I’m not promoting my website… I was already spoken to about that. But I’m faced with something that I just need some assurance and tips about.
Now, let’s pretend I’m writing a book about what spells to cast for certain situations. I’m honestly very interested in the subject, however I’m not experienced. Also, l need to write instructions on how to do the spells yourself without infringing copyrights. I could put each spell with all the instructions in quotations then cite my references, however, that’s sorta like just copying someone else’s work - which feels wrong to me. In my heart I want to work on this project for others to discover, but if I can’t figure out how to do it without copying spells and rituals from other people, it won’t be possible. I can’t just make stuff up. So what am I to do?
I know that if something is common knowledge, there is no need to cite your reference.
Many books require you to even “ask permission” first before you can use their material. I’ve actually tried doing this already without getting any response. Should I just throw my hands in the air and say forget it? I’d rather not… I already created a beautiful site, it just lacks information.
I’m so new with all of this and I asked a family member who was a highschool teacher and taught her students all about citing references… She confirmed to me that I can’t just “copy spell instructions then cite my references”…
Sigh… Can anyone give me a hand? Sorry for not knowing enough on how to proceed.
What you are basically asking is how to take other people’s work and pass it off as your own on the website you can’t seem to stop mentioning.
You’ve said it yourself, you have zero magical experience, but you are wanting to just pump the knowledge of others and jot it down for your own gain. In one post, you literally asked members to take the time to write out step by step instructions for you to copy and paste.
Here is what I would recommend you do: Grab a good grimoire, or one of the tutorials available on this forum and actually put it into practice for yourself. Spend some time finding out for yourself what works, and what doesn’t, and then, with a bit of personal experience under your belt, rewrite the spells and rituals so they are more closely a reflection of yourself. Don’t just copy and paste the original, but make the magick your own in some way.
Authors who write how-to books, be they magical or mundane, tend to do their own hands on research before publishing anything (even an academic study isn’t just copied down verbatim, but generally includes personal anecdotes from those who actually practice what is being written about). They make the effort to learn for themselves before trying to show others. EA Koetting, for example, practiced traditional ceremonial magick from such systems as the Golden Dawn, and various LHP orders, before he began publishing his own take on magick.
Then stop. Books are written from experience. No experience, no book.
Get the experience first, compile the notes, after you have amassed a good body of work, then get all your notes out, sort them into chapters and start writing something that connects the notes into a cohesive work.
This is the case even if you’re doing a memoir for someone else: you still have to interview them and collect together the content for the work, and that takes a lot of reading a lot of talking and a lot of taking many many notes.
Yes and you could end up in court a lot. Nobody needs that, not you and not others. People will just google for what they want and skip the book, and you will be at best only talking to yourself.
So consider your audience and why you want to do this in a public way.
Then consider what differentiator you have that will get people to get your book and not go elsewhere. What makes it special and cool?
Don’t copy anything:
If you want your own grimoire, then one by one find a spell you like and actually do it, do the work, become a real mage, not an armchair scholar merely surveying what’s known.
You will probably tweak it to suit, you will a story about it afterwards…there is your experience that you should note in your journal, and that is something new and different to write into a grimoire you can publish.
If you want to make a quick buck off collating spells you can find all over the web, it’s been done and you won’t make enough to make the time and money worth it. It’s boring, frankly.
If you want to make an encyclopedia, start by looking up all the other encyclopedias (like, grimoire.org) and seeing where they overlap and where they are missing. Become an encyclopedia expert, buy all the encyclopedias and know them all. See what niche yours would fill.
Like, look up knowyourmeme.com as well: that’s an encyclodpedia too, but it’s very in depth with information on names and dates of who started what meme how and when. It covered multiple uses and evolutions of the meme in chronological order. It’s a massive amount of research, but it’s very interesting.
You put the cart before the horse.
Here’s a good article about “getting into the corridor”,which is about getting a job but there’s good advice there that applies here:
Now, you’re doing this by being on BALG, but now you need to be patient with yourself and start the hard work of learning the business. And this can take several years. But only after that level of detailed hard work will you have enough to write something that adds to the body of work on magick.
And of course before you can do that you have to define a bit better what you are trying to do and why:
get your business plan in order. Get your “elevator test” on point.
