Helpline
Your writing problems solved with advice from Diana Cambridge
Diana Cambridge
Email your queries to Diana (please include home-town details) at: diana@dianacambridge.co.uk or send them to: Helpline, Writing Magazine, Warners Group Publications plc, 5th Floor, 31-32 Park Row, Leeds LS1 5JD. She will answer as many letters as she can on the page, but regrets that she cannot enter into individual correspondence. Publication of answers may take several months. Helpline cannot personally answer queries such as where to offer work, or comment on manuscripts, which you are asked not to send.
QI want to use a quotation for each of the many chapter headings in a book which I am writing. Do I need permission for every one? Are quotations copyright? Thank you
ANDREA YARNELL DAKIN
Holywell, North Wales
AAnything 100 years old is free of copyright – so you are in the clear with any classic authors, poets, thinkers. Copyright expires seventy years after the death of the author: but if a there is a translation or adaptation by a new author, it will be under new copyright of its own. So check the publication details of any book you are quoting from. You will find these on the inside cover. Where a quote is still in copyright, you can try writing to the author, via their publisher, for permission to use the quote. Remember that all quotes must be attributed. If you are using them for chapter headings, I’d keep them short and succinct.