Why Intellectual Property Should Be Preserved Before Its Future Value Is Understood
By Joe Cozart
There comes a point in the life of anyone who creates a substantial body of work when the question changes. At first, the question is whether the work can be made. Then whether it can be published. Then whether anyone will read it. Eventually, another question appears. What happens to the work when the creator is no longer there to explain it?
I have published 40 books through Amazon KDP. Most average around 250 pages. That means there are roughly 10,000 published pages of original work sitting inside a catalog that did not exist a few years ago. That number startled me when I finally did the arithmetic. Ten thousand pages is not merely a stack of books. It is an archive. It is intellectual property. It is a record of how a person thought.
That distinction matters because creators are often poor judges of the eventual value of their own work. We know what we intended. We know which pieces felt important when we wrote them. We know which books sold and which did not. But none of that guarantees that we know which part of the archive will matter twenty years from now. History is full of work whose significance arrived late.
One of the stories that has always stayed with me is that of Lee Miller, the American photographer and war correspondent who documented some of the most consequential and horrifying events of World War II, including the liberation of concentration camps. After the war, much of that work receded from public view. She carried the trauma of what she had witnessed and largely withdrew from the professional identity that had produced the photographs.
After she died, her son Antony Penrose began going through what she had left behind. He found negatives, photographs, manuscripts, records, and an archive that revealed dimensions of his mother’s life and work that even he had not fully understood. Then he did something important. He preserved it, studied it, organized it, wrote about it, and over time helped the world understand the magnitude of what she had created.
That story is not important to me because I imagine my own work belongs in the same historical category. That would miss the point entirely. The point is stewardship. The creator cannot always know what the archive may become. Sometimes the work has to outlive the certainty of the person who made it. Sometimes the archive has to survive the artist. Sometimes the son becomes the steward.
The upstream inference is simple: the value of an intellectual estate is often least visible at the moment when someone is most tempted to simplify it.
That is where preservation becomes strategy.
The downstream view asks what the books are earning today. The upstream view asks what options disappear if the archive is dismantled before anyone understands what it contains.
A body of work should not be judged only by what it earns this year. A book that sells modestly today may become relevant later. An essay may find its moment years after publication. A phrase may suddenly acquire meaning because the world changes around it. A collection of writing that appears miscellaneous while it is being produced may eventually reveal an architecture that was not visible in real time.
That is one of the strange privileges of intellectual property. It can remain dormant without being dead. It can wait. That is why preservation matters. The temptation after a creator is gone is often to simplify too quickly, close the accounts, delete the files, discard the drafts, assume the old work has no practical value, and move on. But intellectual estates do not always behave like ordinary possessions.
A chair is a chair. A photograph may be evidence. A manuscript may be source material. A book may become relevant again. A private essay may reveal something about an era. A collection may become more valuable together than any single piece ever was alone. The archive should therefore be understood before it is reduced.
Preserve it first. Understand it second. Then decide what should happen to it.
That is not sentimentality. It is optionality.
Once an archive is discarded, fragmented, transferred carelessly, or allowed to disappear, the future cannot recover the choices that were destroyed with it. Preservation keeps those choices alive long enough for meaning and value to reveal themselves.
That is the upstream position.
Information is common. Inference is scarce.
The information is that there are 40 books and roughly 10,000 published pages. The inference is that those pages may represent something larger than their current sales, current readership, or current visibility suggests.
I have no idea what my own 40 books will ultimately become. They may remain books. They may be republished, turned into audiobooks, adapted, bundled, excerpted, translated, licensed, forgotten, rediscovered, or handed from one person to another long after I am finished writing them.
That uncertainty does not bother me. In fact, I find it rather elegant. A creator spends years trying to make meaning. Then eventually the work leaves his hands, and someone else has to decide what it means.
The wise steward does not begin by asking what can be thrown away.
The wise steward begins by asking what has not yet been understood.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.™
Live Upstream.™
GMJoe.org