditional Hollywood traditional publishing. It’s all still there. Penguin Publishing didn’t go business as far as I, Simon and Schuster still on Fifth Avenue, right?
madison Avenue still exists. Holly Beverly Hills still exists with all the agencies,
[00:41:39] Michael Evans: Oh, they definitely do.
here’s the difference is you don’t necessarily need them. Dave Goggins, one of the highest selling authors out there right now. Self-published, right?
[00:41:52] Michael Evans: . Colleen Hoover, who is the bestselling fiction author, and pretty much I think the bestselling author in the world by a Wide margin last calendar [00:42:00] year, started off in self-publishing and then signed a deal with traditional and publisher.
[00:42:04] Michael Evans: But that was after years of self-publishing success.
Probably the only reason was to take some of the pressure off herself or to say, oh I just don’t wanna deal with this, with all these various things. I don’t think Dave Goggins I think he published through with Scribe the second his second book. He just had another book come out.
And I haven’t read the book yet, but can I met him just before? I met him just before Can Hurt me, came out and yeah, and he was at, he was speaking at the same conference I was speaking at, and he was really great, but nobody really knew him that well. I think he had been on Joe Rogan at that.
He has a great personality and he’s a tough guy and he’s, really interesting. So can hurt me, did extraordinarily well. And and he had plenty of he had lots of action for publishers and he just said, no, why am I gonna do this?
[00:42:59] Michael Evans: This brings me to [00:43:00] maybe a great way to wrap things up, which is utilizing these creative tools.
[00:43:06] Michael Evans: and these new platforms. And what would be your advice specifically to someone who’s getting started in fiction? And a lot of times in our podcast, it’s very common in this community to spend money on paid advertising to drive discovery. . But a lot of times we try and figure out ways you can create things to drive discovery of your content.
[00:43:24] Michael Evans: And I’m curious what your insight would be there to someone who, okay, needs to create,
You do whatever you can do. , if you’re, as I like to say, I’ve got a face made for radio, so podcast is perfect for me. If you could drive, if you could drive engagement, I don’t care where you’re driving engagement. Drive the engagement and if you have something good to say, if you have something interesting to say, if you have new take on something, it’s going to, it’s gonna take a foothold. It’s, it’ll be okay.
I forget it.
[00:43:57] Michael Evans: I really like that [00:44:00] mindset because oftentimes we’re always looking for the perfect platform, the killer strategy.
[00:44:04] Michael Evans: And you’re just saying do something that you like, that you’re good at the passion economy. And as long as you can engage people, that’s, there’s no magical, obviously there’s no magical formula.
Yeah. I don’t care where you are in your career. Everybody can benefit from reading Ryan Holiday’s book, the Perennial Seller. Everybody, I don’t care whether you’re a business owner, a filmmaker, a musician, an author he really breaks it down really well on not creating art that might sell for a week, but creating a following and a fan base and creating art that lasts for for hundreds of years.
And he breaks down the difference. Of what that’s about. Talks about Kevin Hart. Kevin Hart one of the biggest stars we’ve got, right? Was a comedian [00:45:00] for a long time and he would play anywhere. He would play any room, any size. And he did it 365 days a year for years before he broke through. And here’s what he did was he put a pen and paper on every single person’s chair and said, gimme your email address.
And by the time he got famous, he had some email list that was an insane number of people. And when he started getting the gigs, the film gigs, they said you’re gonna promote this right to your email list. He said, Nope, that’s extra
right at the end. Yeah, of course. because at the end of the day, the most valuable thing, any business owner, any author, any person owns is still the email list. Don’t forget about the sort of traditional me measures, right? It’s still the email list. I I only subscribe to one, one person’s content, pay extra paid content.
Name is [00:46:00] Peter Atia. He’s a longevity doctor and out of Texas. It’s very interesting stuff. And I subscribe. He has a podcast called The Drive, but he does quite a bit of writing as well. In fact, he’s got a longevity book that’s coming out soon. But when you look at this stuff from the standpoint of what sells, what is a perennial seller, I love this book.
The the Ryan Holliday’s book, and I’ve read all of his books. He’s one of my absolute favorite authors. , but Perennial seller stuck with me in a way that no other book did, that he wrote because it reminded us of things like the Zian symbols, right? The, that most bands, almost every band uses any professional drummer uses Zian symbols.
That company started during the Ottoman Empire. They made Gongs. , okay.
[00:46:52] Michael Evans: Oh my gosh, . Okay. And they’re still around.
Like this isn’t they’ve been around a hundred years, they’ve [00:47:00] been around since the Ottoman fucking empire, right? Like he, he talks about Iron Maiden, which is his favorite band. Iron Maiden has been selling albums forever and for decades.
and it’s something like maybe one of their songs has gotten any airplay on a radio.
Yeah, I learned about the Kevin Hart thing through, through that book. But the other thing is I know so many authors that just kick, they kick the shit out and without the struggle there it’s quantity over quality. Most people aren’t good enough to do that. I toiled on my book for two years rewriting every word, like thinking about it in ways that, is this the right word?
And maybe I tried too hard. But you [00:48:00] can’t. I think about something. And he talks about this. Jerry Seinfeld worked on one joke for seven years. It was two sentences, but he worked on it for seven years. What makes the difference between the people who are hacks, the people who simply are putting the stuff out, and the people who are artists?
If you’re gonna put it out, you better put out the best you can put out, and then you can talk about marketing and how to get people to go buy it.
[00:48:30] Michael Evans: . Yeah. No, I think that is tremendous advice. And it makes me want to, first of all, I’m very happy you plugged a book cuz put plugging books in this podcast is always welcome and it makes me wanna share a book about storytelling, which is called Wired for Story by Lisa Crom.
[00:48:45] Michael Evans: And it’s all about basically how stories work in our brain and why. There’s some key things that we can do as writers that it has nothing to do with being literary. It has to do with the core fundamentals of why we like to read and why [00:49:00] we like to experience stories. And if you can understand that, you can create a much, much better story.
[00:49:04] Michael Evans: But it’s not easy. And a lot of times, she cited a writer in there who rewrote something 17 times. It certainly limits where you hit your limit. But it’s good insight that you should be really creating something that ultimately turns someone into a fan rather than just flipping the pages.
There’s no question, but I’m gonna say 17 times. I don’t know if that’s, I worked, when I worked in Hollywood. I worked both at an agency and I worked at at a production company. I worked at one of the big agencies and I worked with some really amazing people. I’m gonna tell you, I don’t know that 17 times is a lot.
Yeah, I,
yeah, I, I can tell you like some of the greats who also write novels, who also write plays, who also write, a writing screen plays, maybe if they’re writing in television, one of the things is about television is you gotta kick that stuff out fast, right? Television’s about fast and and a lot of [00:50:00] ’em really like that.
Writers really like that because there’s a big difference between writing television and writing for film. And in these days, . You can go onto YouTube this afternoon. You can, you’re right there, right? You can tell a story, but at the end of the day, this is about getting the best work that you can do out to the public.
Anything less than the public is just gonna ignore it. And let’s face it, most work isn’t that great anyway. Even at their very best. Yeah, my, my uncle who was a very smart guy and very thoughtful, he was a doctor for many years, but very, very trained in the classics of just about everything.
Guy who had a 10,000 record jazz collection that was that was very sought after he passed away. Like everybody, ev, every jazz collector wanted a piece of that right in the Bay Area when he passed away. . But he would say to me, look, five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 [00:51:00] years from now, you probably won’t even remember the movie that won the best picture, cuz there’s really only about two or three movies that came out over a five year period that were memorable.
Yeah. So it takes a lot of work.
[00:51:13] Michael Evans: . You wanna be one of those memorable authors. That’s without a doubt. And that’s not always a thing that comes easy at all. But that’s what makes makes this beautiful. I love it. Eric, thank you so much for being here. in the link in the description, you can find creators legal if you’re interested in using it.
[00:51:30] Michael Evans: I’m very grateful that you came on today.
Thank you very much for having me.
[00:51:34] Michael Evans: And that was the episode. I hope y’all enjoyed it. It was not only what authors need to know about copyright, but a lot of the key things that we need to know as authors about the legal side of things. Eric was wonderful guests, very grateful that he came on, and we’re very grateful for y’all to listening.
[00:51:53] Michael Evans: We have some awesome episodes coming up with some really great guests. We’re getting into like spring now, which. weird, but we’re getting [00:52:00] close. At least when this is released, it’ll basically be really getting close springtime. So we’re really excited to hit the ground running with, not like the next season, but I feel like the next phase of subscriptions for authors.
[00:52:12] Michael Evans: We have some great guests coming up and we’d love to hear from you what episodes you’d like to hear us talk about. So feel free to reach out to us in email at contact ream dot inc. It’s in the description and also if you aren’t yet. A part of the ream wait list. You should join it because we’re launching to the public in May 7th.
[00:52:32] Michael Evans: I think this is the first time I’ve ever mentioned it in the podcast. This isn’t like the official public announcement of that, but since y’all listened to the end that’s your award we’re launching to the public on May 7th. We have two really big events that month. One of ’em I can’t really talk about yet.
[00:52:46] Michael Evans: The other one I guess I can talk about, but I’ll leave y’all in Spence. I’ll share that in one of the next few podcast episodes. It’ll be really fun. So May is a big month for us in subscriptions for authors. If you’re not familiar with Ream is a [00:53:00] subscription platform, bi fiction authors for fiction.
[00:53:02] Michael Evans: We already have hundreds of authors on the platform and we’re really excited to hopefully have you on one day soon so you can check out more about Reem in the link in the description. Otherwise, I hope y’all have an amazing rest of your day. I’m super thankful for you listening. Super grateful for all the support the podcast has had recently.
[00:53:21] Michael Evans: The best way you can support this podcast is share this message with a friend. Share the link to the podcast that you enjoyed with your friends. . We’re trying to create a movement in the publishing industry here. Publishing is changing, we all know that, but we have an opportunity as authors to create a future.
[00:53:36] Michael Evans: We have more power, we have more control over our businesses, and a greater ability to do more awesome things for our readers and prioritize our own wellness. If that doesn’t sound awesome, then well, it sounds awesome to me, which is why I’m sharing it. So I hope if y’all think it’s awesome that you wanna share and spread the word too, because that’s what we’re all about here at Subscriptions for authors.
[00:53:56] Michael Evans: Enough for me. Enough for me. I hope you have an amazing [00:54:00] rest of your day. I’ll be back soon. But in the meantime, don’t forget storytellers or the world.