I've looked through previous posts on this subject, but what I want to do is (I think, at least to me) a little confusing.
I've been battling my editor/agent about the title of my novel for a while. Recently, I read a biography of a long-dead poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) and came across a journal entry of hers written as a kind of poem but never published as such. The entry itself is perfect as an epigraph to my novel; more than that, one portion of a line, a single phrase, jumped out as a lovely title. Even better, my editor loves both the entry and the suggested title.
I'm going to write to the Society that holds all rights to her published and unpublished material and ask for permission to use it. The epigraph is pretty straightforward. I'm also going to ask for permission to use the one phrase as the title of my book, but I'm wondering if I really have to, or if it's just a courtesy. I mean, I know she wrote it, but she never did publish it (although I suppose it's now been published in the biography, and perhaps in other biographies), and it's not the whole sentence, just a fragment. I don't think her journals have ever been published on their own.
I've been battling my editor/agent about the title of my novel for a while. Recently, I read a biography of a long-dead poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) and came across a journal entry of hers written as a kind of poem but never published as such. The entry itself is perfect as an epigraph to my novel; more than that, one portion of a line, a single phrase, jumped out as a lovely title. Even better, my editor loves both the entry and the suggested title.
I'm going to write to the Society that holds all rights to her published and unpublished material and ask for permission to use it. The epigraph is pretty straightforward. I'm also going to ask for permission to use the one phrase as the title of my book, but I'm wondering if I really have to, or if it's just a courtesy. I mean, I know she wrote it, but she never did publish it (although I suppose it's now been published in the biography, and perhaps in other biographies), and it's not the whole sentence, just a fragment. I don't think her journals have ever been published on their own.
