Tag: royalties

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Money for Nothing, Join for Free

There are a couple of perennial topics on this blog. One of them is public speaking, and the other is banging the drum about joining the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.

The ALCS was founded in 1977 to ensure writers are given fair payments for any of their works that are copied, broadcast or recorded. The organisation is the literary equivalent of the better-known PRS for Music, which does a similar job for musicians.

This year, £35,038,136 was shared between 111,415 members. It’s important to note this is not an equal share, but calculated according to the activity of each author’s work. You can bet that bestsellers like Richard Osman and Julia Donaldson took a sizeable chunk of the pie.

My payment this year was around £133. It’s not enough to live on, of course, but it’ll pay my energy company for nearly two months. What’s more, that’s from just nine publications spanning as many years.

So how does an author grab a piece of the action?

The ALCS has recently suspended online applications for reasons unknown, but will accept a postal version. Visit the How to Join page to download and fill in the form.

You don’t need to send any money. Instead, the organisation will deduct a one-off fee of £36 once you’ve earned that figure in royalties. This grants you lifetime membership. Payments are collected for a variety of different visual works, so check the website for details of these.

To start earning, you’ll need to enter the ISBN of each work you’ve had published. This is the 13-digit string of numbers beside the barcode, or 10 digits if the book was published before 2007. Remember to include every publication where you receive credit, regardless of its age.

After all that, it’s just a matter of maintaining your list of works on the website and awaiting the annual payment.

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How to Collect Secondary Royalties

Even in the writing community, it’s not widely known that published writers might be entitled to secondary royalties. These are generated when a work is lent, copied, rebroadcast, &c. Not only that, it’s simple to register for collection.

Firstly, you’ll need the ISBN and/or other details of the publications where your work appears. Then sign up for the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and follow the instructions. Lifetime membership is £36, which is deducted from your first royalties payment so you pay nothing upfront.

There are two payouts per year: in March and September. Writers might be paid in one or both of these, depending on what types of payments have been received. The amounts you receive are never a fortune, but just enough to acknowledge the use of your work.

When I received my payment last week, it was £93.88, with most of that coming from UK fees, but some from EU and non-EU sources. I currently have six works registered, dating back to 2016.

I can’t find a breakdown of the exact amount contributed by each work, but judging by the pattern of payments, it’s a safe bet to assume the more recent ones are higher earners, and I’m quite happy about that.

That latest work was an anthology that took more than two years from the first meeting to the final publication, featuring a number of local poets and photographers. We knew from the start there would be no payment because it was for charity, but we had been promised a complimentary contributor’s copy.

It then emerged that the committee had decided not to offer this. I still have the chain of angry and disappointed emails. Some of the writers offered potential compromises or solutions, but the issue was never resolved and most of us refused to buy a copy.

So although the amount isn’t great, I’ve earned enough from my contribution to buy several copies, even though I still wouldn’t.

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The Middle of the Road

It can be hard to believe that that even well-known writers might only be one piece of work away from losing popularity.

Experience helps a lot, from knowing your particular audience to being aware of wider trends – not to mention fads – in contemporary tastes. However, there is no telling for sure how the public will react to the next offering.

A good way to look at this phenomenon is to consider the winners of the Booker prize. Here’s a list from 1969 to 2014, in reverse chronological order.

Only a few of these have become household names, such as William Golding, Salman Rushdie, and double winner Hilary Mantel. But mention Aravind Adiga, JM Coetzee or even the first winner Bernice Rubens, and it’s likely you’ll need to give a little more context about who they are. That doesn’t mean they aren’t popular writers among their fans, merely that their work hasn’t caught on with the public the same way as their prized novels.

But who needs to be an outright success as an author? There is a term in publishing known as the midlist.

These are books from authors that don’t shift in great numbers, but do sell well enough to justify remaining in print. By its very nature, there are no great examples of midlist authors, because most of a publisher’s roster is likely to fall into this category. In fact, remove the handful of high earners and everyone else probably fits there.

This structure seems to be particularly true in non-fiction. Friends who have told me anecdotally that writing articles can bring in a steady enough income to justify their efforts.

So even if your next project doesn’t catch on as you expected, give it a little time and see whether it fits within the midlist.