What happens to your books after you
A book does not stop selling because its author has died. The listing stays up, orders keep routing to a printer, the ebook keeps downloading, the royalty keeps posting. The only thing that stops is the one person who could log in.
This guide is not legal advice and gives none. Inheritance, the duration of copyright and the rules covering digital accounts differ enormously between countries, and within some countries between states. Everything below is information management: what to write down, and who has to be able to read it. Every decision that follows belongs to a qualified professional where you live.
Why this lands harder on a self-publisher
An author published by a publishing house leaves the house standing. It holds the contract, the files, the ISBNs and the retail relationships, and it goes on selling the book and accounting for the money. The machinery survives the author.
Self-publishing replaces that machinery with accounts in your name: the printer dashboards, the distributor, the ISBN agency record, the email address every store writes to, the drive holding the manuscript and the design files. Each needs a credential only you hold, and most are defended by identity checks — a tax form, a bank account, a code sent to a device in your pocket — built to stop anyone who is not you getting in.
The failure is not mainly that the money stops. It is that the books go on selling and nobody can touch them.
- Nobody can correct anything, change a listing or reprice a book. A typo report, a broken EPUB, a cover a printer starts rejecting at reprint: each needs the account.
- Nobody can take a book down, which matters most when a family wants one withdrawn.
- Nobody can prove who they are to a store that will, reasonably, not hand a live payment account to whoever emails asking for it.
- The money keeps arriving somewhere nobody is watching, or stops with no way to ask why.
None of this expires quickly. Copyright outlives its author by a long period in most countries — long enough that a book can still be earning when everyone who remembers it being written is old. What you write down has to work for somebody who was not there.
The document
One file. Not a plan and not a strategy: a list, of the kind you would hand a capable stranger on their first morning.
- Every platform and account by name, what it is for, and which email address it is registered to. Printers, distributors, the ISBN agency, the website host and domain registrar, the mailing list, the accounts the royalties land in — including the old aggregator or quiet store still holding a live listing.
- Where the master files live. The final interior PDF and cover PDF for each format and printer, the EPUB, the manuscript — on which drive, under what folder names.
- Where the artwork lives, with its licenses. The layered cover source, the art at full size, the fonts, and the paperwork saying what may be done with them. A successor who cannot show the license cannot safely reuse the art.
- Which ISBN belongs to which edition, by format and binding. Nobody can reconstruct that by guessing.
- Who did the work. Editor, designer, illustrator, translator, narrator, with contact details and what each contract says about ownership.
- What you would want done. Keep the books selling, let them lapse, withdraw one, keep the pen name intact. None of it binds anyone by itself — but a successor with no idea what you wanted has to invent an answer, and they will.
In the tools. My Books keeps every project you have made and can duplicate one into a new book with its design and settings intact — so how a book was built stays with the book, not only in the memory of whoever built it. Start your book → · about the tools
The records a self-publisher needs to keep is the same discipline aimed at a different reader: that one you keep for yourself, this one for somebody who has never seen any of it.
Where to keep it, and keeping it true
Two properties matter more than the format.
Reachable. Whoever handles your affairs has to get to it without already having your passwords — a sealed printed copy with your will, a note where the family knows to look, a password manager with a documented recovery path. Which is appropriate, and which is safe, is exactly the question to put to a professional rather than settle from a blog.
Current. A record listing two closed accounts and missing the store you added last year is worse than none, because it will be trusted. Re-read it whenever you publish, change a payment account or move your files, and date it at the top.
Whether to tell someone now
Naming a person while you are alive lets you find out whether they want the job and explain what the books are — the whole difference between a literary executor and a surprised relative holding a folder. It also means telling someone what a book earns, which not every author wants to do. The minimum, if that conversation is not one you want: tell one person the document exists and where it is.
The questions a professional will need answered
You do not have to answer these yourself. You have to arrive with them assembled, because the cost of the advice is mostly the time spent working out what you own.
- Which books, in which formats, through which accounts, in which countries.
- Who decides about the work, and whether that is the person who inherits the income.
- What should happen to unfinished manuscripts, notes and drafts.
- Whether a pen name should be maintained, retired or disclosed — see Publishing under a pen name.
- What is already licensed to somebody else, and for how long, which is where Translations and foreign rights, for a self-published author comes in.
- Whether you registered copyright anywhere, and where that paperwork is — see Copyright: what you have automatically, and what registering adds.
The unglamorous half — the accounts, the files, the ISBNs, the artwork licenses — is the half only you can do, and it takes an afternoon. The rest is somebody else's profession.
Make your book
The tools 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: The records a self-publisher needs to keep · More: Taking a book out of print, and what survives it · Backing up a manuscript, properly