On Writing & Storytelling: The Road to Success is a Bit Bumpy

On the Issue of Using “Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us)” in Reunion: Coda[1]

Hello again, Dear Reader.

Well, I finally got a response from Concord Music, the copyright holder to the song “Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us)” from West Side Story. It was brief – the rep in question, Georgina, referred me to Boosey & Hawkes in London; apparently, Concord has undergone a ton of staffing changes lately and now permissions/licensing issues are handled in the UK rather than in Nashville, which is where Concord is home-based.

Here’s what John, another Concord staffer, wrote in reply to my original query:

Can you please submit your request using our Print Permissions online form at https://boosey.com/pages/licensing/RandL_Permissions_eu_eng? If you could include a summary of your novel as well as a description of the context of the lyrics use in the novel that would be extremely helpful in moving this request along. The Bernstein Estate require a PDF of the pages where the lyrics will appear, this can be uploaded on this form. In addition to all of this we will need to know how this is going to be published as well as the print run and retail price. The latter is very important as this will help determine the appropriate fee for this use.

Please note that some requests can take up to a month to approve due to the volume of requests we receive from certain catalogues but we will make every effort to grant a license sooner than this. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Since I am self-publishing my novel through Amazon’s CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (print edition) and Kindle Direct Publishing (e-book), I have no way of knowing what the print run will be, since each copy is “print on demand.” I also have not finished the rough draft, much less submitted the finished manuscript to Kindle Direct Publishing, which converts the Windows .docx file into the proper format for both the paperback and e-book editions.  Thus, I have no idea how big the finished book will be – especially if I also include a hardcover edition – which I’d love to do, if only for about a few months.

This makes any guesses about a “print run” extremely vague, since Amazon – as I said before – does not simply print out thousands of copies of any of the titles it self-publishes in the hopes that consumers will then order them. For example, whenever someone orders the paperback edition of Reunion: A Story, Amazon must print one copy at one of its regional locations. For orders from Florida, Reunion is printed in Columbia, SC, and shipped from there to the customer who ordered it. As a result, there’s no reliable way to predict how many copies will be printed, much less sold.

I suspected that this process would not be an easy one, so even before I received the emails from Georgina and John, I went ahead and rewrote the scene (which included just the first verse of “Somewhere”) without the lyrics. It broke my heart to do so, but that’s one of the downsides of going the “easy” route of self-publishing rather than doing it the “get an agent, write a book the traditional way, then have your agent shop it to various publishers” way.

I will, as a courtesy, email the folks at Concord Music to thank them for their time and kind consideration, but I have decided to go forward with an alternative to using the lyrics by the late Stephen Sondheim

This, of course, sucks, because I think the scene just works better with the lyrics than without them. And, since I already established in Reunion: A Story that Jim and Marty were going to sing a duet together at the April 1983 Spring Concert, I can’t just use any song in the public domain, at least not without having to rewrite Reunion, remove the references to “Somewhere,” then change the song to, say, “After the Ball.”

As for the rest of my writing day, I still need to revise another section of the manuscript per suggestions from my Beta Reader. I am, of course, a bit down about “Somewhere,” though, so I might have to chill out and listen to music for a while until I feel ready to get back to work.

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[1] This is, as of June 5, the working title of my first novel. It might even turn out to be the official title, but I hope to come up with something a bit better.