Own your words!

Did you know that it is not required anymore to #copyright your material and mark your book with a © symbol? However, it is still highly recommended to go ahead and take the quick steps to protect yourself and your precious literary work. This process may seem daunting, but it is in fact quite simple. I just completed this step, and I can quickly share with you how I went about copyrighting my manuscript.

I started by going to www.copyright.gov and clicking on ‘Registration’ and then ‘Register Your Work: Registration Portal’. From there, you can create an account and begin/submit your application. The application asks for the basic things like the title of your literary work, mailing address and contact info, nothing too crazy. It took no more than 10 minutes to complete. The total fee was $65 for me to submit electronically (see the site for costs as it can vary). I believe you can use good old fashioned snail mail, but that does take longer to process and comes with a higher registration fee. The final step was to upload my manuscript from a MS Word document, easy peasy. The site has current average turnaround times listed and since I electronically submitted mine, it should take around 1.5 months. I will be back to update on that once I receive my certificate!

Have you completed this step? If so, what site did you use and did you experience any issues along the way?