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How to Legally Protect Your Book, Brand, and Author Business - BM487

 

What if the title you love, the story you’ve lived, or the brand you’re building could land you in legal trouble?

This week, attorney and author Cheri Andrews reveals what most writers miss about protecting their books and businesses. From book titles to memoir minefields, she breaks down the must-know legal moves every author should make before publishing.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

  • Why skipping copyright could cost you more than your book
  • The truth about titles—and what you can’t protect
  • Memoir red flags that could trigger lawsuits
  • When a quote crosses the line into copyright violation
  • How one missed step can destroy your brand

Protect your words. Own your work. Avoid expensive mistakes.

Listen now for the legal clarity every author needs.

Here's how to connect with Cheri:

Email

Website

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Download Cheri's free gift, "Safeguard Your Success"

TRANSCRIPT

 

Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas and tips from the masters. Every week I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. 

Today my special guest is CheriAndrews. She's an award-winning small business and trademark attorney. Cheri has helped hundreds of heart-centered small business owners get legally compliant and protected, providing them confidence and peace of mind. She's the best-selling author of Smooth Sailing, an essential guide to legally protecting your business. She's a sought-after speaker and the founder of the Wise Owl Academy. Her greatest joy is hanging out with her family and especially her grandkids.

Cheri, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the show and thank you for being this week's guest, expert and mentor.

Cheri Andrews [00:01:01]:
It's my pleasure to be here. Susan. Thank you so much for having me.

Susan Friedmann [00:01:04]:
So Cheri, I get asked over and over again, what about trademarking my title? What about copywriting my book? What should an author be concerned about? What should they be doing? And to basically protect themselves and their.

Cheri Andrews [00:01:24]:
Book, first and foremost, I would say they need to be filing the copyright registration for their book. Now, the copyright registration is different than filing a copy with the Library of Congress. Library of Congress is to get it in that collection of books. The copyright registration is what actually tells the US Copyright Office that you're claiming the rights to this book. And the copyright registration should be filed either right before you go to publish or right after you want to make sure it's within 90 days of publication to get all of the benefits of.

Susan Friedmann [00:02:05]:
Copyright registration and then trademarking. What about trademarking a title? Is that possible and should that be something that they consider?

Cheri Andrews [00:02:16]:
The short answer is most book titles are not eligible for copyright protection. If you are writing a single book, the title is not going to be eligible for copyright or trademark protection. The only time you need to worry about trademark for a book is if you are writing a series. Let's say, for example, if you're at all familiar with the children's books the Magic School Bus and there's multiples of the Magic School Bus in that series. The Magic School Bus has a trademark because that's how the book is branded. And that's the only time you would use trademark for a book because trademark is all about branding and so it's about the business side of things.

Susan Friedmann [00:03:04]:
When I wrote my book Riches and Niches, I created a word that nichepreneur, that is somebody who specializes in finding a niche market to promote themselves. I actually Trademarked that name because it was a unique name. What are your thoughts on that? Was that the right thing to do?

Cheri Andrews [00:03:26]:
The question for me would be, are you using that as part of your branding? Are you known for that word nichepreneur? If you're actually, let's say, going to offer courses or classes, or you're going to sell merchandise with that name, that would be one reason to trademark it. But if you're not using it as part of your business, if it's not part of your branding, then the trademark doesn't really protect anything, if that makes any sense, because there's not a business behind it that somebody's trying to steal clients away from.

Susan Friedmann [00:04:03]:
Now, what about the copyright page in the book? How far does that actually cover an author?

Cheri Andrews [00:04:12]:
The copyright page is one place where you put in the copyright legend, copyright, the year, the name, either the author or the business that's claiming the copyright. So it's one place where you claim your copyright, but it doesn't replace filing a copyright registration with the U.S. copyright Office. That page is also a great place to basically protect your assets by making sure that any disclaimers that you need are in there. For example, if you're writing a memoir, if it's 100% true to life, you can say that the people that have been mentioned in the book have given their permission to share these stories. Or if you've fictionalized it somewhat, you put in the disclaimer that the accounts are fictionalized and that any similarity to people real out in the world is a coincidence and not meant to match up with anyone in specific. That's one way to kind of COVID yourself in the memoir world. But the other thing that you can do for, like me, when I wrote my book, there's a huge legal disclaimer in there that, hey, this book is not legal advice.

Cheri Andrews [00:05:27]:
And if you want legal advice, you need to talk to your attorney. The book is meant to be educational. Anybody who's writing a book in the legal, financial, health, wellness worlds, that kind of disclaimer would be a really important thing to include on that page.

Susan Friedmann [00:05:44]:
Yes, and I've seen that, especially as you say somebody who does health and wellness and they're talking about something to educate, consult with your doctor before you do anything. I'm not a doctor, you know, I'm not a lawyer. Absolutely. Now, you mentioned memoir, and you and I were chit chatting a little bit before we went on the air about memoir. When you are wanting to mention somebody. Now, you talked about the idea of potentially fictionalizing that a little bit. Talk to us more about that. How can you cover yourself in a memoir, which is meant to be sort of autobiographical? Many times, if you want to name.

Cheri Andrews [00:06:28]:
Names and be true to specific events in your life, then the best bet is to get a release from the people who are being named in the book saying that they have given you their permission to share that story in that way. If you're the person receiving the release, of course you'd like to see what's being said about you and make sure that it doesn't paint you in a bad light. Otherwise you're probably not going to give permission. That's one way, and it depends on how you're approaching your book. The other way would be to somewhat fictionalize your story. You keep enough of the actual story to convey the lesson you're trying to talk about or convey the general gist of what came out of that particular event. But you fictionalize the name of the person. You might fictionalize the location where it happened.

Cheri Andrews [00:07:22]:
You'll leave in some actual details, but fictionalize some other ones so that when a person is reading this, they don't actually recognize the person that you're talking about. The person you're talking about may recognize themselves if they read the book or. But it's not at that point that you've defamed them by naming their name and saying all these horrible things they did.

Susan Friedmann [00:07:47]:
Now, what about quoting somebody? Do you have to get legal permission when you, let's say, quoting something Oprah might have said, do I have to get permission from her to use that quote?

Cheri Andrews [00:08:02]:
That question is under the legal doctrine of fair use. And what constitutes fair use? I liken it to just basically, how are you using it, and why are you using it, and how much of it are you using? If Oprah Winfrey wrote a book and you're quoting one sentence out of an entire 300 page book, as long as you give attribution, so you say, here's the quote, this is what she said by Oprah Winfrey, you don't have to do anything because that's considered fair use. You are using such a small piece of it and you're not claiming it to be your own, that it's okay. If, on the other hand, let's say, for example, you're quoting Maya Angelou and you're quoting an entire poem that she wrote, then you better go get permission for that. It's a matter of. There's a lot of legal tests that go into what constitutes fair use and what Doesn't. But the question really is, how much of a particular work are you using in the case of quotes?

Susan Friedmann [00:09:10]:
And that's important to know. Yes, I did have an author who was working with the stars, with celebrities. She was naming them. I said, you have got to get legal permission to use anything, because the last thing is that you want them to come back. And we live in a litigious society and you've got to cover your ass.

Cheri Andrews [00:09:33]:
Yes, you do. And the last thing you want is a defamation lawsuit or a claim that you stole somebody's name, likeness, whatever, without their permission, because the damages can be significant. And it could mean that if you've printed 1,000 copies of your book, you may have to destroy them all. That's a lot of wasted money.

Susan Friedmann [00:09:56]:
How about Cease and Desist? Does that fall under that same category for copyright infringement?

Cheri Andrews [00:10:04]:
Let's say you wrote your book and you had been doing a lot of research. You took some piece of your research and plopped it into your book without rewriting it in your own words. Maybe it wasn't intentional. Your book goes to publish, and then the owner of that research that you quoted comes back and says, you, you stole my stuff. You didn't give me credit for anything. You didn't name your source here. You put it in your book as if it's your own. I want you to cease and desist.

Cheri Andrews [00:10:38]:
And, well, that means you need to pull all your books and basically rewrite that part. And there can also be damages related to that because that's copyright infringement.

Susan Friedmann [00:10:49]:
I had an interesting situation many, many years ago when I was renaming my company, I was in the trade show business. I called myself Trade Show Success. I got a letter Cease and Desist, because there was a magazine out there called Trade Show Success, which for some reason I had totally overlooked everything that I had produced with that name. Obviously, I had to destroy. It was the only situation so far that I've had, which it's sort of scary. And it was my own fault. I hadn't done the research to find out is anybody using that. I just thought, oh, this is cool.

Susan Friedmann [00:11:30]:
That's what I do. I help people be successful at trade shows.

Cheri Andrews [00:11:33]:
And that particular cease and desist letter would have been for trademark infringement rather than copyright. And that's about branding. So that magazine is branded as Trade Show Success. And basically you unwittingly took their trademark name. That's why you got the cease and desist. That one was trademark.

Susan Friedmann [00:11:57]:
Oh, and I took that very seriously, as you can imagine, you know, from.

Cheri Andrews [00:12:02]:
Experience that's not a pleasant letter to receive. Nor is it pleasant to realize that you've printed business cards, table covers, swag, whatever else, and you have to destroy all of it. You can't use any of it. And all of your advertising is now garbage. You got to start over. You need a new website, you need new social media handles everything because you were using somebody else's name.

Susan Friedmann [00:12:29]:
What are the risks of not protecting your book or your brand legally? What are authors opening themselves up to?

Cheri Andrews [00:12:39]:
I'm going to take them one at a time because they're two very different questions. With your book, the risk of not filing for copyright registration is that if someone decides to republish your book under their own name, whether they take a chapter or the entire book, they just go in and take it and start selling it like they wrote it. You want to stop them, so you send out a cease and desist letter and they go, I don't care, whatever. I'm not going to stop selling this book. Your next step would be to file a copyright infringement claim. But you cannot file a copyright infringement claim in federal court unless you have registered your Copyright with the U.S. copyright Office. If you did it proactively, which is what I suggest, either right before or right after you publish, you already have the copyright registration and you can go straight to court and stop them.

Cheri Andrews [00:13:37]:
If you haven't done that, you now need to go file the application to register your copyright and wait for the US Copyright Office to send that back to you before you can pursue a legal claim against them. Not only that, because you didn't do it proactively, you've now lost your rights to claim trouble, damages, and attorney's fees. Those can only be claimed when you file proactively, not reactively.

Susan Friedmann [00:14:06]:
However, if I brought this out, let's say in February of 2024 and in February of 2025, somebody takes my work. Do I have any claim that I was the original creator of this material?

Cheri Andrews [00:14:25]:
Did you file your copyright registration somewhere in there?

Susan Friedmann [00:14:30]:
No.

Cheri Andrews [00:14:30]:
Okay, then you're back to the scenario where I'm saying you need to file your copyright registration with the U.S. copyright Office before you can go after them. And if then let's say you did that and the U.S. copyright Office granted the application, then you're good to go. You can file a claim against the guy who's stealing your stuff, but if they stole your stuff and put it all under their name and then went and filed a copyright application before you, and it's the exact same words, I don't know, I've actually never been asked this question. I don't know whether the US Copyright Office would actually know that there's two works out there with the exact same information in it. I don't know if they do that kind of a search when they're proving these registrations or not, or if they're just looking at was the application filled out correctly. But when you get to court now, it's, they claim they wrote it first, you claim you wrote it first.

Cheri Andrews [00:15:37]:
How are you going to prove that you beat them to it. And you may have dated drafts on your computer that you could submit as evidence, but it's a lot harder. You've just made the whole process a lot harder and a lot more expensive for yourself.

Susan Friedmann [00:15:55]:
Even the date on the copyright page in the book, that doesn't stand for anything. Correct. I'm hearing you correctly.

Cheri Andrews [00:16:03]:
You've published this in 2024 and your book has a copyright legend that says 2024. If I'm stealing your book, there's nothing stopping me from putting a copyright legend in there that says 2023. It does stand for proof. And you're going to have proof of you put it up on Amazon, you started getting sales on certain dates, you're going to have that kind of proof that maybe will prove that they didn't because they won't have proof of sales prior. But like I said, you're making it so much harder for yourself because you didn't file the copyright proactively that creates that record that you wrote this book before you put it out in the world for somebody else to steal.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:51]:
Now, what about there are several books out there with the same title, however the subtitle is different. Are there problems with that? I mean, I've seen multiple books with the same title, let's say on Amazon.

Cheri Andrews [00:17:08]:
No, because as we talked a little bit ago, the title of your book is not subject to copyright or trademark protection unless it's part of a series. And in that case, you can get trademark protection. Now, this works for titles of books, titles of songs, titles of movies. None of them are subject to copyright protection. If they are a franchise or a series or something like that, they can get trademark protection for the name. But book titles, no, there's no protection for them.

Susan Friedmann [00:17:45]:
Now, let's talk about the process that I want to copyright my book. Do I have to send the whole book to the copyright office to get this done?

Cheri Andrews [00:17:55]:
What's the process if you file proactively and I mentioned right before you go to publish? So let's say, you know, that you're putting the book up on Amazon and you're opening sales up on January 15th. You have the completed manuscript, it's ready to go. You file your copyright registration with the U.S. copyright Office on January 1st. At that point, there are no printed copies of the book. So you just upload a PDF of the final manuscript to the US Copyright Office and you're good to go. You don't have to send in physical copies after the book is published. It used to be that if the book was published, you had to send in two physical copies of the book to the US Copyright Office.

Cheri Andrews [00:18:48]:
And it very, very much slowed down the process because they have to receive them there. You know, there's thousands of people every day sending books, then they've got them in a queue. They have to match them up to the application, make sure everything matches all this fun stuff. It took a lot, lot longer for copyright registrations to get through the US Copyright Office with requiring the physical copy of the book to be mailed in. My understanding now is that even within a short period of time after you've published, you can still just upload the PDF. Unless for some reason, and I don't know what the reasons are, I just know there's that unless the U.S. copyright Office can ask for physical copies, you'll actually see in the application. If they're not going to accept an uploaded copy, it will give you what's called a mailing slip for you to send in the physical copies.

Cheri Andrews [00:19:48]:
Or you may be able to upload the PDF, but then someone from the US Copyright Office will reach out to you afterwards and ask you to send in physical copies. That only happens if you're filing the registration after publication.

Susan Friedmann [00:20:03]:
And does it matter how long the book's been on the market? Let's say one of our listeners has published a book in 2022. Would they still be able to file for copyright?

Cheri Andrews [00:20:15]:
Yes, you can file for copyright at any time.

Susan Friedmann [00:20:18]:
Okay. There's no limitation of the time period when the book was actually published to when you can file for copyright.

Cheri Andrews [00:20:28]:
Correct.

Susan Friedmann [00:20:29]:
Okay. This is fascinating information. And I know I get asked all the time, should I get the copyright for my book? I always say get legal advice because I'm not a lawyer. And in fact, you know, we do an application to the Library of Congress, and I'm pleased you mentioned that earlier. And that is not a copyright. And I actually put that in my letter to the author that this is not a copyright. Filling out the application for the Library of Congress. Right that differentiation, Cheri, if our listeners wanted to find out more about you and especially your book, because I think every author should have a copy of that book that smooth sailing.

Susan Friedmann [00:21:14]:
How can they do that?

Cheri Andrews [00:21:16]:
The best place to find out everything you ever wanted to know about me is on my website. It's CheriAndrews.com that's C H E R IAndrews.com within my website, I have information about my legal services. I have information about the Wise Owl Academy. The information about my book, pretty much it's all there.

Susan Friedmann [00:21:37]:
Excellent. I never even asked you about the Wise Owl Academy. Can you tell us very briefly what that's about?

Cheri Andrews [00:21:43]:
Sure. The Wise Owl Academy is an online learning platform for small business owners to get legally educated and legally protected. It's basically a how you can work with me if you're not in my state and I can't do done for you. Legal services. It's a place where there's different modules for different topics. Each module usually has a video lesson and then if appropriate, there are downloads. Sometimes there are templates for different types of contracts or policies. So there's a whole lot of information.

Cheri Andrews [00:22:18]:
And we do a monthly masterclass in the Wise Owl Academy. It's a different topic every month of interest to small business owners. And by the way, authors are small business owners, whether they know it or not. Publishing and marketing a book is a business, but there's everything there, the kind of that they need on an ongoing basis to make sure that they are legally compliant, legally protected and positioned for success.

Susan Friedmann [00:22:45]:
Beautiful. Oh, that sounds invaluable. As you know, Cheri, we always ask our guests to leave a golden nugget for our listeners. What's yours?

Cheri Andrews [00:22:58]:
My golden nugget is the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make, including book authors is waiting to address the legal aspects of their business. Waiting has a lot of downsides. I liken it to baking chocolate chip cookies. If you have been baking your chocolate chip cookies, they've been in the oven at 350 degrees, they're warm and gooey and they smell great. And you know it's time to take them out. You're not going to reach into the oven with your bare hands and pull that cookie sheet out. You're going to use oven mitts because those oven mitts protect your hands well. In the same way, the legal assets that you need for your business protect your business from getting burned.

Cheri Andrews [00:23:40]:
And waiting just makes the problems worse. So if you haven't addressed the legal aspects of being an author, if you haven't addressed the legal aspects of being a small business owner, don't wait.

Susan Friedmann [00:23:53]:
I love that. What a great analogy. Fantastic. I'll keep that in mind next time you I'm baking chocolate chip cookies.

Cheri Andrews [00:24:02]:
There you go.

Susan Friedmann [00:24:03]:
It'll remind me of you. Well, thank you so much, listeners. You're going to have to listen to this over again maybe a few times to capture all those golden nuggets that Cheri was kind enough and generous enough to share with you. Thank you again. 

And by the way, listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected to, let's jump on a quick call to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales. Because you've invested a whole lot of time, money and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. Go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books.

Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.

Here's how to connect with Cheri:

Email

Website

LinkedIn
Facebook Business Page

Instagram

Download Cheri's free gift, "Safeguard Your Success"