From the moment you set your work down in permanent form, whether it be a recording, a scribble on a napkin, a photo on your cell phone, a file on your computer, or any other form, your work is protected by copyright law. This means that no-one can use your work without your permission (and you shouldn’t give permission randomly). This applies to any form of creative work, including arrangements, remixes, transcriptions, piano reductions, writing, drawing, photography, and too many more to list individually. Copyright does not apply to titles, short phrases or captions, Those may or may not be able to be protected by trademark, which is something different entirely.

You may have heard of the “poor man’s copyright,” which involved mailing a copy to yourself and leaving the envelope sealed. Unfortunately, that doesn’t provide you with any extra protection; that is an extra-legal means which is not generally recognized in a court of law, should you have a copyright violation of your work and your case goes that far. The copyright notice that you put on your works is there just to remind people; it does not provide any legal protection. (There was an older law that required a notice to maintain copyright; that was changed when the U.S. agreed to the 1989 Berne convention. Since that date, notices are optional.) The benefit to using the copyright notice is that a defendant cannot claim “innocent infringement,” that is, someone can’t claim that they didn’t know your work was copyrighted. Another benefit is that your name appears on your work, which means that someone can contact you in order to gain permission to use your work. (If you choose grant permission, make the person or organization requesting permission pay you something, even if it’s only the token one dollar amount. And get a receipt.)

A note about audio recordings: don’t use the © symbol. You need this symbol: Ⓟ. (Copy and paste this symbol all you like onto your computer; it is in the public domain.) This applies to containers of recordings: CDs, LPs, tapes, etc., but does not apply to computer sound files, only to physical objects.

In order to gain real legal protection for your work, you should register your works with the U.S. Office of Copyright. The fee for online registration is $35, which is quite reasonable to assure you the extra legal protection if you decide to produce creative work for publication. We provide copyright registration for you for a small fee (including copyrighting your work under a pseudonym) as an optional service, if you choose not to do it yourself.

Most writers out there don’t have stacks of cash available to them, and are stuck when it comes to being able to finally publish their work. In the hopes of telling them something useful, here’s our guide to publishing on a budget.

Your costs:

• Copyright registration (do-it-yourself, e-version): $35. Don’t rely on the “poor man’s copyright” of mailing a copy to yourself. That doesn’t provide any more legal protection than the date the file was created on your computer. Instead, save up the $35 somehow and do it the right way.
• ISBN: you can get this free if you’re a Canadian citizen, or free from Amazon or Smashwords (although they will be your publisher). You may be able get one from us and have the cachet of a small press for $35. (By the way, people can search for publishers on Amazon, so your book is more likely to be found if your publisher is anyone besides Amazon, simply because there’s another term to search.)
• Formatting: you can do it yourself, or hire someone who may or may not do it properly on an outsourcing site. Our fee varies but our minimum is $30 (this includes loading e-book versions into varied hardware devices to make sure it is formatted properly, or printing out print versions to check the formatting).

If you can scrape up a few dollars here and there, here’s the process:

1. Get a professional editor to edit your book. Don’t rely on friends or other authors, and don’t rely solely on Grammarly or spell check; do it right. If you have to pay an editor chapter by chapter, or set up a payment plan, or barter for it, this is absolutely the most important thing you can do to ensure your success. Editing is expensive, so plan ahead. Your book won’t be a success if it contains errors that could have been fixed by editing.
2. Register your copyright. You must have $35 to do this; this is the fee charged by the U.S. government and gives you the maximum legal protection against copyright infringement. It’s well worth the cost.
3. Format your book. You’ll have to choose among print and the various forms of e-books.
4. Acquire one ISBN, from someone, and publish the book in your desired format.
5. Wait until you’ve sold enough books to earn back your costs. Wait some more until you’ve earned another $65 or so, then use that to format and get an ISBN for a second format for your book.
6. Repeat step 4 until you’ve acquired formatting and ISBNs for softcover, hardcover, pdf, Kindle, and iTunes versions of your book (and audio, if you choose).
7. Save the $100 from your sales to start your next book. (Of course, you can skip a format for your book if you don’t think it’s useful; for example, it might not be worth getting a hardcover version for a 32-page book.)

By bootstrapping your book off the sales of one version, it will be easy to continue to add formats and new books. Your potential losses will be limited to the few dollars necessary to get that first book off the ground.