Accuracy, real people, and permissions
Most publishing contracts make the author, not the publisher, responsible for whether a book is accurate, cleared, and safe to publish. That single fact changes how these questions should be approached, and it is documented rather than folklore. What follows reports what named authorities say. We are editors and not attorneys, and nothing here is legal advice.
Is what I have written about this place, job, illness, or period true?
Verification is part of copy editing, which Editors Canada describes as editing to ensure correctness, accuracy, consistency, and completeness, including checking factual accuracy.1 In practice that means dates, names, titles, spellings, and figures that a reference work can settle.
It does not extend to the substance of a specialized field. An editor can confirm that a drug name is spelled the way its manufacturer spells it and that a date matches the one in chapter three. An editor cannot confirm that a symptom would present that way, that a procedure would be followed in that order, or that a machine would fail like that.
Where a manuscript depends on that kind of accuracy, the reader it needs is a specialist rather than an editor. We flag the passages we cannot verify and say why, and the author decides whether to check them, cut them, or accept the risk.
Do I need permission for the song lyrics, the poem, the photograph, the map?
There is no safe quantity, and the United States Copyright Office says so plainly. Its guidance on fair use states that no formula ensures that a predetermined percentage or amount of a work may be used without permission. Words, lines, pages, and copies are all named among the things no formula covers.2
Fair use is decided on four factors. They are the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work used, the amount and substantiality of what was taken, and the effect on the market for the original.2 Courts weigh them together. Short quotations from songs and poems are risky precisely because a few lines can be a large share of a short work.
Permissions work is real work with lead times, and structural editing includes determining permissions needs as one of its tasks.1 Identifying what needs clearing is something an editor can do. Clearing it, and judging whether a use is fair, is not.
Can I name a real person, and can I name them doing that?
Copyright is not the relevant law here, and the Copyright Office is explicit that copyright does not protect ideas, facts, titles, or names.3 The exposure comes from defamation and privacy law instead, which vary by jurisdiction.
What is documented is the contractual position. The Authors Guild reports that standard publishing warranties have the author promise that the work does not infringe copyright, does not invade another's privacy, and is not libelous. The indemnity that follows makes the author responsible for costs and liability whether or not the claim is valid, and whether or not the author knew.4
That is the reason to take the question seriously well before a contract exists. An editor can list every named or identifiable real person in a manuscript and mark the passages that make factual claims about them. Whether those passages can be published is a question for a lawyer.
Have I changed enough to protect someone, and does the change break the book?
The first half cannot be answered with confidence by anyone, the lawyer eventually asked included, because identification does not depend on the name alone. A changed name attached to an unchanged job, town, and family structure identifies the same person to everyone who knows them.
What an editor can do is inventory. Every identifying detail attached to a disguised figure can be listed in one place: name, age, occupation, location, relationships, distinguishing events. Seeing the list together is usually what tells an author whether the disguise is real or nominal.
The second half is a craft question and it is genuine. Composite characters flatten timelines, moved locations break geography, and altered relationships can remove the reason a scene matters. Where a change damages the book, an editor can say which scenes stop working, which is different from advising the author to take the risk.
Do I need to fact-check my own memoir?
The contract answer is yes, because the warranty and indemnity clauses the Authors Guild describes apply to memoir as they do to anything else.4 A publisher's legal read is not a fact-check, and it is looking for exposure rather than for errors.
The practical answer is that memoir contains two kinds of claim and they need different treatment. Checkable external facts, meaning dates, places, public events, song titles, and the weather, can be verified, and errors in them undermine a reader's trust in the parts that cannot be checked. Private recollection cannot be verified by anyone, and the honest handling is to say in the text that it is recollection.
An editor separates the two and checks the first. That is copy editing work as Editors Canada defines it, and it stops well short of deciding what happened.1
Is there material that a publisher's lawyer would want to see?
Five categories account for most of it. They are passages making factual allegations about identifiable living people, medical or financial claims stated as advice, quoted material from other works, unpublished letters and diaries, and photographs of people. An editor can find and list all five without judging any of them.
That list is worth compiling early. Clearing permissions takes months, and a legal read late in production is where schedules break. A book that reaches typesetting with three uncleared quotations has a production problem rather than an editorial one.
Where the book is being self-published, no publisher's lawyer exists and the same exposure does. An author in that position is carrying the risk that the warranty clause would have assigned to them anyway, with nobody upstream reading the manuscript for it.
My epigraph has no attribution. Do I need permission for it?
The attribution and the permission are separate obligations, and having one does not supply the other. The Copyright Office guidance on fair use gives no quantity that is automatically safe, which applies to an epigraph as much as to a block quotation.2
Epigraphs are a common problem for a specific reason. They are decorative rather than necessary to the argument, which weakens the purpose factor. They are also drawn most often from song lyrics and short poems, where a few lines are a large proportion of the whole work.2
An editor's contribution is narrow and worth having. Every epigraph in the manuscript can be listed with its source, its date, and whether a source was supplied at all, and the ones with no source are exactly the ones that cause trouble later.
Is this content that needs a warning or a note?
No authority we found publishes a rule about content warnings in trade books, and practice varies by publisher and by category. Anyone offering a standard here is describing a house preference.
What can be observed is where a book's own framing sets an expectation it then breaks. A memoir that reads as gentle for eighty pages and then describes an assault without preparation is doing something to a reader that the author may or may not intend.
An editor reports that as a finding about pacing and framing rather than as a moral position. Whether it is answered with a note, a change in the opening, or nothing at all is the author's decision, and it is a decision about what the book is for.
Are quoted sources and permissions cleared before the edit starts?
They rarely are, and asking early changes what the edit costs. Material that turns out to be unclearable has to be cut or paraphrased, and doing that after a copyedit means the replacement text has never been edited.
The information an editor needs is a list rather than the clearances themselves: what is quoted, from where, how long, and whether permission has been sought. Structural editing includes determining permissions needs, so the list is something an editor can help build.1
Authors who supply that list at the start get a more accurate quote and a schedule that survives the permissions process. Where nothing has been sought yet, saying so is more useful than an optimistic answer, because it changes the order the work is done in. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, quoted material included.
References
- Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
- United States Copyright Office, More Information on Fair Use. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ ↩
- United States Copyright Office, Circular 1: Copyright Basics, revised September 2021. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf ↩
- The Authors Guild, Stop Forcing Authors to Take Unlimited Financial Risks, December 18, 2015. https://authorsguild.org/news/stop-forcing-authors-to-take-unlimited-financial-risks/ ↩