A plea for PLR

Twice a year, my Twitter feed is inundated with cheery messages from other authors, along the lines of “Just received my PLR cheque – £129 for my loans this year!” and “I love PLR – cheers for my cheque!”.  For the uninitiated, PLR stands for Public Lending Right, and it is a small payment made to authors (and illustrators, editors, translators and audiobook narrators) whenever a book is borrowed from a UK library.  At the moment, if their book is borrowed the author is given 11.26p.  The money is handy, of course (an annual cap of £6,600 is set so that the most popular authors don’t run off with millions) but what is really exciting is seeing your books being borrowed.  Or I imagine it is really exciting.  For I have yet to benefit.  Let me explain.

Despite the availability these days of extremely accurate borrowing data, PLR is still calculated on a old-fashioned method, using loans data from a sample of thirty regional library authorities (there are 151 in total) which is then multiplied to provide a national estimate.  I have donated the Sam books liberally to my various local libraries – but they are all in the Cambridgeshire library authority.  Which was last part of the PLR sample in 2010.  This means that the PLR scheme, by not looking at Cambridgeshire, knows nothing about my books and so does not include them in its calculations.  Sadly, the sample proposed for the year ending June 2022 does not include Cambridgeshire, and nor does the one ending June 2023.  I have written to the PLR people a few times, asking why – given that all libraries these days keep digital records of loans – they can’t simply use complete data rather than a sample, but they’re not keen.  I’ve blogged about this before, way back in 2015, but nothing has changed since then.

So here is my plea.  If you are a library user, please ask your library to stock books by your favourite authors – which may even include me.  The more widely our books are stocked, the more likely we are to be lucky enough to get into that PLR sample and therefore become eligible for a share of the pot.  You can check here to see whether your local library authority is part of next year’s sample group – yes, that’s you, Suffolk, Camden, Oxfordshire and Cornwall, for instance.  And it’s not just about the money: I dream of the day when I receive a PLR statement showing that people are borrowing my books because I know how much I love libraries, and what a thrill it can be to find a favourite author’s back catalogue just waiting for you to borrow, or to discover a previously-unknown author whom you grow to love.

I have a dream

At the weekend, for reasons too complicated to explain, I spent a couple of hours thinking about my dreams – not the sort where your teeth are falling out while you’re being chased by your O-level maths teacher for your overdue homework, but the sort where you imagine and plan for the future (as in “hopes and dreams”).  The brief was to dream big – to write down anything, regardless of likelihood or practicality.  Of course several of my dreams related to the Sam books and I thought I would share those with you:

• To publish two more Sam Plank books, taking the series to seven
• To hear one of the Sam books read aloud on Radio 4 as their “Book of the Week”
• To win “The Selfies” in April 2019
• To see “Fatal Forgery” on sale in Tesco and Waitrose [one for the numbers, the other for the snobbery…]
• To open a national newspaper and see one of the Sam books unexpectedly and favourably reviewed
• To have the Sam series recommended by Mariella Frostrup
• To see the Sam series turned into a Sunday evening costume drama on the BBC, with Claudie Blakley playing Martha – Sam is still to be cast.

Here’s Claudie in “Lark Rise to Candleford” – and maybe moody Brendan Coyle would work as Sam…

What surprised me when I went back over my Sam dreams was that none of them mentions money.  Sure, winning an award or getting a review heard/read by thousands would increase sales, but what seems to matter to me is a wide readership rather than earning a fortune.  I do appreciate that I am in the lucky position of having a day job quite apart from my Sam writing, which means that I do not have to rely – thank goodness! – on Sam income, but still, it’s shown me that I am motivated by getting people to read Sam rather than by getting them to buy books.  I’ve blogged before about my unhappy experience with libraries and the PLR system, but despite this I would be just as happy to see more people borrowing the Sam books as I would to see sales increasing.  (I just love checking our local library catalogue and seeing all the Sam books out on loan.)  So that’s the dreaming done – now on with the reality of writing.

Both a borrower and a lender be

About a year ago I wailed to you about the pain of PLR.  Public Lending Right is the scheme we have here in the UK to reward authors when their books are borrowed from libraries, to the tune of 6.66p per loan – in other words, a Good Thing.  I was very much looking forward to getting my share of the loot, but it turns out that PLR is calculated not on an actual basis but on an extrapolated basis from stats returned from a sample of libraries – and Cambridgeshire is not being sampled at the moment.  And as my books are only in Cambridgeshire libraries, I do not exist as far as PLR is concerned – boo!  I have taken the matter up with the Society of Authors, asking why PLR cannot be assessed more accurately – with all libraries now recording loans electronically, surely this is possible – and I’ll keep you posted.

However, my PLR pain (particularly in February, when Twitter is full of authors saying “Fab – just received my PLR cheque – I LOVE being an author!” and the like) does not stop me checking the local library catalogue from time to time to see how Sam is doing.  And this is what I see today:

In case it’s too small for you to read, “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” are out on loan, while “Worm in the Blossom” is on the reserve shelf waiting to be collected.  I may not get any money from these loans, but hopefully people are enjoying the stories, and might recommend them to others and perhaps even morph themselves from borrowers to buyers.  Whatever happens, Martha would be amazed to know that there are free lending libraries, and that people are using them to read about her.

The pain of PLR

I forgot to tell you all about this.  One of the benefits of having an ISBN on your books is that it is very easy to register them with the Public Lending Rights – PLR – scheme here in the UK.  The PLR people keep track of library loans, and pay authors 6.6p each time their book is borrowed (up to a maximum payout, so that JK Rowling and Lee Patterson don’t drink the well dry).  So as soon as “Fatal Forgery” was ready, I registered it with the PLR people and then dashed into my local library (Cambridge Central) and handed over two copies as a gift.  I did the same with “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  And then (I know, I know – I can see from here that you’re rolling your eyes pityingly) I checked the online library catalogue about once a week to see if my books were out on loan.  And quite often they were!  Great excitement, imagining Sam soaking up the rays on a beach in the Bahamas or hiking manfully up Kilimanjaro – I know how he likes to travel.

The PLR statements come out in January, with payments made in February.  Now, I wasn’t expecting any money: the deal is that you will get a cheque only if your 6.6p-per-loans add up to at least a pound – so at least sixteen loans.  But I was looking forward to seeing my loans itemised on my statement – proof that I was a real author with real books being borrowed by real people from a real library.  But the statement arrived, and nothing – nada, zip, niente, not a loan in sight.  I contacted the PLR people, and they explained it thus: “Unfortunately, we do not collect loans data from every library in the country.  Rather, we collect a sample of data from all regions and we use this to estimate the number of national borrowings.  Cambridgeshire was last in our sample in 2010 so this would explain why we have not picked up any loans of your books.”  Aaaaargh!  Wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments!  I had assumed that with computers and all that cleverness, the system would accurately record all loans and do a big add-up, but no, it’s sampling and I’m just not being sampled.