Quoting other people's work in your book
Somewhere in your manuscript there is probably a line you did not write. A song your character hums. Four lines of a poem as an epigraph. A paragraph from a book that made the point better than you could.
Each of those is somebody else's work sitting inside a product you are about to sell, and how much trouble it is ranges from none at all to a bill large enough to make you republish. The difference is not obvious from the outside, which is why this catches careful authors.
Nothing here is legal advice. It is what publishers treat as routine practice, and the point of it is to tell you which of your quotations are worth an hour of a lawyer's time.
The principle
Text you did not write belongs to whoever wrote it, or to whoever they sold it to. Using it in something you sell may need permission, and whether it does turns on three things: how much you use, what you use it for, and where you are.
There is no word count that makes a quotation safe. The often-repeated figures — a line, ten words, a quarter of a page — are folklore. What matters is proportion and substance: how much of the original you took, and whether you took the part that gives the work its value.
Song lyrics: don't
Music publishing is the most aggressively policed corner of this whole subject, and lyrics are the worst case in it. A song is short, so two lines can be a large share of the whole work. Rights are often split between several publishers, so there may be more than one party to clear. The rates are set by people who do this all day, and they are not scaled to a self-published print run.
A single line can require a paid license, and the quoted fee is often high enough that traditional publishers routinely tell their authors to cut the lyric instead.
The practical advice is simply not to quote lyrics. Name the song and the artist — titles are not the problem — and describe what the music is doing. She had the radio on, the one about the highway, and she knew every word does the work, costs nothing, and cannot be invoiced.
Poetry, prose and epigraphs
Poetry has the same proportion problem as lyrics. Four lines of a fourteen-line sonnet is more than a quarter of the entire work, and estates of well-known poets are attentive. Treat any quotation from a poem still in copyright as something to clear, however short it looks on your page.
Long prose extracts are more forgiving per word because the source is longer, but a page lifted from a living author's book is still a page, and using it as a chapter's centerpiece rather than a passing citation moves you toward needing permission.
Epigraphs deserve their own warning, because an epigraph is a quotation placed in the most visible position in the entire book: alone, on its own page, in the front matter, credited. It is the easiest thing in your manuscript to find. It is also decorative rather than necessary — which is exactly the kind of use that gets the least sympathy. If you cannot clear an epigraph, cut it. The book survives.
In the Interior Formatter. Front and back matter are built from fields, so a permissions line or a credit you enter once is typeset onto the copyright page and carried into both the print PDF and the EPUB, rather than being retyped for each file. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
What is generally safer
Titles. Titles of books, songs, films and albums are generally not protected by copyright. You can name them freely. Brand names are a separate question: use them accurately, and do not put a real product into a scene that defames it.
Facts. Facts, data and ideas are not owned; the particular expression of them is. You can report what a study found. Copying the paragraph that reported it is different.
Brief quotation for review or criticism. Many jurisdictions allow limited quotation when you are genuinely discussing the work — reviewing it, criticizing it, analyzing it. The quotation has to serve the discussion, be no longer than it needs to be, and be attributed. Quoting because the line is beautiful is not criticism.
Work old enough to be out of copyright. Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens. Two cautions. The term varies by country, so a work in the public domain where you live may not be everywhere your book is sold. And a modern edition of an old text carries its own rights: a scholar's translation, a new arrangement of a poem, an editor's notes and a publisher's typesetting can all be protected even though the underlying work is not. Quote from an old edition, or from the text itself.
Getting permission
Identify the rights holder. Usually the publisher's permissions department rather than the author; for lyrics, the music publisher rather than the artist or the label. The copyright page of the edition you are quoting usually says.
Ask early. Permissions take weeks and sometimes months, and the answer can be no. Start when you start editing, not when you are setting the interior.
Expect to pay. Ask for exactly what you need: this work, this quotation, print and ebook, worldwide, all editions of this title. A cheap grant for one territory or one format becomes a problem the first time you widen distribution.
Record what you were granted. Keep the correspondence, the invoice and the exact wording of any credit line they require. You will need it again for the second edition.
Credits and permission lines go on the copyright page, or on a separate acknowledgments page if there are more than a few. See What belongs on a copyright page.
Anything substantial — an epigraph you will not cut, a long extract, an entire poem — is worth an hour with a lawyer who practices publishing law where you live. An hour is cheaper than a reprint.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: What belongs on a copyright page · Also in this guide: Parts, sections and the pages between chapters · Copyright: what you have automatically, and what registering adds · Stock images: what the license actually lets you do