Market My Novel

Today's question comes from Ruth Lowry:

I would appreciate any feedback you can lend me on this subject. Your site is great.                          

Ruth-

First, let me commend you for reading the Terms of Service before you even got started. Many people don't bother, and later find themselves in a tough situation because of a tiny clause buried deep in the legalese.

Most blogging services will include a clause in them that says you give them the right to reproduce your materials so that they can put them into their blogging service. This simply means you give them the right to take the information and show it in their format. It does not mean that they take first North American Rights, or automatically own that content. You MUST give them permission to place your works on their system.

I pay for my blogging service through Typepad. I own all of my content, but Typepad has the right to reproduce it in their blog format so I can share it with others. When I publish the Market My Novel book, the excerpts I post here will be mine, not Typepad's, but Typepad will have my permission to show it.

Some services will include clauses that they want to be able to use your items in promotional materials. This is like the ads you see where Blogger or MySpace pulled profile photos or other information and put it into an online ad. Some allow you to opt out of this if you aren't interested – you just have to read carefully.

MySpace and Facebook have changed their terms of service in past years to take over content, but once users discovered what they were doing, the backlash forced them to change their terms back to the original – which is similar to what I describe above. I stopped using MySpace almost entirely after their change, and even though they changed it back, I never went back to it. It simply wasn't worth it to me.

The Blog Herald has a fantastic article on Terms of Service, and how they take our rights when we aren't looking.

Every TOS is different, so read them carefully. If you have questions about how the site uses your content, e-mail them to get more specifics. Check out the site's blogs or Help sections to see if you can find answers there. If you are not satisfied with what they say, move on until you find a program that works for you. Personally, I use Blogger, Typepad and am playing with WordPress.

I wish I could give you more concrete advice than "read carefully," but that's all we can do in the blogosphere. You should always check up on the TOS once a year to be sure it hasn't changed, or follow comment streams on Twitter, where vigilant net geeks are always sharing links to Terms of Service changes, and what you can do to stop them.

Which reminds me, it has been a bit since I've read Typepad's Terms of Service…

HOT TIP: Use a service like Copyscape (featured here at Market My Novel) to prevent your copy from being plagiarized.