Sheila's Guests and Reviews

I got two letters from the copyright office today, and I was really excited. Put them together with the one I got last weekend, and maybe all three of the copyrights I'd applied for might've come through. Sure enough, they were both copyright certificates. Success at last - I only applied last Christmas! But when I looked more closely, they were both for the same book. So now I have three copyright certificates, but only two copyrights. I checked online. The third book's still "pending," so I hope it unpends soon. Still, it's kind of exciting to start receiving them. I almost feel like an author.

Last year I self-published some books with Lulu. I found out there's a "mandatory deposit" requirement with the Library of Congress for anything with a copyright symbol. So I looked up everything I could find about copyrights, and decided the simplest and safest approach might be to officially file for each of the books and pay all the fees. So that's what I did. In December I filled in the online forms and paid my money. And in January I sent two "best copies" of each book to the Copyright Office. All in all, an expensive process--and a slow one. Yesterday I got two letters back at last! Yes, it is midway through May. Still, two out of three's not bad, I thought. But the letters weren't exactly what I was hoping for... "We recently received your copyright claim," they said, "...after it had been irradiated..."--a Postal Service precaution instituted after the anthrax scare in 2001. Unfortunately "The irradiation level is str...