Free Images for Authors

It’s been said to never judge a book by its cover, but the reality is that books have to look nice if you want them to sell (and who doesn’t?). Authors spend a lot of time writing content and visualizing a finished product. At FontLife, we do our best to capture the author’s vision and produce a product that makes the author proud. All too often, new authors send us a manuscript and ask that we insert photos, images, cartoons, etc. at certain locations in the final layout. It’s a common practice for these authors to provide us with images they’ve downloaded from the internet. Our first question to the author is “Do you have the license, rights or permission to use these photos?” The fact is, authors are responsible for making sure they are not infringing copyright laws. As publishers, we can help police the situation, but ultimately, it’s the author that remains responsible for their own content.

Licensing Images

Finding images on the web can be tricky and fraught with licensing nightmares. Some people download images from Google and modify them with new layers and effects believing they can use it for their own purposes without permission because they’ve created what is essentially a new image. This may not be the case at all. They very fact that they’ve modified an image without the permission of the copyright holder may be a violation of the Copyright Derivative Works clause. Look at this excerpt from U.S. Copyright Office Circular 14:

Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, an adaptation of that work. The owner of a copyright is generally the author or someone who has obtained the exclusive rights from the author. In any case where a copyrighted work is used without the permission of the copyright owner, copyright protection will not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully. The unauthorized adaption of a work may constitute copyright infringement.

When dealing with copyright infringement questions, it’s always best to consult a legal resource who specializes in intellectual property matters. When it comes to downloading images from the web, it’s best to either purchase licenses to use the images from sources such as Getty Images or iStock, which is also owned by Getty.

There are also quite a few sites on the web where authors have released their work into the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. All Creative Commons licenses require attribution, which we usually include in a book’s front matter. As authors, we hope the following list of sites on the web will help you find the images you need to convey your vision at no additional cost.

Our 3 Top “Go-to” sites

Freeimages

Creative Commons Licenses and Public Domain Images

Pixabay

Public Domain Images

Wikimedia Commons

Creative Commons Licenses and Public Domain Images

Other Sites

All of these sites offer either Creative Commons Licenses, Public Domain Images or both.