Estate Planning for Authors (+audio)

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So, what is this book? This is about how I developed the letter I wrote for my wife and kid. A letter that explained how they could manage my intellectual property once I’m gone.
How many of your heirs even know what intellectual property means in that last sentence, never mind the options that exist regarding how to manage it? We need to educate our heirs and do it in simple language—I will repeat this often and it still won’t be often enough.
Dear Heir, Intellectual Property (commonly referred to as IP), which we’ll get into more later, is all the stuff the author created: books, stories, notes, audio, film, and potentially much more.
This book is first an education that I gave myself and then it is about the method I’ve found to communicate this to my heirs. Further along I’ve included a copy of my own Final Letter as well as a list of the best reference books I’ve found so far in my research.

The Heir
When I say “heir,” this may be as simple as “my wife” or as complex as a corporation operated in trust for multiple generations of descendants, friends, and charities. For most of this book, that differentiation won’t matter and I’ll be clear when it does. For simplicity I will refer to heir or heirs to encompass all of these different variations.
Dear Heir, You can also use this book as a guide to help the creator of the literary estate organize their estate—to make your life easier in the future. Maybe you can use the story below to nudge them into action.

The Inside Story: Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley left $500,000 to his ex-wife Priscilla and the remainder of his estate to his daughter Lisa Marie.
Generous? Not very.
The balance of the estate was worth only another $500,000. Still not bad—except that it was incurring over $500,000 per year in expenses. Nine-year-old Lisa Marie was going to be bankrupt before she was ten.
Priscilla stepped in on behalf of her daughter. She didn’t need the money, she was already a successful businesswoman worth several million in her own right. But she wanted to help her daughter. After years of massive lawsuits that are a matter of public record, Priscilla recovered control of the mismanaged estate and then ran it properly.
Did she succeed? The Elvis Presley estate is worth over $400 million dollars as of 2017 and he is still a household name forty years after his death.
Lesson: If you leave your estate in a mess, will there be a Priscilla to clean it up? Or will your literary legacy die shortly after you do because the tangled disaster you left behind was too much of a pain in the ass to deal with?

Initial Publication: July 18, 2017
Print Pages: 138
Audio length: 2:42
Narrator: Read by Author