Public Lending Right Payments frozen – Authors hit by Government’s library cuts.

Earlier this week I picked up on a Tweet by one of Britain’s best loved Fantasy Authors, Juliet McKenna. Juliet was somewhat dismayed about a Government announcement – no surprise there! – here’s what she said:

Authors’ Public Lending Right payments [have been] frozen. Great. Not. My steadily diminishing income takes another hit.

For those who don’t know, when an author’s book makes its way into a library an author receives a set amount of money per loan of their books. Now, this isn’t a huge amount; as of 2013 it is 6.2Pence (about 10Cents).

So… why? Well, it comes as a result of the Government cutting the amount of money that they allocate for Public Lending Right (PLR) from £6.4million in 2012/2013 to 6.1million in 2013/2014 (a fall of 4.7%).

How will this affect authors? I guess it depends how ‘borrowable’ your book is and how much money you are making from book sales. Although authors such as James Patterson are having their books borrowed as much as 2,000,000 times throughout the year, the maximum payment is capped after 106,000 loans (so the most you can earn is £6,600). Out of the hundreds of thousands of authors who have their works in libraries, which increases by about 1,500-1,600 per year, only 183 authors surpassed 100,000 loans.

Juliet also commented upon the fact that the Government has yet to come up with a solution for authors to receive payments for their books borrowed from ‘volunteer-run libraries’. With so many of Britain’s libraries being closed down, a number of communities have stepped up and saved their communities by running them on a volunteer basis. The problem is, however, that the culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, has yet to address the fact that their loans are excluded from PLR if they don’t have an official connection to their local authority (Council).

Although The Society of Authors have said that they are “pleased” that there is no change on the rate per loan (I presume because there was talk of a cut), they save said that: “The Society of Authors continue to campaign against the closure of libraries and the exclusion of volunteer libraries from the PLR scheme. In addition to this, we continue to press the goverment on extending PLR to audiobooks and ebooks and remind them of the Digital Economy Act 2010 which agree the extension of these payments for a limited time but these have never been implemented.”

To leave on a slightly jollier note, here are some figures from PLR that show reading in Britain is still going strong:

Children’s borrowing is climbing. Last year 81.8million books were borrowed (this represents 37.4% of total books borrowed)

James Patterson, who I mentioned earlier, has been the most borrowed author for 6 years in a row. He is one of only 7 authors to have his books borrowed over 1,000,000 times.

The UK’s Most Borrowed Book was 10th Anniversary by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro. This represents just how into crime Britain is with 7 of the Top 10 Most Borrowed Books belonging to this genres. Sadly, fantasy doesn’t make an appearance even in the top 100 loans (that I could see / that I recognised) 🙁

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