When it comes to creative work, Creative Commons is the way to go. I know a guy who exclusively releases music under the Creative Commons license.
Here's a "Chooser" wizard, that asks you some questions and then suggests a suitable CC license for you.
Fun fact KGWZ released one of their albums completly free (i guess public domain) and encourage you to play with it as much as you want :)
Here's a careful reminder that "public domain" is not a worldwide thing ^^; in fact, very few countries have a public domain.
In some cases, if you try to publish something as "public domain" from a certain country, it is invalid - because their judiciary does not define public domain as anything.
It maybe considered public domain, until you die and someone wants that copyright, in which case the family takes precedent over the estate - full stop.
There's a difference between countries that have common law (US and UK) and those that have civil law (the Nordics), so yeah.
But CC is valid license pretty much everywhere, with a few exceptions.
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
You probably want the SA (share-alike) or NC-SA (non-commercial share-alike) but take a look and decide what suits you best.
From https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-i-have-to-provide-my-name-can-i-ask-that-my-name-be-removed :
Do I have to provide my name? Can I ask that my name be removed?
As a licensor, you may choose to receive under any name that you wish, such as a pseudonym or pen name, or you may choose not to be credited by name at all, and to publish anonymously. You do not have to be credited under your legal name. Most jurisdictions permit this, but you should check to be sure this is valid in your jurisdiction.
CC BY-SA
or CC BY-NC-SA (the non-commercial-use-only one)
RMS’s biography “Free as in Freedom” seems to be under the GNU Free Documentation License, incase that’s anything to go by.
If you write something, you own the copyright, period. There's no registration process or anything like that. If you made it, it's yours, legally. And the only process involved to exercise your legal rights would just be proving that you're actually the one who made it.
Of course, none of that makes it certain that no one will claim it as their own or use it for something you don't want. As a general rule, just assume that anything you don't want used in a way you don't like simply shouldn't be put out into the public at all, regardless of what kind of license you package with it. If you're an average person and not a billionaire good luck exercising any kind of legal rights for intangible stuff like written words.
It is generally a good idea to include with anything you put out there some kind of license, which could be as simple as a .txt file that says "Made by [name], free to use for xyz purposes with abc caveats"
For a book stuff like that can go into the first or last couple pages that usually include all sorts of random boring information and publisher credits and whatnot
You do have to prove you wrote it. Nothing does this better than owning the credentials to an account with your name and posting it publicly on GitHub, Internet Archive, or similar
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