While we cannot provide our authors with qualified legal advice, we recommend our authors seek out copyright permission before they include any song lyrics in their manuscript, unless the song lyrics are in the public domain. Without direct permission from the rights holder, you generally can not legally include song lyrics in your book, even if you credit the owner.
As outlined in Section 9 of the Tellwell Terms, the author agrees that they have all necessary copyright or permissions for all content they supply to us during the production of their book.
From our experience, it does tend to cost a considerable amount per song to publish lyrics in a book, and the cost and requirements are dependent on the lyric’s copyright owner.
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