The Nitty-Gritty

SAY you’ve just written a scene into your novel in which a character puts in her earbuds and joins Adele in belting out a few lines from her 2015 hit “Hello.” Or say you’ve written a collection of essays and want to use quotations from your favorite poets and writers to introduce each essay. Depending on how many words you use and how you display them on the page, those decisions could cost you when the book is published, in terms of both licensing fees and hours spent tracking down who owns the rights.

Writer Anjali Enjeti learned this lesson the hard way when she began seeking permission to use five brief quotations in her debut essay collection, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, due out in April from the University of Georgia Press. The Atlanta-based former attorney had read the fine print in her contract that stipulated that she, not her publisher, had to seek out and pay for the rights to use the quotations. Despite understanding the basics of U.S. copyright law, she was unprepared for how much work it took to get permission to use the five passages.

Enjeti had planned, for instance, to use lines from an essay by Indian scholar and social reformer Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, considered by many the father