It’s that time of year when authors are told whether they have earned any money from the Public Lending Right system. If any libraries have your books on their shelves, and if anyone borrows them (as judged by a sample of libraries) then you get some dosh, at the rate now of 9p/loan.
My books are bringing in £46.78 soon – woohoo!
That £1.26 for Fighting for Birds is very welcome given that it is payment for work I did in 2011 but it is very clear that the copies of Inglorious are still being read and their loans make up the majority of my PLR payment.
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Hi Mark.
Just checked our bookshelves, we have seven of your books, including Blogging for Nature, four of them signed and with a cover price of £124.90. I’m pretty sure we didn’t pay full price for any of them but hopefully discounting doesn’t impact on your royalties!
The PLR system obviously won’t make you a fortune so hope the books are still selling as well.
I used libraries a lot when I was first interested in birds. Our local library had a set of The Handbook of British Birds by Witherby et al in the 1950s and I would take one out in sequence at each visit. I noticed that often a book had not been borrowed again between my visits.
Eventually I bought a set of my own from Hay-on-Wye about 40 years later. There was some symmetry when I noticed that they originally came from Margate Reference Library.
The lesson is clear – you need to diversify into best-selling fiction!
James – I’ll give it some thought, thanks.
Many in the CA think you have!