What the Copyright Office taught us about story collections

When Barking at Dogs went to print, we did the responsible thing and filed to register its copyright. We chose the simpler, cheaper online form and got back to the business of launching a book.

Some time later the application came back refused. Nothing was wrong with the book. We had used the wrong form, because in the eyes of the US Copyright Office, Barking at Dogs isn’t quite one work. It’s a collective work, and collective works can’t go through the Single Application.

We’d have liked to know that before we filed, so here’s what we learned, in case you’re about to publish a collection of your own. A quick note first: we’re a publisher, and none of this is legal advice. The Copyright Office’s own circulars are the place to check the details, and we’ve pointed to them at the end.

The form that looked right

The Copyright Office offers two main online routes. The Single Application is the simpler one. It’s meant for one work, made by one author who owns all the rights, and not made for hire. At the time of writing it costs $45. The Standard Application covers everything else and costs $65.

On paper, Leon fits the Single Application perfectly. He wrote every word, he owns every word, and nobody hired him to do it. The trouble is the phrase “one work.” The Office spells out that collective works aren’t eligible, and it says plainly that it will refuse a claim filed on the Single Application by mistake. The fee doesn’t come back either, so the saving we were after turned into a cost.

Why a book of linked stories counts as a collection

Barking at Dogs is a memoir told in stories. They share a narrator and a cast of recurring friends, and we’ve always thought of it as one book. But each story stands on its own with its own title, and several carry their own subtitles too. Read them in any order and they still work.

That’s what makes it a collective work. When separate, independent pieces are gathered into one volume, the Copyright Office treats the result as a collective work and registers it as one work. A novel is different, because its chapters don’t stand alone. Story collections and essay collections almost always land on the collective side of the line, even when the pieces are closely linked.

What we’re doing instead

We’re refiling on the Standard Application and identifying the book as a collective work. When the same person wrote all the pieces and owns all of it, one registration can cover the collection as a whole along with the text of each story, provided the stories haven’t been published or registered separately before. Circular 34 sets out the full conditions.

The application also lets you list the titles of the individual pieces. It’s worth the few extra minutes, because it means someone searching the public record for “Matjiesfontein” or “Vooma” can actually find them.

If any of your stories ran somewhere else first, in a literary journal or an anthology, flag them. A new registration only covers material that hasn’t been published before, so previously published pieces are excluded from the claim and would need registering on their own.

What we’d tell another small press

Read your table of contents before you pick a form. If it looks like a list of separate pieces, go straight to the Standard Application.

The $20 difference isn’t worth it. A refused Single Application costs you the fee and months of waiting, and you end up paying for the Standard Application anyway.

Register soon after publication. In the US, registering within three months of publication protects your right to claim statutory damages and attorney’s fees if someone copies the work. You also need a registration before you can sue at all.

Keep a simple record of where each piece first appeared. You’ll need it for the application, and it’s a nuisance to reconstruct later.

A gentler kind of bureaucracy

Plenty of the stories in Barking at Dogs involve dodging the authorities of a country that made very little sense. Our brush with the Copyright Office was far gentler, and to be fair, it made perfect sense once we read the rules. If you’re putting out a collection of your own, we hope this saves you a fee and a few months.

Useful reading: Circular 11 (Using the Single Application) and Circular 34 (Multiple Works), both free at copyright.gov.