Permission Granted

Hello out there if anybody is still following my blog. I have been so busy editing and re-editing my novel that I have been a woefully poor blogger.

Just for the record, on February 6 I received permission from HarperCollins to use three lines of a poem by Sylvia Plath as my epigraph. This permission cost me $30.00 for US rights only. If I want to get broader rights, I have to contact Faber & Faber Ltd. in London. All of Sylvia Plath's royalties went to her husband, Ted Hughes, after her death, and since Mr. Hughes was British, this makes sense to me.

I had to make a decision whether to take additional time to apply to London for permission to use the epigraph for a wider distribution, or just go with the US rights. Since I will feel fortunate if Americans other than those living in Klamath Falls, Prineville, Bend, and Corvallis will buy the book, sales in other parts of the world seemed like a stretch, so I opted to just distribute my book in the US.

UPDATE:
I had to abandon my plan to use the lines from Sylvia Plath's poem as an epigraph, because in this internet world of ours, it is not possible to restrict distribution to any one country. After I contacted Faber and Faber and found they do not grant permission to use epigraphs from any books they publish, I deleted the epigraph page from my manuscript.