Amazon allows your parent to publish your book for you

4.1 Eligibility. You must have an active Program account in order to participate in the Program. You represent that you are at least 18 years old (or the age of majority where you reside, whichever is older) and that you are able to form a legally binding contract. A parent or guardian of a minor can open a KDP account and be the Publisher of the minor’s Book. (From Kindle Direct Publishing Terms and Conditions)

Yes, this means your parent takes on liability for your work. Your parent would also collect any money from sales.

This is not the same thing as getting your parent's permission. The account you need in order to publish must be in your parent's name.

The other issue is that your book has multiple authors, but you can only post it under one account. My suggestion is that one of you (probably you) is the primary author and that person's parent owns the account.

First, write out a contract. The contract spells out who owns the copyright, how you split up money, and what happens if a publisher wants to purchase your comic. You might think this is all unnecessary. Because what are the chances you'll make money and, besides, you all trust each other anyway.

Do it anyway.

Seriously, never publish without a written contract. Just sitting down and hashing out the terms is enough usually to make sure what's obvious to you is exactly the same as what's obvious to your friends.

Once the contract is to everyone's liking, print out enough copies for everyone and order a bunch of pizza or Indian food or something. Have every author sign every copy. As minors, your signatures are not legally binding, but it's important to show that you have read the contact and take it seriously. Next, have one parent of each author also sign. Everyone keeps one copy (plus you can photograph one fully signed copy and keep it in the cloud). Now you can eat!

A sample contract might read:

[A's mom] will set up the Amazon account and publish [comic name] in the Kindle store. Any expenses must be approved ahead of time by the group and the person will be reimbursed first out of any proceeds. If there is anything else left, it gets divided up this way: A gets 40%, B gets 20%, C gets 20%, D gets 10%, E gets 10%.

And so forth.

If your comics get popular enough that you're each getting more than about $20US, find a cheap lawyer and make a better contract than your simple one.

Being fined isn't really an issue with publishing as a minor. It's not illegal. It's just that your signature isn't binding and any contracts you make without your parents don't count. The reason to make a contract with your friends (with their legally binding parental signatures) is in case you all disagree about something. "Why is A getting more money than I am?" "I don't want my work on Kindle anymore: take it down!" "I'm going to publish the comic at this other place and keep all the money."

Cross your t's and dot your i's and you'll be fine. Congrats on writing the comic and good luck with it!

posted over 5 years ago

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Cyn‭

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