Moving Forward. . .

As I press forward toward the realization of SpeakLifeTV I’m reminded of an old saying “anything that is worth having is worth working for.”  What started off as a great idea has, over time, grown into an entity that has a life of it’s own.  An entity that has it’s own share of problems, hurdles and obstacles that it must overcome in order to fully come to fruition.  One specific hurdle being licensing issues.

One of SpeakLifeTV’s shows is an animated series that is produced using a particular animation application.  In using this application, although the main characters are custom made, I’ve found that we are not permitted to use the character’s likeness on our store merchandise.  This is a pretty sizeable hurdle to jump and we are looking for creative ways around this particular rule while still remaining perfectly legal.

Making sure that all of our actions when building SpeakLifeTV are within our rights, and do not violate the rights of others, is one of our greatest missions.  We are seeking to create a positive, informative, channel and in order to do so, we must be careful to remain within copyright, and other governing, laws. 

Another concern that has presented itself is our means of DVD distribution.  Finding the right print-on-demand distributor that will allow us to keep the rights to our material has been sort of a treasure hunt.  I’ve found great aggregators that had all of the services that we required available at a moments notice and some that wanted to nearly own our content in order to print it.  Researching these types of businesses is valuable part of the building process of any type of new company that has self-publishing needs.  The best things to look for when choosing a distributor or aggregator are: 1) retention of your own publishing and copyrights, 2) provision of an ISBN or other descriptive cataloging number, 3) clear description of the royalties that you are entitled to.

 Keep in mind that it’s always best to read the fine print and find out all of the details before signing up with any company. Look for reviews to read, ask to see testimonials and always remember to ask loads of questions.  It’s better to know what you’re getting yourself into in advance than to find out down the road that you’re stuck with a company that you no longer have need of.