Do you own your ebooks?

Mike Shatzkin has an interesting post in which he makes the claim that (1) readers never own an e-book; they just own a license, and therefore (2) readers should stop complaining about DRM and the lack of the right of first sale, things that are “silly conversations” in the digital world.

The second point first: Shatzkin’s post is an exercise in circular logic, because the legal intricacies of license versus ownership are totally irrelevant to the questions he purportedly dismisses.

It is not enough to say “an e-book is only licensed.” Licenses have content that restrict use. There is no magical default license language in the sky–publishers and distributors set the terms of the license. If the publisher says, “you may not lend your e-books,” the license that the reader gets does not allow lending. If the publisher says, “you may lend your e-books,” lo and behold, lending is allowed.

It begs the question (note the correct use of the phrase, please) to say that readers should not complain about DRM because they have a license. Why the heck can’t readers complain about a license, when the terms of that license are dictated by the publisher? Even assuming that Shatzkin is right about the license/ownership debate, why is it a “silly conversation” to talk about the terms of the license? It’s not silly to complain when you are paying more for books where you receive fewer rights.

Saying “because it’s a license” doesn’t answer any of those questions. It just tells you why you have the questions in the first place. The question of license versus sale is irrelevant to the question of the content of the license. It is never a silly question for consumers to say to producers, “We would like a different license, please.”

There should be a name for the logical fallacy of equating “legal” with “unarguable,” but in an event, that’s what Shatzkin is doing.

Now we come to the second count: Shatzkin basically asserts that you don’t own your e-book; you merely have a license to use it. This is a categorical claim that does not track the (still unsettled) law on the question. As a note, I think Shatzkin is confusing ownership of the copyright with ownership of a copy.

To make the distinction clear: I own a copy of this paper book that I am holding in my hand. (It happens to be Tiffany Clare’s The Seduction of his Wife, in case you’re wondering.) I bought it at the store. Buying that copy gave me certain rights: the right to read it, to read it aloud, to give it away on my blog, to lend it to a friend, to resell it to someone else. I have the right to make an archival copy for personal use. I own a copy.

I do not own the copyright, nor do I have a license to distribute. That means that I cannot make photocopies of the book and distribute or sell them.

Now, let me start this off by saying that I have never seen anything that suggests that you cannot sell a digital copy. If anyone can point me to that, I’d love to see it. It’s true, however, that most sellers would prefer to license digital copies. This is because the seller retains more control that way. But no person can categorically state that all e-books are merely licensed and not sold. If you want to know if you have a license or a sale, you have to look at how the item in question is transferred. In Vernor v. Autodesk, the Ninth Circuit explained:

A software user is a licensee rather than an owner of a copy where the copyright owner (1) specifies that the user is granted a license; (2) significantly restricts the user’s ability to transfer the software; and (3) imposes notable use restrictions.

(For reference purposes, the Ninth Circuit falls on the “more likely to read as a license” bit of the license/ownership debate; this debate is not over by any means.)

Under this standard, I suspect at least some of the e-books I have purchased are in fact sales and not licenses. It’s also quite clear to me that nobody can say, “you didn’t buy your e-books!” without looking at the terms of the transfer. And someone who says, “Gosh, we’re all calling them sales, and that’s wrong!” needs to look at factor (1) in the standard above and ask, “If we are calling them sales, can they actually be licenses?”

Of course, my analysis doesn’t mean that we must perish under Shatzkin’s parade of horribles, in which one person buys one copy and then transfers it to infinity and beyond. The transfer of the digital copy requires you to effectively make a copy–something you can’t do with a print copy–and it’s an open question whether that is allowed for owners of a copy. You’d probably have to have a license to do that.

Where to find Courtney

Today is Valentines Day, and that means you will find Courtney…spending the evening alone, since Mr. Milan is working the night shift tonight. (BIG frown.)

But! I’ve updated my page of signings on my website, so if you live in Southern California or New York, you can mark your calendars many weeks in advance of my appearance.

More importantly, on February 23rd, 2011, I will be at the Smart Bitches online Book chat. (I’ll post the link to the direct chat on the 23rd). The chat starts at 9PM EST/6 PM PST, and I’ll be joining the merry throng at 10/7 to answer questions and the like. Maybe I will have a glass of wine with the chat, and then you can see what Courtney is like when she has no filter!

Shudder in horror. Shudder in a great deal of horror.

How to get UNVEILED

Hi. It’s been a busy last few weeks, and I promise I will resume regular blogging soon, as soon as I manage to get rid of this nasty cold.

I know the question on everyone’s mind is this: when is Mr. Milan going to post his review? I don’t have an answer to that. He wrote a review a week ago, but… it was filled with spoilers. I mean, filled with them. I was aghast. So I’m making him redo it, and sadly, Mr. Milan has to work. (I say “sadly” because this takes him away from vital activities, like reading and writing reviews and doing my laundry. But this helps keep my dog in dog treats, so I suppose it is necessary.)

In the meantime, I’ve heard many a tale of woe from people about not being able to find Unveiled in various bookstores. If you haven’t heard, things in publishing and bookselling right now are…well, to call them “unstable” would probably be a little kind. Let’s just say that some elements of publishing and/or book-selling appear to be poised for imminent doom. And while I’m not naming names, if you read publishing news, you can probably tell who or what appears to be on the border. *cough*

BUT.

In any event, I have heard that it may be harder to find Unveiled then usual. (In fact, it has been harder for me to find it, too.) This is actually true for a lot of books that were released this month, and not just Unveiled, so this advice goes for any book you want to read and can’t find. So here’s how you can deal with this:

  1. Go to the information desk at the store that doesn’t have the book, and request that the store order the book in. This will take somewhere between a few days to a week to deliver. I know this is a pain in the behind.
  2. Order the book online. There’s Amazon, but I also suggest Borders, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, or ordering through your local romance-friendly indie (check Indiebound).
  3. Buy the e-book. There are a ton of buying choices here–kindle, nook, and kobo are the obvious ones, but there are also indie e-book sellers (All Romance Ebooks, for instance, has Unveiled available for $3.50 for the next 3 days, and I am a big fan of Books on Board).

Right now, everyone’s still sorting out distribution as best as possible. If I had my way, this book would be available everywhere in mass quantities. But then, if I had my way, there would be a thriving bookstore on every corner. Clearly, I am not having my way.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the publishing world, and it’s easy to get caught up in the bad news. But I really believe that no matter what happens, people will still want to read good stories. And nothing I have seen in the last few years convinces me that this will vanish.

Unveiled!

This is an entirely self-serving post to let you know that Unveiled is out today. That means you can buy it. You can also read the first chapter online, or the mini-excerpts I’ve been posting on my facebook page.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again now (but I promise this is the last time): I think Unveiled is my best book to date. I hope it is not the best book of my career–I am greedy and want many more of those. But I like this one. So do other people.

A smattering of reviews:

Mandi Schreiner at Smexy Books: “This book is on my favorite list for 2011 and will proudly sit upon my favorite shelf.”

The Season for Romance: “Unveiled is without a doubt my favorite of Ms. Milan’s books thus far and an all-time romance genre favorite that has earned a permanent spot on my keeper shelf.”

And my favorite lines in a review, ever, by Meoskop at It’s My Genre: “This is probably a book with flaws. I have no idea what they are.”

You see? Not just me saying it.

But never worry; everyone’s favorite negative reviewer, Mr. Milan, will be dashing my hopes and dreams sometime soon. At least I assume he will be, since it’s taking him forever to finish the book…but perhaps he’s just savoring it?

Yes. We’ll go with that.

Finally, a P.S. If you’ve already read the book, I bet you’re wondering when Mark’s book will be out. Right? Right. It’s Unclaimed, and it will be out in October. And just in case you are wondering–the (unedited) first chapter is here.

Winners! And… more things to win!

After much browbeating on my part, Mr. Milan has finally picked a winner. Through ways that are mysterious and masculine, he read through all the entries, laughing from time to time, and finally has said that the winner is:

Laney, for: “In America, you go to war. In Victorian times, war comes to you.”

But wait! There’s a random winner, too. And the random winner is… Rene! Rene and Laney, send your snail mail addresses to courtney@courtneymilan.com.

For those of you interested in winning other things, this quarter I’m giving away a prize pack of six debut historical romance authors, all awesome in their own right.

  • Elizabeth Essex’s The Pursuit of Pleasure is a wonderful book about a woman who marries a man who is going to die for freedom, and then has the bad fortune to fall in love with him. I meant to post about this book when it came out, but it came out right in the middle of sudden-death deadlines and a couple of other things that completely ate up my November and December. Trust me, this book is wonderful, and the prose is elegant. I loved it!
  • Tiffany Clare’s The Surrender of a Lady. Tiffany definitely pushes some boundaries with this one. It’s set in a harem in Victorian times, and it’s as much about emotional freedom as it is about sexual freedom.
  • Vicky Dreiling’s How to Marry a Duke. A long, long time ago, Vicky and I finaled in a writing contest together with two unpublished manuscripts. We started talking. I told her she was going to sell her book, even though I hadn’t read it. I just felt sure it was true. And it was! Now that her book is out (it just came out yesterday), I can see why it sold. The premise is unbearably cute–think “The Bachelor” in Regency times, and the execution made me laugh.
  • Ashley March’s Seducing the Duchess. A gorgeous book about two people–married–who each do something that is absolutely unforgivable to the other, and then have the ill luck to fall in love. It was a deeply emotional book, filled with angst…and yet it was also funny, too, which pretty much makes me excited.
  • Grace Burrowes’s The Heir. Another gorgeous book about a man who falls in love with his housekeeper. The language is exquisite, the romance is hot, and I have to say–this is just between you and me–I love a scene where people know how to use their hands, and this book has lots of them.
  • Jeannie Lin’s Butterfly Swords. One of my favorite new authors. I started writing a post about Butterfly Swords months ago–I still have a draft saved–I couldn’t figure out how to express my adoration in a few hours. I have to actually write this out at some point, even though I’m unforgivably late. It’s like a martial arts movie crossed with a happy ending.

Six debut historical romance authors, wildly different in tone and setting and place, and all excellent. If you want them, you have to enter my website contest.

Where I spent my money

I buy and read a lot of books. I buy books because they look like they’ll contain interesting historical biographical information, or will tell me about society or technology in historical times. I buy books because I think they’ll help me with research. I buy a lot of memoirs because it helps put me in someone else’s head, which helps me when I build characters. I buy romance in several subgenres, both to examine craft and to examine the market. I buy fantasy and science fiction to examine world-building (which is important for historicals, too). I buy thrillers to see how best-selling authors pace action scenes. I buy a ton of young adult to see what the zeitgeist is for the next generation. (I also, of course, have a lot of fun reading all of this, too.)

But my point is that if you are a bookseller, you should love me. I spend money on books like it’s going out of style. I buy electronically. I buy in print. I buy online. I buy in person. If you sell books, I buy them. I spend more on books in a month as I spend on my dog. And because I’m doing taxes–and because many of my book purchases are tax-deductible–I know how much I spent on books in 2010. I’ll tell you this much: it’s easily four figures, and it’s a lot closer to $5000 than it is to $1,000.

I think the breakdown of where I spent that money is interesting.

35%: electronic
65%: paper

The numbers skew paper because (1) if I do giveaways, I want a paper book; and (2) many research books I prefer to have in paper copy so I can spread them out on the desk as I work, or mark passages or write on the edges. I mix up my e-book purchases so the e-book purchases are spread across Amazon, All Romance eBooks, Books on Board, Powell’s, and eHarlequin.

55%: purchased online
45%: in a retail store

Again, the number skews to online purchases because, for instance, if I want to track down “The Municipal Government of Bristol: 1820-1851” I usually am going to find it online. The 20% difference between electronic and online purchases is pretty much that: purchases of research books that I’m getting for a specific purchase. But just to give you some idea of how much I spent in retail stores, we’re still talking four figures, and by a good margin.

Here’s the last set of numbers I’m going to give you:

At what retail outlets did I spend my money in 2010? (This is a further breakdown of the 45% figure above.)

Barnes & Noble: 48% (there’s a B&N convenient to the place where I work)
Borders: 34% (I try to spread the love around anyway)
Target: 11% (I end up getting books every time I buy toilet paper, too)

That’s 93% of my purchases. The other 7% are made up by airport bookstores, the occasional purchase of books at conferences, and…

Independent Bookstores: 3.5%

Yeah, that’s kind of surprising to me, too. I like all bookstores. There’s a reason I wrote a webscript that generates automatic links to indiebound and two prominent independents along with the major chains–I believe that a vibrant book marketplace depends upon the health of all bookstores–large chains, discounters, and independent bookstores. I don’t want any piece of that to go away.

But you know what? Even though I spend thousands of dollars on books–in the young adult section, in science fiction and fantasy, in biography and history and memoir–I generally don’t go into indie bookstores because I also buy a metric ton of romances, and there is no indie bookstore near where I live that carries romance. It’s not that I’m boycotting indies, or even that I’m trying to send a message. It’s just that when I feel like browsing for books, I want to do it somewhere that has all the sections I like to browse in. If you don’t carry the primary genre that I read, I’m naturally going to spend my time–and therefore money–elsewhere. I want to love you, indies, but you just don’t have what I need.

When I break that 3.5% down even further, another interesting statistic: 3.3% was spent in person at Powell’s, while 0.2% was spent at other indies.

This is interesting because I don’t live anywhere near Powell’s. But Powell’s has excellent romance curation, and so when I go in I know I can spend three hours and browse every kind of book in the entire world and buy a massive armload of books from all sections. If I lived near Powell’s I would just have my paycheck direct-deposited into their coffers to save time. It’s a giant magnet for me: it has so many books, and I want to walk out with all of them.

I know this might not change any minds. But if you run an indie bookstore and you don’t carry romance, be advised that you’re losing out on more than the dollars you’d make on the romances. You’re losing browsers.

Disclaimer: These numbers are rough. I’m still gathering receipts. They also *ahem* underestimate my spending, because there are some receipts I ended up not scanning at all because the books had no business purpose: cookbooks, for instance.

Unveiled & the Victorian Reversal (giveaway!)

Do you remember the old Russian reversal jokes? You know, “In America, you find party. In Soviet Russia, party finds you!” Or: “In Soviet Russia, cold catches you!” And so forth.

In any event, I was trying to figure out yet another way to describe Unveiled for an upcoming blog post. Blah blah blah, I am so bad at telling people what my books are about! When I talk about Unveiled, I tend to say stupid things like, “this is a book about sexy, sexy bigamy!”

Not working so well. Or: “This is about this dude–and even though he is out for revenge he is totally cool–no, honest, I know it sounds like he’s vengeful, but he’s actually a total mensch, you know? He’s like…the Harlequin Presents mensch.”

And sometimes I sit down and spend half an hour constructing the following: “Margaret knows what all the rules are, and has followed every one… up until the point when she discovers that her father and mother weren’t really married, and she’s a bastard. By all the rules, she’s worth nothing.”

This, of course, is not even a description of the book; it’s a description of a tiny fraction of the events that happen before the book starts. Still, it leads me to the Best. Description. Ever. for Unveiled. Are you ready?

In America, you break rules. In Victorian England, rules break you!

Okay, fine. This still does not describe Unveiled, not at all, but hey, who cares? It’s fun!

So here’s the deal. You want to win a copy of Unveiled? Come up with a Victorian reversal. Post it in the comments below. One person will win randomly. One person who has the best reversal (as chosen by Mr. Milan, a sage and fair judge) will also win a copy. You can enter the skill portion as many times as you like, but you’ll only get one random entry per person.

This contest is open until the year 2011 hits the West Coast. 😉

Christmas Waffles

I have a recipe for multi-grain waffles that I’ve been working on perfecting for the last…oh, five years or so. I make these in massive batches and I freeze most of the results; in the mornings, I pop half a waffle in the toaster for an easy (and really delicious) breakfast. This recipe is what used to be a tripled recipe for someone else’s straight up white-flour waffles, but since I found that original recipe, I’ve basically modified it a thousand times.

At this point, it has evolved into a (mostly) forgiving recipe: a few blunders won’t kill you, and there are endless opportunities for substitutions without fear that you’ll ruin the whole thing.

Here’s my Christmas version of it (which I’m making now, while Mr. Milan sleeps).

dry ingredients

3 c whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 c buckwheat flour
1/2 c blue cornmeal
1/2 c brown rice flour
1/4 c yellow cornmeal
1/4 c garbanzo flour
1/4 c oat flour
1/2 t powdered stevia
1 t baking soda
1 1/2 t salt

A note: I’m giving actual amounts here, because I’ve found most people like getting recipes that have actual amounts. The only thing that is fixed in the above is the 3 cups of whole wheat pastry flour (is that ever important–you must use whole wheat pastry flour! I’m convinced the reason most people think that whole wheat is solid and chewy is that they use bread flour to try to make pastry items) and the baking soda (use baking soda, not baking powder!). Everything else is malleable.

For instance, you can use sugar instead of stevia. (Most people like waffles sweeter than I do, so I think you’d want about 1/3 cup sugar for regular person sweetness?) And the other flours are “for instance.” I like using a little oat flour every time, because it makes the batter sticky, and it makes the resultant waffle less likely to come apart in the iron. But if you don’t have somewhere where you can get cool flours, it’s perfectly fine to use 3 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour and 1 1/2 cup corn meal. Just about any combination of flours will work–but I try to keep it at 3 3/4 cups fine ground flour and 1 1/2 cup gritty flours for texture reasons.

Now we get to the fun part: Christmas seasoning! To the bowl above, add the following, freshly ground:  nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, juniper berry, black pepper.

I have a pepper grinder; everything else is done on the microplaner. I would tell you how much I add, but I don’t really measure as I go. A few gratings of nutmeg. About half a cinnamon stick. A berry of allspice, cardamom, and juniper. A few grinds of the pepper grinder. Be careful not to overdo it on the nutmeg–it can be a very overpowering spice. You can add a little clove powder if you want, but it’s even more dangerous than nutmeg: too much completely ruins the batch, and you can’t have too little.

You can do just about anything (within reason) for the seasoning. One of my favorites is the zest of 3 limes–simple and delicious. Or think about just plain vanilla (if you’re doing this, either add the extract to the wet ingredients, or if you’re using a vanilla bean–and why wouldn’t you?–put 1 c of the buttermilk into a pan and scrape the seeds into it, and then simmer with the bean in the mix. Remove bean before adding back to wet mixture). You can also add heftier ingredients: pecans and cranberries, or chocolate chips and slivered almonds. But if you do that you should be sure to increase the liquid slightly below. And no, I don’t know how much “slightly” is–just pour a little more in, okay?

Mix the dry ingredients together and set them on the side. Now is a good time to turn the waffle iron on.

In a separate bowl, mix:

1 quart buttermilk
1 1/2 c canola oil
6 egg yolks (put the whites in the largest bowl you have).

Set this bowl of wet ingredients to the side of the dry ingredients. A note on the eggs: there are only a few non-forgiving portions of this recipe. One is the whole wheat pastry flour (pastry flour: don’t forget that!). The other is the eggs. This recipe is highly dependent on the eggs for loft. So use really, really good eggs. I mean it! The other thing is the buttermilk. You do have to use buttermilk–otherwise the baking soda won’t activate. If you really, really can’t use buttermilk, I guess you can make do with regular milk and a little vinegar, but it just won’t be the same.

Another note on oils: I use canola oil. I’ve done just enough experimenting with olive oil to know that the batch comes out way too oily if you use 1 1/2 c. I think olive oil is just too heavy over all to be used here, but I suspect that the usual suspects used in baking are just fine.

All righty. Now take your egg whites and beat them until they form stiff peaks. I like to do this by hand. And before you freak out–if you have really, really good eggs, it actually doesn’t take that long for the eggs to get peaky, and you can feel the eggs get to that stage of ultimate perfection. Combine the buttermilk/oil/egg yolk mixture with the dry ingredients, and then fold the combination into the egg yolks.

Voila! Your batter is done. Now you need to cook it in a waffle iron. I use a 1/3 cup measure to dollop it in, and leave a little room around the edges for the waffle to expand.

The one danger of this recipe is that if you open the waffle iron before the waffle is cooked through, the waffle will split–even with a supposedly non-stick iron–and that makes a mess and isn’t fun for anyone. A second danger is that if you have a waffle iron that beeps when the waffles are supposedly done, it judges “doneness” very poorly with this recipe (and other whole wheat recipes). You can tell when the waffle is done by the amount of steam that comes from the iron: too much, and it’s not still cooking; wait until you have only a few curls of steam.

It helps to have a very, very hot iron: most waffle irons will tell you they’re ready to be used when they could stand to heat up for another few minutes.

Enjoy!

How to Run a Website Contest (without going to jail)

More than a year ago, I wrote an article for the RWR (That’s the Romance Writers Report–RWA’s formal magazine) about the legality of website contests. When I was blogging for the release of my last book, I noticed that some bloggers were attaching conditions to my giveaway of my book–conditions that they did not run past me, and that I did not agree to. Some of those conditions made the giveaway illegal. All of those conditions annoyed the heck out of me.

More recently, some discussion has cropped up about whether bloggers are running illegal website contests, and so I thought it would be timely to post my RWR article. It doesn’t address the complaints of rigged giveaways–honestly, I thought it went without saying that if you say you’re going to give a prize to one randomly drawn commenter, you have to freaking give the prize to a random commenter! But the article does talk about the contours of the law. A little.

Be advised that it’s an attempt to be light-hearted, that it was written for an audience of romance writers–and that it was more tailored to address specific circumstances than it was to provide a full and complete background of the law of contests.

—

You’ve seen this situation a thousand times before.  Author Jane Promoter, eager to start some online buzz about her novel, announces an exciting contest on her website:  Buy her book, send her the receipt, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a box of chocolates.

Jane knows that the release of a book is a make-or-break event, and she’s determined to make it in the world of publishing.  A contest is a good idea . . . or it would be, except that by virtue of her little promotional contest, featuring a $20 box of chocolates, she’s now guilty of a misdemeanor offense in California, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and a multitude of other states, punishable by up to two years in prison.

Website contests are wonderful promotional tools. They have been used as wonderful promotional tools ever since the first Australopithecus advertised her skill in making flints by painting on cave walls.  But because contests are so effective at drawing people in, they have been regulated ever since the second Australopithecus came up with a scheme that conveniently required every entrant to give him the carcass of a woolly mammoth.

Since the time of the Australopithecines, there has been a bit of modernization on the contest front.  We have access to fire, paper, printing presses that utilize movable type, and the Internet.  Sadly, law enforcement officials have access to these same things, too, and they’re tasked with the difficult job of enforcing the law.

What this article covers

If you’ve ever read the fine print for contests run by major corporations, you’ll notice that the contest rules contain exceptions and clauses stating “void where prohibited” and “cannot be redeemed in Azerbaijan” and “no cash value.”  This is because a contest, even one that is situated in one state, must abide by the rules and regulations of every state, territory, or country in which participants are solicited.  The law of contests and raffles fills entire treatises.

Not only is the law on this subject voluminous, the law changes.  Legislatures rewrite portions, especially as it applies to the internet.  There is only way you can be 100% certain that your website contest is completely kosher, and it is to hire a good lawyer, who will survey the law in existence at the time of your contest, and who will examine the specific facts of your situation.

Needless to say, if all you want to do is give away copies of your book on the Internet, the prospect of hiring a lawyer to perform hours of legal research is probably outside your budget.

This article discusses the black areas and the gray areas in contests.  It tells you the one contest you (or your RWA chapter) should absolutely never run (hint: it’s a raffle), and the contest you should probably never have (hint: you require people to purchase your book).  It provides a few useful guidelines for your website contest.

What this article can’t do is provide you with absolute certainty that you are operating within the bounds of the law.  For that, you need a lawyer.

A note about jurisdiction

When discussing website contests, you might wonder, “Why do I care about the laws of all 50 states?”
The answer to that is called, in legal terminology, long-arm jurisdiction.  As a general rule, if you rob a bank in Montana, the state of Rhode Island cannot prosecute you for it.  That’s because Rhode Island only has the power to protect against activities that happen within its boundaries.  Legally, one would say that Rhode Island lacked jurisdiction.

You might imagine that in order for a state to have jurisdiction over a person, you would need to live in the state.  But suppose you live in Montana, and you hack into a bank in Rhode Island.  Even though you were situated in Montana, the act you took had an immediate, obvious, and foreseeable effect in Rhode Island, and Rhode Island can assuredly prosecute you.  It is not always easy to tell when your activities open you up to a state’s jurisdiction; the Supreme Court has stated that a state may have jurisdiction over you based on a test that balances “the quality and nature of the activity in relation to the fair and orderly administration of the laws.”  In other words, you can be prosecuted by a state so long as you have “minimum contacts” with that state.

How does this apply to website contests?  Many states have what are known as general long-arm statutes.  Long-arm statutes are exactly what they sound like: they are statutes that reach a long arm outside of the state, and provide that people who violate the laws of the state, and have the “minimum contacts” required by law, can be subjected to the laws of the state.

How does it matter? If you hold a contest in Montana, and you forward the announcement to a chapter in Alabama, you are effectively soliciting entries from Alabama.  Now, Alabama does not just prohibit gambling; it also prohibits promotion of gambling, which includes advertising and profiting from gambling.

Alabama not only has a general long-arm statute; its laws state: “It is no defense . . . that the lottery itself is drawn or conducted outside Alabama and is not in violation of the laws of the jurisdiction in which it is drawn or conducted.”  In other words, if you run a lottery, and you solicit entries from Alabama, you might be in violation of the laws of Alabama—and they reserve the right to come after you.

The precise boundaries of personal jurisdiction, in the days of the World Wide Web, are still up for debate.  The Supreme Court is still shaping the doctrines at issue here, and states (and other countries) themselves are experimenting with enforcement of laws that apply to entities outside their territory.
If you want to become a test case for the exciting litigation in this area, you should feel free to experiment.  If you do so, you might someday have the enthralling prospect of paying for an attorney to represent you in front of the Supreme Court.  Law students everywhere will curse your name as they struggle to understand the implications of the precedent you set.

If shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees doesn’t sound like fun, this article is for you.

The Black Area

While the law of contests varies substantially from state to state, there is one thing that even a cursory examination of the law reveals: Raffles and lotteries are highly regulated, and mostly banned.  You should probably not run one unless you have consulted a lawyer in depth, and my best guess is you should not run one at all.

Raffles or lotteries are games where someone sells tickets for money or something else of value, in exchange for a prize that is distributed by chance.  It does not matter if that chance is a random drawing or a game of Bingo or the culmination of a vingt-et-un tournament.  If you are collecting money and offering a prize that is distributed based on chance rather than skill, you are running a raffle or a lottery. These activities are regulated because they are a form of gambling: They entice people to give up money in exchange for a chance to win.

When raffles or lotteries are conducted online by RWA members, they are for a good cause.  The beneficiary of such a contest is an RWA chapter, or an author who has fallen on hard times due to unforeseen medical bills.  You might think it is okay to hold a raffle if it is for a good cause.
In a few states, you might be right.  In the rest of them?  Not so much.

Every state has specific rules about what counts as a “good cause.” In just about every state, the only private organizations that are allowed to apply are registered nonprofits.

An individual simply cannot raise money for a friend via a raffle.  That is illegal in just about every state, almost certainly including the one you live in.

Even if you are affiliated with a registered nonprofit (for instance, RWA chapters are nonprofit organizations), the requirements for running a raffle are usually quite stringent.  For instance, California states: “An eligible organization may not conduct a raffle authorized under this section, unless it registers annually with the department of Justice.”  Furthermore, California also states that “[i]n no event shall
funds raised by raffles conducted pursuant to this section be used to fund any beneficial, charitable, or other purpose outside of California.”  New Mexico requires raffle-holders to obtain a license from the state and to pay a tax on three percent of the proceeds. It will only license an organization “which has been in existence in New Mexico continuously for a period of three years immediately.”

These are the laws of just two states, and I think if you put them together, you’ll see why online lotteries are such a conundrum.  A lottery is only legal in California if the funds raised do not benefit a purpose “outside of California.”  New Mexico only license organizations which have existed in New Mexico continuously for three years.

As far as I can tell, the only way that an RWA chapter could meet both these requirements with an Internet lottery would be if the New Mexico chapter of RWA held a lottery to benefit California romance writers.  All you need to do is add in one more state and you’ll see that it is simply impossible to run a nationwide raffle that satisfies all state laws.

This means, if you are running a raffle over the Internet, and soliciting entries from chapters throughout the United States, your raffle is very likely illegal.

There may be ways to legally run an internet raffle.  But if your organization hasn’t talked to a lawyer who is familiar with the hazardous law of lotteries, it is almost a given that your raffle is illegal.  If you or your RWA chapter are raising thousands of dollars on a raffle conducted on the Internet, you need to stop reading this article and start talking to a lawyer.

The Gray Area

You’ve probably seen a thousand commercials for contests run by corporations, in which the announcer at the end states that “no purchase is necessary.”  Most states require that contests allow all members of the public to enter, even if they have not made a purchase.

If you hold a contest in which the method of entry is to provide a receipt for a book that the person has purchased, you have entered a gray area.

You can probably stay legal by providing an alternate form of entry—one that does not require a purchase—but if you do, you must make sure that you state the alternate form of entry clearly and plainly, so that anyone who learns of your contest can find out about it, and can enter as easily via the free method as they would be able to enter if making a purchase.

If people can e-mail you a receipt from Amazon to show they purchased your book, you must allow them to e-mail you a free ticket to enter.  You almost certainly cannot allow e-mailed entries of receipts, but require that free entries be sent via US Postal mail.

Contests that require receipts for entry (even if you have an alternate method for entering) are gray areas.  They are not safe.  If you have any doubt about a website contest that requires a receipt for entry—and if you are running such a contest, you should likely entertain such doubts—you should either consult a lawyer or change your contest.

Areas that are probably white

If you do not require people to give up money for a chance or to make a purchase, your website contest is… I hesitate to use the word “legal,” but it is probably not going to be subject to scrutiny.

Here’s the unfortunate truth: If you live in Rhode Island, and you are giving away a book from your backlist, your prize is worth perhaps $6.99 (unless you look at the used price on Amazon, in which case the value is more like $0.02).  Even if your contest violated New Jersey law, how likely is it that a prosecutor from New Jersey will care about your illegal contest?

For the same reason that prosecutors would (usually) not go after a group of friends betting on the outcome of a sports event, even if that conduct constituted illegal gambling, they are unlikely to pursue your website contest.  Let us face it—New Jersey has more hardened criminals to deal with than renegade authors who willfully give books away to fans on the Internet.

I care profoundly about legal ethics and the rule of law, and so even if your $6.99 giveaway will never be subject to state scrutiny, I must say that you should never, ever break the law, not even a little.  No, you may not even jay walk across the street to buy my book (but if by chance you do, please buy two).

Unfortunately, given the frequent changes in the law, the accessibility of website contests around the world, and my inability to speak languages other than English well enough to decode worldwide laws, I can’t tell you for sure how to create a website contest that abides by all laws.

But there are a few things that I found in common.  If you want to be really, really safe, here are a few things you can do to increase your sense of security:

  1. Limit participation to US Residents.  The laws of other countries are too diverse and too different from the United States, and there is simply no way to make sure that you are interacting with jurisdictions that allow your contest.

Many contests run by corporations deal with this problem by use of the following fine print:  “Void where prohibited.”  It’s a good idea, and one you might consider adopting, but it also means that you need to know where your contest is prohibited, so that if a person from Thailand is drawn as the winner to your contest, you’ll need to find out if she’s allowed to enter.
  2. Provide the odds of winning.  Many states require that you clearly state the odds of winning.  If you are awarding a prize to every 20th commenter on your blog, you would need to state: “The odds of winning are 5%.”  If you are giving away one copy of your book to a blog commenter, state “The odds of winning depend upon the number of participants.”
  3. State what the prize is up front. Don’t say, “It’s a very good prize” or “it’s a surprise grab bag of really cool things.”  Do say, “The prize is a copy of Proof by Seduction, my latest release” or “You can win a $25 gift certificate to your choice of Borders or Barnes and Noble.”
  4. Don’t make it onerous to enter. If you state that valid entries must send you the name of the French maid employed by the Duchess of Whatsit (material that only appears in chapter 21), you could fall in to the gray area above, because you might be (indirectly) requiring a purchase of your book.  True, a person might be able to find the answer by borrowing the book from the library.  But you’ve now made it much, much easier for someone who owns the book to answer the question than someone who doesn’t, and that could run afoul of state laws requiring that non-purchasers be able to enter the contest as easily as purchasers.  Do ask readers to find the answer to your question in an excerpt provided on your site.

None of these things can guarantee that your contest entry will be legal—only a lawyer can do that.  But if you follow these guidelines, and make a good-faith effort to adhere to the laws, chances are that you will be safe.