Trust Issues

* Should I register my manuscript for copyright before I send it out to publishers, to keep them from stealing my ideas?

* I know you only accept digital submissions. However, I can only send this by snail mail because I am concerned over internet privacy.

As creative people, we’re all cautioned to protect our ideas because there are people out there who want to copy them or steal them. But at some point, if you want to get published, you have to get past that fear and send your creation out into the world. If you can’t bring yourself to share your idea with a publisher (or, worse, with the public once it’s published!), you’ll never have a chance.

Publishing is a business and publishers are professionals. If they like your manuscript, they’re not going to steal it. They’re going to sign it.

Publishers want to promote their professionalism and have the best reputation they can, so that authors and agents feel comfortable and encouraged to submit their proposals. A publisher that no one wants to submit work to, doesn’t publish for long.

If you don’t feel that you can trust any publisher or agent anywhere with your query, you’re not at a point where you’re ready to get into a business partnership with one.

Moira Allen over on Writing World breaks the issue down with the dastardly use of logic. This is a must-read. Not only will it put your fears to rest, it’ll make you ashamed of thinking them in the first place.

So, if it’s such a myth, where does it come from?

Digging a little deeper, I’ve found that the frequency of idea theft appears to be higher with short, non-fiction submissions, in venues where authors are asked to pitch an article or a book they haven’t written yet. Certainly, it’s easier to imagine a publication receiving a neat little package with a topic and a list of references, then handing those sources off to someone else and getting an article with quick turnaround.

But even the sites that report on the frequency of pitch theft state that if an article is already written (as your manuscript should always be, before you start querying!) “chances are they’re not going to hire someone else to rewrite it.”

Some tips, to help you sleep at night:

* Do your research and submit only to reputable publishers/agents/editors. There are plenty of resources (like Preditors and Editors) to help you separate the real publishing entities from the scams, and use your own judgment, too. Does the publisher have a name you know? Have you read any of their books? What comes up if you try to search for them online?

* Ensure that what you submit is completed, to make it more recognizably yours. Frank Wilson, Editor-in-Chief at O’Reilly (in an excellent post that applies to fiction as well as non-fiction), says, “There is little copyright protection of ideas, and it is often difficult to prove that you had an idea that we hadn’t already thought of ourselves or heard about from someone else. Copyright law likes to protect written work. If the proposal you send us is complex and detailed and includes an overall description of the concept, an outline, and some indication of your qualifications, however, your ability (and a court’s) to recognize your idea in any finished work increases.”

* Recognize the difference between theft and inspiration. Ideas aren’t unique. It’s what’s done with the idea that makes it something special. Other writers are likely inspired by the same sources and events which inspire you. If “two people fall madly in love but circumstances keep them from being together” were a copyrightable idea, our current field of literature would probably be a heck of a lot narrower than it is! That doesn’t mean that all those stories copied or stole from each other. Similarly, another story may be similar to yours, or yours may be similar to it, just because it’s grown, completely independently, from the same kind of seed. Asimov himself said, (here quoted in an article on io9 about science fiction’s greatest stolen ideas,) “It’d be different if I used the details of his plot and worked up a story that was so like his that nobody could fail to see it – that’s plagiarism. But just to use the idea and build your own plot or story about it – why, we do that all the time.”

Tagged as: idea-theft, publishing, submissions