Use Quotes in your Book

How to Get Permission to Quote Someone in Your Book

Nov 10, 2006 Kimberly Dawn Wells

Learn the answers to your questions, such as, "How do I get permission to quote someone in a book?" or "What do the copyright laws say about quoting someone?"

Note: the following information was collected by posting many questions on forums for small publishers; in many cases it represents opinions and should not be taken as competent legal advice.

As a compiler of a book of quotations, I sometimes get questions like, “How do I get permission to quote someone in a book?” or “What do the copyright laws say about quoting someone?”

Here are a few things I learned while researching the subject for myself.

To start, if you want to quote someone, you need to get permission from the author or publisher. Consider it to be a necessary step in writing your book.

How do you go about doing it? I sometimes had success with sending the author/publisher a faxed agreement and having them fax back a signed copy. Other times they preferred to just send a quick email saying it’s ok, as long as I agreed to provide a “by-line” in the back of the book.

Let me say this: it is hard getting “permissions”. If you only have 1 or 2 to go after, it isn’t too tough. But in my case, with a book of quotes, wow…it was difficult.

Copyright law in this area is called “Fair Use”. One section of Fair Use says that you might be able to copy someone without permission if it’s for educational purposes instead of commercial.

At one point, I had heard that if an author passed away more than 50 years ago, their work would *probably* be in the public domain. Now, this is not 100% fool-proof. See the end of this article for some clarification as to what falls under public domain.

In my case, at a late stage in the publishing process, I decided to re-compile my whole book using quotes from people all dead over 50 years. This was a bummer, since I had my heart set on a few really good quotations. Why did I re-compile the whole book? Because it just became way too hard to track down so many “live” authors.

Some people gave me permission to quote them, but others flat-out said “NO!”

Before you can ask for permission to quote someone, first you need to find out who they are! How do you find out when they lived? When did they pass away? Google is great for this…especially if you type their names in quotes: ex. “John Doe”.

If you have a lot of people to track down, there are services that can do it…but I never found anyone who offered such a service. I called a few BIG publishers who said they have small departments that do this job. It’s tricky, so they themselves like to stick to long-dead people to quote.

Apparently, a lot of people do quote other people without permission. Will the copyright owners find out? Will they care? Will they be honored to be included in your work? Will they look at it as promotion or damage?

What if you can’t locate the owner and you really “need” to use that quote? When/if the copyright owners find out, will they take legal action against you for a small quote? And, what if you provide a generous “by-line” in the “Resources” section at the back of your book? Under Fair Use laws, they have to show that your quote caused them financial damage. If it appears to

have actually helped them, by referring people to their book/company/service/website, is that damaging? You decide.

Also, it appears that the courts will take into consideration how big your quote is in relation to the work as a whole. If it’s a small quote in a big book, some people say you’re more safe.

If you can’t get permission, maybe you can find another similar quote, or perhaps you could reproduce/re-write the idea into your own words…without blatantly plagiarizing. Your last line

of defense would be writers/publishers insurance…which can or can’t be expensive. Shop around. Spannet.org has some specials if you join their association.

Also, before you start asking for permission to quote someone, it would be good to know what works are considered public domain, so take the following into consideration:

1) Works published in the U.S. before 1923 are considered public domain.

2) Works created after 1989 are protected for 70 years after the creator's death.

3) Works published in the U.S. between 1923 and 1989 are also protected, as long as the copyrights were registered/renewed.

As one last thing to think about: please don’t take my words as “Gospel” or competent legal advice. Check out publaw.com and ivanhoffman.com for some very good information on copyright law.

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Shawn Bremner is the compilor of the quote book: “Aspire to Something Higher: A

Pocket Book of Inspired Thoughts”. See www.happypublishing.com

Make sure to check out the list of Inspirational Quotations while there.

The copyright of the article Use Quotes in your Book in Editing is owned by Kimberly Dawn Wells. Permission to republish Use Quotes in your Book in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.