National Memoir Writing Lunch Break Day 2: Write Your Copyright Page

Welcome back to NaMeWriLuBre! You made it past the hardest part: choosing your title. Now it’s time to move on to the next task: writing your copyright page.

The copyright page goes in the beginning of your memoir and provides your reader(s) with lots of important information on your oeuvre, like what city it was published in, and where it can be found in the Library of Congress.

Let’s be honest: no authors like writing the copyright page. In fact, dread of writing the copyright page is the most-cited reason for why authors abandon book projects. So let’s get the copyright page out of the way, and get on to the fun part of sharing our stories!

What goes on a copyright page?

Here’s an example of a copyright page from a book I illegally downloaded during that one week each year when I convince myseld I’m actually going to read Ulysses.

As you can see, it contains a lot of information including:

• Random addresses
• A bunch of years and copyright symbols
• Indecipherable strings of numbers

What should I put on my copyright page?

That largely depends on the kind of memoir you’re writing. A story of a single woman trying to have it all in New York City might be better served by more recent years, while older years might make more sense for a tale of toughing out tuberculosis during the Russian Revolution.

My book, as you’ll recall, is titled Living with Linguaphilia: Learning to Sneeze in Japanese, Pop a Wheelie in Swahili, and Pass for Haitian in Serbo-Croatian, so it’s going to be a more literary/Nobel-prize-winning work.

First I need to pick a publisher and initial publication year for my first edition. I’ll go with Penguin Classics and 2017.

I’ll skip the second and third editions for now.

Next, I need to Google Penguin Classics’ address.

Then I need to write a line introducing the publisher.

Next, I need to tell readers how to buy my other works and/or financially support me.

This should be followed by scary legal language. I’ll pull mine from an iTunes user agreement.

The next thing I’ll need is a Library of Congress entry, followed by the expected width of my book.

Finally, I need an ISBN. My favorite number is 27, so I’ll make heavy use of that.

Here’s my final result:

What does your copyright page look like??