The notices started to pile up about me paying up. I'd taken a graphic off the web with a screen grab, something I should've known better about. After all, I started out in print publishing, when we'd get nothing to use unless it was mailed to us. Postal mail. A subscription or a license was essential. As it turns out, even in our digital era, it's crucial.
A photographer hired a service to scour for the websites that took liberal use of his chess board photo. I hadn't licensed a thing and so I was in the doghouse. I took down the offending art and then I sidetracked the relentless emails about paying $2,700 for a single use of web artwork. I'd violated, but there was nothing about my little publishing company that suggested we had that kind of license budget available.
Not long ago, an entrepreneurial developer and consultant reminded us all that even fundamental tools need licensing. A real self-publisher will monitor the state of licensing fonts and typefaces for use in the printed books and ebooks they publish. Dave Chesson, the Kindlepreneur, alerted us to the need to get a license for any font we use when we publish. If you do this in a clumsy way, Times New Roman is going to cost you $200 or more to use in your books. Just because it's inside of Word doesn't mean you pay nothing to publish using it.
There are free fonts out there, but they might just be free for personal use. You have to watch the terms in the font packages, which are several separate files including one named something like notes.txt with a license inside. Other fonts are free for any purpose, like Helvetica Nueue , which you want to avoid for body text. Body text is the sort for your writing, rather than headlines. Serif fonts read faster than sans serifs. Serifs are the pointy ends of the letters, making each one easily distinquished. San serifs, no points.
I once spent a springtime working at a font-using company. In the lingo of the middle 80s, we were a typesetter. I had to come up to speed on recognizing the distinctive marks of Garamond versus Baskerville. At least they let me use a pica pole to measure font sizes. "Give me an ad just like this," the creative clients would say. "Same typeface."
The designs of letters in your type, or the names of typefaces? Copyrightable, and so there are licenses to pay. You pay a license in publishing so you can own the works you create. A license preserves your ability to sell the works, instead of halting all sales because the font belongs to someone else
Designers help out
If you use a designer to create your books, you're very likely able to skip all of this licensing, since the pros all hold licenses one way or another. Creating a book or ebook with Adobe's Creative Suite extends the font licensing to you or your designer.
Now, it's not automatic to know whether a font is licensed or not. In this digital age, a designer can have so many fonts floating around a computer that came from other sources. One book and cover designer said, "How can we possibly keep track of which font company is going to come after you to see if you have a license?"
She adds that people should be careful that the fonts being used are actually available for commercial use. There are free fonts out there that are for “personal use only” and can only be used commercially if they are paid for.
If the licenses from your designer are not valid, it's not the designer's duty and responsibility to make things right. It's the duty of the publisher's — and that means you if you're self-publishing.
There probably are not many enforcement actions in play for font and typeface licensing. In fact, those two words are used interchangeably but mean different things. And no, since Amazon and IngramSpark aren't publishers, they don't have font licenses for everybody. Those companies are really just print shops with stores and distribution.
It's enough of a challenge to write a good book and get it looking professional with edits, interior designs and covers. Don't take a chance on suffering a takedown over a license. It's simple, but not automatic.
Myfonts.com is a good resource for fonts with licenses attached. It's run by Monotype, one of the two biggest font founderies. Yeah, that's what a type house is called: a foundary. It comes from the era when fonts were stamped out of metal, a letter at a time, for offset printing.
The other resource is Adobe.com. When you purchase a font from Adobe, or use an Adobe font as part of a Creative Suite project, your license is included.
It’s the look of licensing
A certain caliber of self-publisher will want to skip all this legalese. (You want to avoid the word legalese in general, but in particular in this case.) Creations trigger rights whenever the book or publication emerges. Publishers buy and protect rights; the biggest part of the London Book Festival is wrapped around licensing book rights for international use.
Use fonts that are allowed to be used for commercial use. As creators, we want to respect other creators. Adobe does make life easy. Taking a subsciption to Adobe Creative Cloud gives you access to its full library of fonts, something to share. At about $43 a month, it's a powerful set of tools that includes font licenses.
Authors who publish should be more concerned about the proper usage of art, rather than the fonts. There are plenty of good royalty-free clip art services like Pexels and Pixabay and Unsplash, ready to do your bidding for just a simple credit to the author who took the photo.
While there's a glut of knock-off, derivative-laden artwork being built with AI, those often look like a DIY affair. The details can escape you, especially while you carefully prompt the artwork robot that's stealing pixels from human artists. Try not to be the author-publisher who builds artwork by using AI, but is relentless about crediting yourself. Before you know it, such artwork appears in a book, depicting a person using a phone cradled to their ear — with no arm extended to hold the phone. Or a shoulder, for that matter, so the corded phone seems to be floating in midair. AI doesn’t care about human anatomy or licensing. Let your art and font licensing be grounded in respect and realism.
Really good advice, Ron! I have a client whose employee grabbed a photo off the Web and used it ... turns out it was a photo used as "bait" so that they could be caught using it without getting the proper license. Totally a setup but it still cost him. It is tedious to monitor and important.