Notes from the desk of the editor are offered in the interests of personal posterity and transparency for writers and other potential editors who wish to learn from my experience.
the editor
Off the bat, I need you to know (if it weren’t already obvious enough) that I’m not a lawyer and am not giving you legal advice. I’m sharing my experience.
I got an email today from the Copyright Office identifying a point of confusion in my application to claim the copyright for Dread Mondays (which released 10/24/2025).
Without fanfare, I want to share that note with you and follow it up with explanations of
(a) my immediate confusion and
(b) my solutions, as well as
(c) a few clutch lessons you might take from my experience and errors.
I’m also going to go through some of the changes I’m making to my own contracts to ensure I’m not overpromising or underpromising anything to my contributing authors. This sounds boring, and maybe it is… but it’s crucial for all of us authors and anthologists to get right. So… learn from my experience, please!
Here’s the email from the Copyright Office:
[… stuff about case ID / thread ID numbers …]
I am examining the copyright application for “Dread Mondays: A Whisper House Press Horror Anthology,” which appears to be your compilation of individual stories along with some text you wrote as editor of the compilation. It also appears that Whispering House Press employed, hired, or specially commissioned you to write text and compile the individual stories that form this work for-hire.
A work made for hire is either (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment, or (2) one of several specific types of works specially ordered or commissioned pursuant to a signed written contract where the parties agree that the work is a work made for hire. When a work is made for hire, the employer or commissioning party is the author and owner of the copyright in the work.
The Office has developed a questionnaire that may be useful to applicants in determining whether a particular work fits within the statutory definition of a work made for hire. For your convenience, I have attached information on works made for hire to this email. (U.S. Copyright Office Circular 30 is available at https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf, and Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices 506 (3d ed. 2021) is available at https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap500/ch500-identifying-works.pdf)
Please determine whether you wrote text and compiled stories for hire as defined above, in which case Whispering House press should be named as the sole author and claimant of this work.
Additionally, please confirm that the claimant intends to register ONLY your new text and compilation of stories for-hire, but not the contributors’ text, and allow me to exclude “text of individual stories.”
If circumstances are otherwise, please explain. Once the Copyright Office receives your reply, I will resume our examination.
Regards,
So. What to do?
My challenge here is that I have fundamentally misunderstood copyright law, and I didn’t pay a lawyer a few hundred dollars to do this application for me. But it’s okay—the system, slow though it may be, allows me to correct my errors and get it right.
My misunderstandings:
(1) I thought I was copyrighting the whole book. And in a sense, I am, but I’m not copyright all its contents.
To be clear: I can’t copyright the stories within the book, and under contracts signed with my authors (and my own understanding), I didn’t buy the rights to do so.
What I am copyrighting is the complete book as an arrangement and coordination of those stories in a single volume along with my intro/afterward notes. I’m copyrighting the edition of these stories arranged as I’ve designed them. I’m copyrighting my contribution, that is, not those of the authors. They retain their own rights (and that means, by extension, they have to protect their own copyrights).
(2) This is not a “work made for hire” because of the way my company is arranged. Whisper House Press is not an LLC or another kind of legal entity distinct from me. I am it, and it is me. I’m the sole proprietor in a sole proprietorship. So it’s me, not Whisper House Press (a separate legal entity that doesn’t exist) claiming the copyrights I’m claiming.
If these stories were works made for hire, I’d own the copyright forever and authors would not be able to claim copyright over their own stories.
A few key takeaways for you, perhaps (again with the disclaimer that I’m no lawyer):
(1) If you’re an author, be aware that your anthologist is not claiming or protecting the copyright to your story’s words. We can’t take that on (and you don’t want us to own the rights to your story in perpetuity, hence the “all rights revert thereafter” language in your contract with us).
(2) If you’re a writer signing a contract, look out for when and under what circumstances the rights do revert to you. It should be something where the very specific right you are granting (say, exclusive first publication, worldwide, in English), and then there should be something along the lines of “the author retains all other rights not specified in this agreement.” In me saying that as a writer I’m looking out for these things not because I assume a publisher is trying to screw us (we hope) but only that we want everything to be crystal clear. (That’s what contracts are for. And remember: Clarity is kindness.)
(3) If you’re an author signing an anthology contract, look for a clause like this one (that I’ve just inserted for clarity’s sake into my own contracts):
Relationship of Parties
Independent Contractor: The Author is an independent contractor. This agreement does not create an employment relationship, and the Work is not a work made for hire as defined by the U.S. Copyright Act.
(4) If you’re an editor / anthologist, it will matter whether you are publishing the work as a sole proprietor or something else. Whether yours is a “work for hire” seems to be dependent on this.
After drafting this post, I prompted my AI tool with the following check:
In the interests of transparency (a core company value) and helpfulness, I’m writing a blog post detailing this issue, my confusion, and some takeaways for authors and for anthologists (without giving people legal advice). I wonder, could you cross reference (1) our conversation today clarifying the issues noted in the email from the copyright office with (2) my article’s draft as it stands and (3) the two contracts I’ve used most recently for anthologies? What I want to know is, basically, am I understanding (a) copyright law correctly (in so far as I’m not claiming to be an expert but am sharing what I hope is reliable experience-based inferences) and (b) that the last two contracts I’ve used specify the correct “rights granted” on behalf of the author and that (c) I’m not claiming in the contract to be able to protect any rights I do not own?
Here’s what the tool gave me in response, after a few more back and forth comments to get it citation-free and in a format that suits my purposes here:
AI Analysis of Whisper House Press Contracts and Copyright Strategy
1. On Copyright Ownership and “The Whole Book” Your understanding of the distinction between the “collective work” and the “individual contributions” is accurate. In an anthology, the publisher typically owns the copyright to the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the stories—the editorial “glue” that turns a pile of manuscripts into a curated book. The authors retain the copyright to the individual stories themselves. Your current contracts reflect this by granting you specific rights (like “First World Anthology Rights”) while explicitly stating that the author retains all other rights.
2. On the “Work Made for Hire” Confusion The Copyright Office’s confusion stems from a technicality of your business structure. Because Whisper House Press is a sole proprietorship, you and the business are the same legal entity. A “Work Made for Hire” generally requires an employer-employee relationship or a very specific commissioned-work contract. Since you cannot be your own employee, you are simply the individual author of the compilation. Correcting this in your application tells the Office: “I am the person who edited this, not a company that hired an editor.”
3. On Protecting Author Rights Your contracts include a clause promising to “take all necessary steps to protect” the author’s copyright. While the author is the ultimate owner, this clause places a professional responsibility on the publisher to ensure the work is attributed correctly and to discourage unauthorized distribution of the anthology. However, because you do not own the stories in perpetuity, the legal standing to sue for independent infringements of those stories remains with the authors.
4. Alignment with Current Contracts
Dread Mondays: The “First Rights” grant combined with the “Author retains all other rights” language confirms that these are independent works, not works made for hire.
Year One: The “non-exclusive reprinting rights” grant is a clear signal to the Copyright Office that the story is preexisting material and should be excluded from your claim of original authorship.
I went in and adjusted language in the contract, again with the analytical assistance of an AI tool, such that my commitments to authors are neither overstated nor understated. I had gotten things right in these contracts, but I wanted them to be precise and without ambiguity.
Before this conversation with AI and me writing my post today (without any AI assistance except for specifically quoted passages, as always in the behind-the-scenes posts), my copyright notices at the front of Whisper House Press books read: “© 2026 Whisper House Press” with an “all rights reserved” notice below.
Because of today’s work, I’m changing the copyright notice on all future printings of the older anthologies and am inserting this sort of language into the newer anthologies to follow this pattern:
Anthology Selection, Coordination, and Arrangement © 2026 Stephen F. Capone Jr.
Individual Stories © 2026 by their respective authors.
I made a similar mistake with Costs of Living and corrected it a few months back, but I neglected to share it due to my 40-hour job overwhelm. But on spring break, I’ve got to be me.
Questions for you to think on: What do you think about all this? Have you made similar errors? Any lived experience you can share out to help others?
As always with behind-the-scenes posts, I developed this article without any AI assistance (except where I’ve specifically quoted passages generated by an AI tool). My commitment to transparency means that if I’m using AI to write something, I’m telling you about it (and I have no plan to use it for any creative purpose). For more on my AI policies, check out the behind-the-scenes posts numbered 57-59.
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