First--

 

As everybody seeks to get copyright laws revised, I have a suggestion that will warm the heart (and the cooking fire) of every writer on earth.

 

I recommend that regardless of how long a period of time a copyright extends, the first year that a publisher does not pay the writer at least $2000 in that year, the book should be considered effectively out of print, and the copyright should automatically revert to the writer. During all those years that the publisher is sitting on a book it's not making an effort to distribute, it's often the case that the writer could do other things with that book, even--in some cases--turn it over to PGLAF.

 

Someone asked me what my longest-surviving book has been. It is SCENE OF THE CRIME, from Writer's Digest Books, and it has been in print since 1992. The first printing sold out before the official release date, because of the Writer's Digest Book Club. After that, it remained viable, though the entire rest of the series it was part of died, as a result of three unexpected events: (1) A lot of police officers bought it on the grounds that it was more thorough and less boring than their official police science books; (2) The O. J. Simpson trial showed a lot of people what happens when a crime scene is worked by total idiots, and I was asked to comment on that fact on nationwide television; and (3) the CSI shows have been a success. My most recent royalty check, though, was pretty small, and I doubt it will make it through another year. It needs to be thoroughly revised and I'm not up to doing the work, and WD people don't want it revised anyway. They prefer to kill it.

 

It has earned me a total of about $18,000. I spent an entire calendar year working on it. Despite the fact that crime scene work had been my job for years, I was determined to be totally correct and up-to-date with my research. At times I had as many as 75 library and ILL books in my office; as I also slept in my office at that time, things got pretty crowded. The last year I worked for the telephone company I earned $30,000. Admittedly I would far rather write a good book than sell telephone systems to businesses, but since when did it become improper for people to have a job that they like rather than a job that they don't like?

 

I really loved my police work. I'd wake up in the morning and think, "Oh, darn, I can't go to work today." I was one of the best fingerprint examiners on earth. I could do stuff the FBI couldn't do. I was called in to help FBI agents, Secret Service agents, postal inspectors, Marine Corps CID, and various small-town police agencies. It gave me an incredible feeling of power when I had just made a nonsuspect ident--that is, identified a criminal by no clue at all except fingerprints made in a place only the criminal could have made them, by cold-searching the prints through all the fingerprint cards we had--but there's no way on God's green earth that I could do that work now. I also cannot possibly sell telephone systems to businesses, at which I was marginal at best, or teach students to learn how to write, at which I was fair to middling competent.

 

So I'm back where I started when I was seven years old. I can write. I can edit. I can wash the dishes if I can stay out of bed long enough to do it.

 

I apologize for recent outbursts on my part. I hope at least some of you can understand why they have occurred.

 

Now I am going to crawl back into the woodwork and resume anonymity.

 

Anne