Supervillain of the Day will be released under a Creative Commons License

I’ve been teetering between licenses this week. I couldn’t seem to settle on whether I should release Supervillains under a traditional copyright or a CC license. I leaned towards the former because it’s safe and familiar, but I finally decided on the latter because it’s progressive, and I need all the help I can get.

The number of books, especially fictional works, being licensed under creative commons is very, very small. You don’t get much more cutting edge than that, and if it’s nothing else Supervillain of the Day is intended to be cutting edge.  The thing I want the most out of this series is not fame, not fortune, not success as some graph portrays it – the thing I want most is for people to read it. All people, everywhere. As many people as possible. I’m confident enough in my writing to believe that if enough people read it, they will love it. And my theory is that fame and fortune will follow in the wake of fandom.

Under a traditional copyright license you have exactly one way to get a hold of Supervillains – you buy it from me.

Under a Creative Commons license the number of ways you can run into it are limited only to the number of people who deem it worth their time to help spread it around.  You can copy it for friends, you can read it aloud at class, you can adapt it for stage, you can translate it into your own language and sell it in your own country.

And above all, what do I have to lose? The commercial rights to a franchise that may or may not ever become worth anything? I’ll take the open source route, thank you very much.

Supervillain of the Day by Katie Lynn Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, to remix, adapt, or make commercial use of the work under the following conditions: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). You must share alike — if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. For information regarding permissions, contact the publisher by visiting the website: Books.ProvideYourOwn.com or by writing to the address above. For more information on on Creative Commons Licensing visit creativecommons.org

To learn more about my views on Creative Commons vs. Copyright, here are links to two articles on the subject on my personal blog:

Traditional Publishing in an Open Source World
Copyright