Can you plagiarize yourself? The short answer is NO.
If you wrote it, and you retain the rights to the material, and you can do whatever you like with it.
Jonah Lehrer, recently hired by The New Yorker, repurposed his own material.
I haven’t gone into the story in depth, but it seems a non-issue. He retained the rights to his work, so he can use it wherever he likes. If he’s repurposing material in a staff position, presumably his boss knows he’s repurposing.
As Jonah Lehrer “Self-Plagiarism” Brouhaha is Crap | Matthew E. May says:
“As the story goes, Mr. Lehrer is accused of lifting material from his blog and using it in his book, and vice versa. He is accused of using material he’s written and posted in his blogs and books in New Yorker articles, and vice versa. BIG F’in DEAL. We all do that. Geez, Guy Kawasaki’s last two books (Reality Check and Enchantment) were essentially hard copies of his popular blogs. I myself reprint and repurpose stuff all the time…I reprint my OPEN columns here, for example.”
I repurpose, and you should repurpose too, because it makes sense… as long as you retain the rights.
If you’ve licensed your material — let’s say a magazine has licensed an article with First North American Serial Rights — it’s still your material. Once the magazine has published it, you can offer other rights elsewhere. Or you can use the material in a book. It’s your material.
You can’t repurpose clients’ work
On the other hand, if you’ve written material for a client, under a “Work Done For Hire” agreement, you can’t repurpose it. You sold it, with all rights. The copyright belongs to the client, once you’ve been paid in full for it.
So be careful about what you repurpose. 
Never be shy however, of reusing your material. There’s nothing wrong with repurposing a series of blog posts for publication as a Kindle ebook, for example. You’d be crazy if you didn’t do that.
Just make sure that you announce that that’s what you’re doing, in the ebook’s description, and in the ebook itself: “Originally published on my blog ________ (whatever your blog’s name is.)
You can’t plagiarize yourself. Just make sure that you do indeed own all the rights to the material when you repurpose.
The post You Can’t Plagiarize Yourself (As Long As You Own the Rights) appeared first on Angela Booth's Fab Freelance Writing Blog.
