Managing the shoals of publishing

Elderly copyright websites are among the rocks that authors steer through

Want to publish on your own? Get better at filling in website forms.

I bulled my way through the US Copyright Office’s eCO website recently, after about an hour of registering my latest novel. This is not an example of your government funding that you’d be proud of. The eCO is very fussy about how your Firefox browser opens a new window. The instructions are out of date about what to do with your browser’s settings. The website assures you of nothing unless you’re using no computer older than a Windows 7 PC. If that browser isn’t configured right, the site just dumps you onto a “processing” page with no update, after you’ve input the credit card to pay.

Who knows how to get customer support if a charge for the certificate goes into limbo? You might be in luck getting a human to interact with you from the eCO team. Or not, because there’s no chat window or even a bot to answer questions. And oy, the Office demands that you change your password every 60 days. Gotta keep good track of you…