New authors in Britain must make sure they register for Public Lending Right – the means by which you get paid each time your work is borrowed from UK lending libraries. Registration is easy enough if you apply through the PLR site but unless you register you can miss out on significant earnings.

I found out the hard way as described in The Bookseller.

Use it or lose it

28.05.09

I NEVER thought lending libraries could get me so het up.

As a first-time author I believed the old publishing axiom “you always earn a few pennies every time your book is borrowed in a library”. But as with many axioms this one is only half true. Yes, you can earn a few pennies for every borrowing . . . but only if you have gone through the registration process.

I found this out in the most painful way when I was recently sent a Guardian cutting about last year’s national figures for library lending. I am a first-time author and was thrilled to learn my book Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart (Vintage) was the UK’s most-borrowed travel title of 2007–2008 and the fourth most borrowed non-fiction title.

That must translate into quite a few pennies, I thought.

But when I made inquiries it turned out the Public Lending Right (PLR), the official title of the mechanism by which authors are remunerated for borrowings, does not automatically apply to an author in the way copyright does. Instead, you must actively register for PLR.

No amount of pleading to the staff at PLR headquarters in Stockton-on-Tees could get round this. Dr Jim Parker, the overall boss, politely took my call but, just as politely, he told me the rules clearly stated to be paid for borrowings in the 2007–2008 year my book had to be registered by 30th June 2008.

Masochistically I asked what I had lost out on. A glance at his database and he came back with the information that Blood River was borrowed 29,238 times up to 30th June 2008 and would have earned me £1,748.

To sweeten the news he added that figures for the 2008–2009 year for Blood River were showing borrowings of 19,000 but only if I registered by 30th June 2009. After putting down the receiver I went to the website and made sure I didn’t miss out again.

I found registration straightforward and the PLR staff appeared keen to get authors signed up but a system which was set up supposedly to help authors did not seem very well thought-out.

Agents and editors are not obliged to tell authors about the need to register so there are going to be plenty of authors out there who, like me, have been missing out. Then I read that PLR was created by the last act passed by Labour in 1979 before the long, dark night of Tory rule. It was almost enough to turn me into a supporter of Margaret Thatcher.

And now, when would-be authors ask me for advice, I have a simple answer: make sure you have registered for PLR.