Ten Minutes With Mary Rasenberger
CEO OF THE AUTHORS GUILD, MARY RASENBERGER
COURTESY AUTHORS GUILD
Mary Rasenberger is a recognized expert in copyright and media law. For more than 25 years, she practiced law in roles that spanned the private, government, and corporate sectors before becoming CEO of the Au- thors Guild in 2014. In the run-up to the Authors Guild Foundation’s In- augural Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival from September 22 to 25, Berkshire Magazine talks to Rasenberger about her work and the role Guild plays in our society.
How many members are there in the Authors Guild and what does that nation-wide membership look like? We have over 12,000 members, and they range from fiction writers, poets, nonfiction writers, cookbook writers, how-to book writers—the entire gamut of book authors. We also have approximately 2,700 professional journalist members.
What are the goals for the Authors Guild? We are a membership organization for professional writers, and we have a host of resources for our members. We’re also an ad- vocacy organization. That’s how I got drawn into the Guild—advocacy around laws and litigation to protect and defend the rights of authors. We do a lot of work in D.C. on copyright law, for instance. Right now, we’re also fighting for collective bargaining for freelance creators since they currently have little to no bargaining power when it comes to contract terms. We’ve also been doing a lot of work on antitrust on Amazon’s outsized influence and control in the publishing industry; and we are getting more and more involved in lobbying on the state level. One of the things we’re really actively working on right now is getting a law passed in New York State, The Freelance Isn’t Free Act. There’s already one in New York City. The law says that anyone who employs a freelancer has to provide a contract and has to pay on time. It is remarkable how often freelance writers have to chase down pay. We also work with publishers on their contracts, and with Audible and Amazon about their contracts and practices. If you’re a member and you’re having an issue with Amazon, we have a channel where we take our members issues directly to senior-level people there to get them resolved.
So it’s more important than ever for the Authors Guild to be in existence? Yes, definitely. If not for the Authors Guild, things would be a lot worse for writers.
Are there any other organizations similar to the Authors Guild that represent authors and writers? We’re the only professional associa- tion for all authors, and we are the only one that regularly lobbies in D.C. and provides legal assistance to authors.
What’s the benefit of joining an organization like the Authors Guild? The first thing I tell writers is that it is your professional association, and that as a writer, you should think about your writing as a business and should support the health of your profession. All authors should join, in my humble opinion, for the advocacy alone—it is about writers supporting each other and mutually protecting their work.
What interested you in the job? Prior to joining the Guild, I practiced law and was doing a lot of what I would call copyright policy work, particularly related to publish- ing and other media. One of my clients was the Authors Guild. The Authors Guild has always had a presence in copyright pol- icy, going back to its foundation. It’s been involved in amending the copyright law to watch out for the interests of authors. This is so important because the copyright industry groups—like the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Academy of America—have so much more money for advocacy than the creator groups. They have a lot of lawyers on staff, they have lobbyists, and they have a bigger presence in D.C. If we’re not there sticking up for the individual author, then laws get written, decisions are made that don’t factor in our specific interests. The Authors Guild has always been a leader in protecting the individual creator. This made me very excited about joining the Guild. I’m also a lover of the arts and particularly literature. I have been surrounded by writers in my personal life. My brother, my former spouse, and so many of my dear friends are writers; and I’ve been a big reader since I was a small child. Books have been incredibly import- ant to me as long as I can remember.
What genre of writing do you enjoy most? I’m a big literary fiction reader. I read a lot of nonfiction, too, on topics that interest me. I especially love history and, really, any well-told story.
Are you excited about the WIT Festival? I’m so excited. It’s not something that we’ve done before—literary programming around ideas. I love this expansion of our mission. The Authors Guild Foundation was created in the 1970s. It has a broad mission that includes the public about literature, but we never did much of that until a few years ago—mainly just the writer education programs. WIT was Lynn Boulger’s brainchild. [See page 52.] She had done something similar at the College of the Atlantic. We had already been making baby steps into literary programs, but this expands it much more broadly, gives life to that aspect of our mission, which is bring- ing literature to people and emphasizing the importance that books and writers play in the American discourse.
How does that fit into the purpose of the Authors Guild? If we don’t have people who appreciate literature and appreciate reading books and understand the importance of that society, we’re not going to have a robust literary profession—or culture. We, as an organization, are not just focused on providing benefits to members. We are very much about protecting this precarious profession of writing.
What do you hope that the festival will do for the Authors Guild? Writers know who we are, but people who aren’t writers don’t necessarily know who we are. They don’t know about our mission and the im- portance of our mission.
What is the difference between the Authors Guild and the Authors Guild Foundation? The Authors Guild Foundation is a supporting organization of the Authors Guild. It funds our advocacy work, as well as our educational programs for authors. Now we also have this new literary programming, the WIT Series and Festival, focusing on the value and importance of literature. That’s a really important part of our national messaging these days.
What gives you the passion for your job? It’s a love of books and reading and knowing how important it is to protect writers, because if you don’t protect writers, they can’t write for a living, and they write fewer great books. Then there are issues like the recent book banning that’s popping up all over the country. That’s when you realize that what we’re doing really makes a difference. We have to counter that with the message that if we’re going to be an intelligent democracy, people have to read. We can’t ban books just because we don’t agree with the positions of the author. We’re an incredibly diverse, complex society. Our literature needs to reflect all of our experiences.
Is there any author that in your position that you were, like, Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe I met this person? Every day. I remember when I first inter- viewed, I was so intimidated, and when I first started, it really blew me away, working with these incredible writers. And it still does whenever I think about it. Working authors are people who can put their arms around thoughts and feelings and translate them into words in a way that others cannot. Talented writers who have spent years perfecting their craft are on a whole different level when it comes to communicating with words than the rest of us. They are able to express our ideas in words so that we can better understand and have discourse about them, particularly new issues or circumstances that we are confronting. Writers help us understand our world, each other, our own lives, and what we’re living through. That is what we want to bring to audiences with the WIT Festival.
—Anastasia Stanmeyer