Grizzly murders and Springsteen
Why it's expensive to use song lyrics in a book
A couple of weeks ago I signed off on the final page proofs of 138 Main Street, which means, terrifyingly, that the book is now pretty much set in stone.
For those unfamiliar with the publishing process, the page proofs (also called galleys) are the the manuscript typeset and laid out exactly as it will appear in the physical product, and it’s the author’s last chance to change anything.
At this stage, the publisher definitely does not want you to change anything major, like renaming a character or adding a new chapter, but it does let you catch the odd typo or clunky line, or suggest a different font for emails etc.
This is the [thinks] eleventh time I’ve done this, so I know the ropes by now. It took me back to the first time I had to go read the proofs for my first novel written as Mason Cross, The Killing Season (still available, and pretty good if I say so myself. You can buy it here, and because it earned out, I even get royalties).
One of the few advantages of not having a publishing deal back in the day was that it meant I could really take my time over my first novel and make as many changes and tweaks as I liked en route to what I amusingly believed was a final version.
I probably went through five or six drafts of Killing Season before it got to the point where I was happy to send it off to my agent. After that, it went through another couple of rewrites with him, and a further version with my editor. It was then read by a copyeditor and a proofreader. A bunch of my friends read it, and even some advance reviewers. All of these people fed back on the book and helped to point out the little mistakes (as well as the not-so-little ones). All in all, you'd expect that it would be polished within an inch of its life by the time it got to page proofs, but when I read them over, I still managed to find a couple of dozen new things I decided needed changing.
This ranged from minor continuity mistakes (such as referring to a 'cold October noon' which falls at the beginning of November) to minor formatting glitches to one embarrassing spelling mistake - on page 152 I found a reference to a 'grizzly' manner of death. Since there were definitely no bears involved, I was glad to have caught this one at the last moment.
One of the final changes was to remove a number of song lyrics. Another advantage of blasting out a publisher-less novel is the fact that you operate in a bubble of blissful ignorance of things like copyright law, and specifically how it gets complicated around song lyrics. Naively, I'd assumed you could quite reasonably include a line or two from a pop song in your book and it would be covered under fair use.
Not so. Quotations from song lyrics don't work quite the same way as literary quotations. For a start, nothing from the modern era (actually since 1923 or so, which is pretty much everything, pop-music-wise) is in the public domain. There is no fair use limit, so any part of the song other than the title is copyright. Which kind of sucks, since a songwriter could use a line from one of my books and it would be fine by me and by the law.
To add to the confusion, the rights may be held by more than one party (songwriter, dead songwriter's estate, publisher etc). There's an informative article on the whole thing here, summed up by the author's advice: Don't ever quote lines from pop songs.
My then-publisher flagged this up to me at the contract stage, and kindly offered to chase down the rights-holders to see how much it would cost to use the five or six song quotes I'd blithely tossed into The Killing Season. None of them were cheap.
So part of the process of finalising that book was to surgically remove these expensive little samples and instead try to allude to the songs without directly quoting. There was one Bruce Springsteen lyric, however, that I couldn't bear to lose: a line from the song 'Nebraska' from the album of the same name. I quoted it in the epigraph and I liked how it sets the tone for the book, so I decided that one was worth keeping. It worked out about the cost of an iPhone for two lines at the end of the song. Given the low-fi nature of that particular album, I've probably covered the production costs all by myself.
So the typos were fixed and the song lyrics were mostly been excised and the next time I saw The Killing Season, it was in a bookshop. I’m at that stage now with 138 Main (or 138 Main Street as it will be in the UK), and I can’t wait to pick up that hardcover and leaf through. It always comes as a pleasant surprise that a book exists entirely filled with stuff I made up.
And yeah, I cut some Springsteen lyrics from new one: the line about the dogs on Main Street, from ‘The Promised Land’.
Pre-order my new novel 138 Main here.
Reading
I’m giving a talk on writing a crime novel at the weekend, so I went back to the Governor for inspiration - Stephen King’s On Writing. This time I’m listening to the audiobook, which has the bonus of being narrated by Mr King.
Watching
How To Make A Killing was better than I expected, though I have to sheepishly confess I’ve somehow never seen the classic it’s based on: Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Writing
I’m editing book two, and filling in some of the connective tissue that makes the plot properly hang together. Next month I’ve got a slightly more fun job - location research in New York City.
Listening
My current writing music is Nicholas Britell’s score for season one of Andor, which is setting the mood nicely for menace. When the franchise was so inextricably associated with one composer (John Williams), it was a savvy idea to zag instead of zig with a more electronic score for this show. But let’s finish with the Boss instead…
See you in fourteen…