Public Lending Right: The Movement of (Mostly) Small Amounts of Money
I've just been initiated into one of the more obscure financial rituals of the writing business: got my first statement of income under the Public Lending Right scheme. Under PLR, each time a book is borrowed from a UK library, the author (assuming they've registered for the scheme), gets a little bit of cash. 'Little' is the operative word here: the rate is currently just under 6p per loan. Unless you're a bit of an exceptional case (of which more later, complete with facts and figures), PLR isn't going to be paying for many holidays. Still, it's a welcome token. Another minor way of tracking your book's journey out into the big wide world.
The income for the author would be much higher, of course, if all those library loans had been book purchases instead. You can hope some of those borrowers might become buyers in the future, or that they'll tell their buying friends about this great book they've just read, but at the end of the day helping writers sell books is not why libraries exist. Shocking, I know, but it's true apparently. Their purposes are rather nobler, and having a well-used library system is an inherently good thing for a country and a society. So I'll just take my PLR payment as a sign that I've become a tiny little cog in the wheels of A Good Thing and be grateful that people are reading the book anywhere and anyhow.
The PLR people have also put out a booklet in which 'writers comment on the PLR scheme, its future priorities and the broader context of authors' rights.' Sounds dull as ditchwater, right? Well, probably. You can judge for yourself if you like, since this is the pdf of the booklet, but in case you're not so inspired, here's a few things that caught my eye:
There are 37,000 authors (I think they might be including some illustrators, translators etc. in that figure too, but I'm not sure) registered for the PLR scheme, with around 1,400 new ones joining each year. Wow. That seems ... quite a lot.
The number of visits to libraries each year is increasing, but the number of book loans and the number of books bought by libraries are both decreasing. People are obviously finding things to do in libraries that don't involve actually borrowing printed books. Does suggest a slight disconnect developing, though, since as far as I'm aware the number of new titles published each year has been going up, so if the libraries are buying less of them, does that mean the proportion of titles that are available through libraries (in printed form, at least) is declining?
No surprise to anyone, I imagine, but writing is a top heavy business. Some recent research says the top 10% of authors now accrue 50% of all income earned by writing. The bottom 50% get just 10% of the riches. That'll be the 'death of the midlist' everyone keeps talking about, I guess, but if anything those figures seem less extreme than I would have expected them to be. Still, in recent years the figures for wealth distribution in the UK as a whole have shown a very similar pattern, to within a couple of percentage points. Maybe under the British version of capitalism, the top 10% of every category just naturally get 50% of everything. Law of Nature or something.
According to the same research, the average income from writing for UK authors is declining and is now down to £4,000 p.a. Treasure that day job. Really. Maybe even get another one, just to be on the safe side.
Also available is the PLR's annual newsletter, which is even less interesting to a non-writer on the whole (although if you've got masochistic tendencies, or just like to know how things work, here's the pdf of that, too). But it does have some more of those facts and figures I so enjoy:
Approximate total number of book loans from UK libraries per year: 323 million (down from 330 million the previous year).
About 83% of resgistered authors received less than £100 as their PLR payment this year. See what I mean about it not paying for many holidays? This includes 35% who received nothing at all. You don't get paid anything if your earnings are under £1, I think, plus there's probably some registered authors with no books in-print.
Just over 4% have a PLR income in excess of £1,000 this year. That includes 242 lucky souls (less than 1%), who qualify for the maximum allowable payment of £6,600. In order to get that, your books have to be borrowed a very impressive 110,000+ times. I did actually go onto the PLR website to see how many sf/f/h authors are on their lists of most borrowed writers, but to be honest there're hardly any and you could guess who they are with a moment's thought: JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, that kind of thing.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered Winterbirth was borrowed rather a lot less than 110,000 times. Still, it's always good to have something to aim for.
The income for the author would be much higher, of course, if all those library loans had been book purchases instead. You can hope some of those borrowers might become buyers in the future, or that they'll tell their buying friends about this great book they've just read, but at the end of the day helping writers sell books is not why libraries exist. Shocking, I know, but it's true apparently. Their purposes are rather nobler, and having a well-used library system is an inherently good thing for a country and a society. So I'll just take my PLR payment as a sign that I've become a tiny little cog in the wheels of A Good Thing and be grateful that people are reading the book anywhere and anyhow.
The PLR people have also put out a booklet in which 'writers comment on the PLR scheme, its future priorities and the broader context of authors' rights.' Sounds dull as ditchwater, right? Well, probably. You can judge for yourself if you like, since this is the pdf of the booklet, but in case you're not so inspired, here's a few things that caught my eye:
There are 37,000 authors (I think they might be including some illustrators, translators etc. in that figure too, but I'm not sure) registered for the PLR scheme, with around 1,400 new ones joining each year. Wow. That seems ... quite a lot.
The number of visits to libraries each year is increasing, but the number of book loans and the number of books bought by libraries are both decreasing. People are obviously finding things to do in libraries that don't involve actually borrowing printed books. Does suggest a slight disconnect developing, though, since as far as I'm aware the number of new titles published each year has been going up, so if the libraries are buying less of them, does that mean the proportion of titles that are available through libraries (in printed form, at least) is declining?
No surprise to anyone, I imagine, but writing is a top heavy business. Some recent research says the top 10% of authors now accrue 50% of all income earned by writing. The bottom 50% get just 10% of the riches. That'll be the 'death of the midlist' everyone keeps talking about, I guess, but if anything those figures seem less extreme than I would have expected them to be. Still, in recent years the figures for wealth distribution in the UK as a whole have shown a very similar pattern, to within a couple of percentage points. Maybe under the British version of capitalism, the top 10% of every category just naturally get 50% of everything. Law of Nature or something.
According to the same research, the average income from writing for UK authors is declining and is now down to £4,000 p.a. Treasure that day job. Really. Maybe even get another one, just to be on the safe side.
Also available is the PLR's annual newsletter, which is even less interesting to a non-writer on the whole (although if you've got masochistic tendencies, or just like to know how things work, here's the pdf of that, too). But it does have some more of those facts and figures I so enjoy:
Approximate total number of book loans from UK libraries per year: 323 million (down from 330 million the previous year).
About 83% of resgistered authors received less than £100 as their PLR payment this year. See what I mean about it not paying for many holidays? This includes 35% who received nothing at all. You don't get paid anything if your earnings are under £1, I think, plus there's probably some registered authors with no books in-print.
Just over 4% have a PLR income in excess of £1,000 this year. That includes 242 lucky souls (less than 1%), who qualify for the maximum allowable payment of £6,600. In order to get that, your books have to be borrowed a very impressive 110,000+ times. I did actually go onto the PLR website to see how many sf/f/h authors are on their lists of most borrowed writers, but to be honest there're hardly any and you could guess who they are with a moment's thought: JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, that kind of thing.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered Winterbirth was borrowed rather a lot less than 110,000 times. Still, it's always good to have something to aim for.
posted by Brian Ruckley at 8:16 PM :: Permalink ::
3 Comments:
Brian, I came to your interesting post via the Piccadilly Cowboys forum where it received a mention and was commented on by Terry Harknett (aka George. G. Gilman) and Mike Linaker (aka Neil Hunter, Richard Wyler).
I am a western writer myself and my hardcover books go mainly into UK library systems. My problem with PLR is that I now live in New Zealand, which disqualifies me for any British compensation for lost royalties. If I lived in an EC country, and was a citizen of, say, Germany, it would be okay apparently.
What I can claim is an NZ semi-equivalent called the Authors' Fund. Last year, I called my income from this source the tea money, since the population of NZ is about a seventeenth of the UK's and libraries are in proportion. The payment wouldn't stretch to even a beer a day, though this year it will buy me a few biscuits to go with my tea.
I wrote about the ins and outs of this at moderate length a couple of years ago. The article contained no four-letter words but it raised objections from a couple of my Black Horse Western writing colleagues. When I persisted and published it in Black Horse Extra (www.blackhorsewesterns.com , click March '06) it was used by the author who owns the Yahoo blackhorsewesterns group to serve me with a "Notice of Removal". Astonishing but that's what happened. I was ostracized.
The principle of PLR is basically a sound and fair one. Authors are generally paid for their work via royalties, which in turn depend on the number of copies sold. If hundreds of people can read each copy, because the book is mostly stocked by the libraries, that amounts to a virtual elimination of income.
Chap: thanks for the interesting comment. I can see how your position - having books out through a publisher whose main market is UK libraries, while being unable to plug into the UK PLR system because of where you live - might be a bit frustrating! It's certainly true that I, as a UK author, can theoretically tap into PLR-equivalent schemes in several other EU countries (though by no means all - some of them have no equivalent schemes in place yet anyway), and I assume your average German author can do the same for UK PLR if they want to. You wouldn't think it was beyond the wit of man to have a more or less global scheme that linked together all national schemes, but evidently that's too much to hope for at the moment.
Quite aside from the issue of how the money moves around, what I find oddest about the whole thing, to be honest, is the apparent absence of any equivalent scheme in the US. As you say, the underlying principle seems sound and fair.
Public Lending Right is under attack in 2007. How do I get my views across EFFECTIVELY that PLR should be linked to the RPI?
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