The poet Horace bragged that he built “a monument more lasting than bronze.” He was speaking of his writing, of course. But not all of his poems have survived two thousand years to reach us. Granted, he is luckier than most ancients in this respect, but maybe he should have considered etching his poems on sheets of literal bronze instead of papyrus. Or maybe he should have just found a better literary executor.
Thanks to the profusion of Halloween decorations in town, and the wraithlike fog that awaits me every morning when I let the dog out, death is much on my mind.
Earlier this year, I heard a podcast in which a young man confessed to being morbidly fascinated with death.
Michael La Ronn told his interviewer that his grandfather had left his estate so tidily wrapped up that Michael was inspired to do the same.
But that is tricky, you see, because Mr. La Ronn is a writer—science fiction and fantasy under his real name, and nonfiction for writers under the name M.L. Ronn—which these days means that his copyrights will live seventy years beyond his death.
It’s easy to settle an estate that consists of personal property, real estate, family heirlooms, cash, vehicles, and investments. It is far more complicated to properly bequeath and entrust your literary output to your heirs. Frankly, it is burden that will last decades.
Just what was he supposed to do?
As I listened to this, I thought:
Tell me about it, brother!
Seventy years is a long time. Just for starters, let’s say little writer you keels over today, immediately after reading this post. Your very first copyright will enter public domain in the year 2094. That’s so far in the future that your siblings or current literary agent, if you have one, will have also ceased to exist.
No problem, say you. That means my copyrights must necessarily be entrusted to someone far younger than my contemporaries. Great, let’s go with that for a second. Let’s say you and your spouse had kids at age 30, the same year you started writing. If you die at 80 years old, your 50-year-old child will be 120 years old when your very first copyright enters the public domain.
Such a revelator, math! Already it’s easy to see that by making the very selfish decision to drop dead, you must now entrust your precious copyrights to a succession of humans, who now include your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In a sense, by trusting family, you are placing bets that they will not a) die young, or b) turn out to be a gaggle of glue-sniffing squish-heads. Furthermore, you are trusting that this lineage will have the publishing acumen when the time comes to see that your work a) stays in print, and b) is exploited properly. (In these cases, the verb
exploited is a good thing.)
What if your progeny don’t care about writing—yours or anyone’s? Who can blame them? You know how some writers say that they “just want to write”? What if your successors
just want to sell tires, clean teeth, do taxes, or a million other things sane people do for a living? Why should they be saddled with intellectual property that has no meaning for them?
I have now presided over or witnessed the disposition of five family estates. What sticks in my mind is how much pressure executors get—from the state, from lawyers, from siblings—to wrap this thing up already. Everyone wants the decedent’s possessions sold, donated, dumped, disappeared, and converted to cash. No one likes paying for storage facilities longer than they have to. Everyone has jobs and families to get back to.
The thought that some loved one or dear friend will have the time or energy to page through every single hard-copy or digital document to catalog your writing stretches the meaning of love—but that is exactly what a devoted literary executor must do.
Or—call me crazy—what if you don’t have kids?
The great wit of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker, married three times but had no children. A supporter of Civil Rights, she left her copyrights to Martin Luther King, Jr., with the proviso that should he predecease her the copyrights would go to the NAACP. He was assassinated shortly after her death. Open a book by Dorothy Parker today and the NAACP is listed on the copyright page.
That’s one way to do it. You leave your estate to a non-human entity—a corporation or org—that is likely to survive to the public domain stage. We’ve all heard of artists—usually musicians—who sell their catalogs to some entity that will profit from those rights into perpetuity. I’m sure that’s easy if you have an IP catalog that’s worth bajillions.
Some writers leave their copyrights outright to their literary agents, which always struck me as dumb. At least name an heir or charity that the agent, attorney, or literary executor must send royalties to while those people or entities you care about still live/exist, with some provision if/when they don’t.
Saying “my agent will take care of it” often feels to me like a cop-out, the “I-just-can’t-bear-to-think-of-this-crap” default decision. The agent option is nice if you have an agent now. But it’s not as if agents and agencies don’t die too.
Some literary agencies operate “heritage” departments that represent the estates of dead authors. Heck, some agencies manage the estates of dead
agencies. For fun, look at this agency’s website page and see
how many of their deceased authors you know.
But what if you are a mid-list writer with modest sales, zero agent, and a large output? There are no easy answers, which is not something living writers like to hear. A number of books discuss this dilemma, and offer concrete suggestions.
Michael La Ronn, the young writer I mentioned above, wrote two such books, one for writers, and another for their heirs.
M.L. Buchman, who some of you will recognize from the SMFS boards, wrote a great book on estates that recommends authors write a letter to their heirs.
In a podcast interview with Jo Penn back in 2017, he said that he was inspired when his daughter confessed that she dreaded him dying and leaving her with his books because she had no idea what he did and what she was supposed to do with them.
Seth Davis is the stepson and literary executor of the great short story writer
Avram Davidson, who died in 1993 at age 70. When he had time during the Covid pandemic, Mr. Davis, who is an attorney, crept up to a family attic and began paging through mountains of Davidson’s published and unpublished manuscripts. He realized that he was sitting on a treasure trove of material. And if it was ever going to see the light of day—and live anew—that he would have to do the heavy lifting.
Slowly, he re-released Avram’s work in new editions as ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks. (He indie-published the new editions.) Next, he began sharing the stories via a delightful podcast,
The Avram Davidson Universe. He did so on the hope that someone beyond Avram’s fans would notice and want to produce one or all of the stories as a movie or TV show.
I asked Mr. Davis if he could offer any advice to us. Here’s what he said:
“My first piece of advice to authors is: Get incredibly organized. Imagine having a beautiful spreadsheet with all your stories, when they were copyrighted, when they expire, and what’s under contract. In my own experience, I had to turn a very disorganized estate into an organized one, and trust me, doing it in advance is a lifesaver. Have all the agreements in one place. Spend time going over it with your heirs.
“For heirs, it’s similar: If you know you’re going to be the one inheriting this literary legacy, start organizing things while the author is still around. And if you’re not sure, then just enjoy the process, keep their legacy alive, and don’t put too much pressure on yourself. And of course, reach out to others in similar situations for advice. Don’t throw anything away for a few years and take your time going through the estate. You can’t rush it. A little bit at a time.”
Sensible advice. See that part where he says “keep their legacy alive”? The four things he did—ebooks, paperbacks, audiobooks, the podcast—are time-consuming endeavors even for those who are comfortable with traditional or self-publishing. To a non-publishing civilian who has no interest in publishing, audio production, or podcasting, they might well seem impossible.
If such an heir receives an email out of the blue from an editor assembling a future anthology, offering a token payment and a straight-forward, reasonable contract, how will they react? Will they say, “Sure, let’s get this story out in the world again!” Or will they demand a payment so exorbitant that it ensures no one will ever see your work again?
I heard of such things when I worked with editors at Scholastic. The literary classroom magazines were always approaching writer estates for reprint rights, specifically for plays, short stories, and poems suitable for kids. They often ran into heirs who had no idea what they were asking for. These descendants dreaded hiring a lawyer to review the reprint contract, and so they declined the offer or quoted absurd payments that guaranteed that they would never hear from that particular editor ever again. Equally sad were the times those editors could not locate an heir, period.
In that beautiful spreadsheet Mr. Davis suggested, it would help if you also listed…
- blurbs that the story or book might have received
- relevant reviews
- rights that were licensed in your lifetime
- publishing houses you worked with
- names of editors you worked with
- scans of royalty statements
- scans of copyright registration certificates
- scans of contracts (foreign and domestic)
- accounts (logins/passwords) at online retailers/distributors used to self-pub your books and stories
- the bank account numbers where those royalties are wired or direct-deposited
You are creating, in other words, a story bible of the lives of each of your works, so someone who knows little about your catalog can give it the best chance of success in your afterlife. If you this correctly, your spreadsheet and its attendant pages have now grown into a chubby file of digital data. A hard-copy backup with original docs and copies of the original magazines, anthologies, or books would be nice too.
When you get the facts assembled, do what Mr. Buchman suggests and draft that letter.
Considering what has transpired recently in the world of literary legacies, I don’t think it’s crazy to tell your heirs…
- How do you feel about them publishing work of yours that was not published in your lifetime, whether intentionally or not?
- How do you feel about extending the life of your series characters after your death?
- Would you consent to them hiring ghostwriters to write in your world(s)?
- Would you consent to them editing your work to remove material that future enlightened citizens of our fair republic, ha, might find objectionable?
- How do you feel about them publishing your letters, journals, diaries? (Yeah, I know most of us reading this are not Joan Didion, William Faulkner, or Harper Lee, but it doesn’t hurt to get your directives in writing.)
- Can you offer any advice for how welcoming they should be to anthology requests?
- What advice can you offer if a small press wants to reissue all or some of your books?
- What are your thoughts on translations? Are there countries you would prefer not be published in?
- Do you object to your as-yet-unborn, great-great-teenaged nephew writing books in your series using the AI chip embedded in his brain that all the cool kids, circa 2095, use to help them think?
Hate AI? Don’t be such a stick in the mud, dirt-napper you! Naturally, when your stories enter the public domain, they will absolutely be hoovered into the maw of AI, if they haven’t already. You have no choice about that. By then, what happens to your words will be beyond the control of your heirs.
But in the meantime, you have seventy lovely years for a shot at the big time. In the 2017 interview I heard, Mr. Buchman reminded us that
Lucia Berlin, who was a largely unknown short story writer in her lifetime, hit the
New York Times Bestseller List twice, both times more than a decade after her death. And Mr. Buchman noted that if you ever read the novels that followed the creepy hit,
Flowers in the Attic, you probably did so after V.C. Andrews quit the stage. The ghostwriter brought in to finish her last two novels has gone on to write many more V.C. books than V.C. herself ever wrote.
I am inspired personally by the tale of the sickly, acid-dropping mid-list writer whose work was mostly out of print toward the end of his life. When he still walked among the living, a movie studio acquired the rights to one of his novellas. He got to see the first few rounds of scripts—and hated them. Then the production invited him to view scenes they had shot using a revised script. He bitched all the way to the studio in the limo they sent for him. And bitched some more when they showed him around the prop shop.
Then the footage started rolling, and he sank in his seat. What he saw left the writer awestruck. He asked them to run the footage again.
It’s like they got inside my head, he declared later. In 1982, a few months before the movie release, he suffered two strokes and died at age 53.
The movie was Blade Runner, and at least a dozen of Philip K. Dick’s stories have since been filmed, thanks to the careful stewardship of his three children via a family literary trust. They are far from running out of material. PDK wrote 44 books, and more than 120 stories.
In short, dying is a thing that happens to people, some of whom are writers. It’s sad, sure, but not as sad as leaving an orphaned estate.
If you are undead, feel free to ignore the foregoing. Happy Halloween.
* * *
The books I mentioned, alphabetical by author. The Buchman and Ronn books are small enough to tuck into your estate documents as you plan.
See you in three weeks—I hope!
Joe
