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This month we have expert advice, and secrets from Simon Whaley on how to get paid twice for your work, Ten Top Tips focuses on adding value to your work with photographs, which is echoed in Useful Websites. Student Successes are as uplifting as usual and, if you’re stuck for ideas, see Inspiration.
Getting Paid Twice
By Simon Whaley
There’s no one else reading this, is there? It’s just you and me, right? You have checked over both shoulders, haven’t you? Good. The reason for this cloak and dagger approach is because I’m going to share a secret. It’s a secret about how to get paid twice for your work. Actually, this secret may also help you to get paid for those free pieces some new writers produce because they want something for their portfolio.
As the great Samuel Johnson once said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” If you’re going to write for a client, then value your work and let your client pay for it. These days, it is also possible to be paid again for those same words, with only a little effort on your part. Here’s how:
Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society
The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society collects secondary royalties from UK organisations and distributes them amongst their members. But what are secondary royalties? Large institutions, such as businesses, educational institutions, and government bodies, pay an annual licence fee to enable them to scan and copy books, magazines and journals. It’s payments like these that allow universities, colleges and schools, for example, to photocopy a section from a textbook and then hand it out during a class or tutorial. The payment is a small, financial token acknowledging that if those words hadn’t been written in the first place, they couldn’t have been photocopied and shared.
Now, it is not physically possible for every author of every photocopied document to be tracked and recorded, so that’s not how the system works. Instead, members of the ALCS can log a record of every article they’ve had published in a magazine or journal and, because it is published, it is therefore available for photocopying. It’s because your published piece can be photocopied, that you’re entitled to some of those secondary royalties. Effectively, what happens at present is all the money is shared between the number of registered writers, based upon the number of articles they have had published. At present, you can register any articles published since 2008.
I’ve collected payments from ALCS for many years now, and the payments vary each year because more and more writers are becoming aware of the organisation (so the money has to be shared between an even greater number of writers) and because the number of articles I have published each year varies.
The ALCS collects secondary royalties from a variety of sources, so it’s worth checking out their website at www.alcs.co.uk for more information. They’re an organisation who collect money from more sources each year, and have recently established a scheme for paying out against freelance written newspaper articles published between 1998 and 2008.
There are currently 80,000 members of the ALCS – there is a one-off joining fee of £25, but this is taken from your first annual payment (and if nothing is paid out to you, then your membership fee isn’t charged). Members of some organisations, such as the Society of Authors, can join for free. Authors should also register all of their book titles with the ALCS because the society collects payments from many European public lending right (PLR) systems. (More about that later.)
The Design and Artists Copyright Society
The Design and Artists Copyright Society works on a similar basis as the ALCS, collecting secondary royalties from photocopying and scanning licence fees from large organisations. However, whereas the ALCS is concerned about your published words, DACS looks at pictures. From a writer’s perspective what this often means is photographs. If you take your own photographs to augment your articles, then you can also claim your share of these royalties through the DACS Payback scheme. Unlike ALCS, there is no need to be a member; you just need to make a claim during their annual claim period. Further information can be found at www.dacs.org.uk. Their claim form asks you to list the number of photographs you’ve had published and in how many different magazines and issues. Authors who have used their own photos to illustrate their books can claim too.
Public Lending Right
Public Lending Right is a scheme to recompense authors for the loss of royalties from books borrowed from a library. In the UK, the scheme began in the 1980s, after campaigning by writers during the 1970s. When a library buys an author’s book, the author receives a royalty from their publishers because the book has been purchased, like any other book sold through a bookshop. However, before PLR, when people borrowed that book from the library, the author didn’t receive any more money and they’d also lost out on further book sales and royalties – because if 20 people borrowed the book from the library, that was 20 fewer copies sold. So, PLR is a small recompense for this. It works out at a few pence per book, but it can produce a useful annual payment to writers.
To find out more, visit www.plr.uk.com for the UK PLR system. To be eligible, your name needs to be listed as an author on the title page. Others able to claim PLR include artists and illustrators, translators, and even ghost writers, if they’re entitled to a royalty from the publisher.Public Lending Right is a scheme that is being adopted by many other countries across the world. (The ALCS collects payments from some of these foreign schemes on behalf of UK authors.) Ireland is the latest country to implement a scheme.
Borrowing figures are taken from a wide sample of libraries across the UK, and payments are calculated on a ‘per book borrowed’ basis, so it doesn’t matter how many books you’ve had published, every one should be registered with the PLR. Author’s books need to be registered by 30th June to be included in the payment for the 1st July – 30th June of the same year. The minimum PLR payment is £1, whilst payments are currently capped at £6,600 for the most borrowed books. Capping payments prevents the big, famous writers taking most of the money, ensuring that a greater number of ordinary writers benefit.
So, as you can see, it is possible to be paid more than once for a piece a work. Sell an illustrated travel feature to a magazine and you could collect the fee from the magazine, and then a contribution from ALCS and another from DACS. Write an illustrated book, and in addition to your royalties, you could collect PLR money, a contribution from DACS and even a contribution from ALCS if they collect PLR money from foreign PLR schemes. If you’ve only had a handful of articles published, don’t expect to become a millionaire overnight through these secondary royalties. But, they are still a very useful and welcome income source!
Other Collecting Societies include:
Austria - www.literar.at/
France - http://www.la-sofia.org/sofia/Adherents/site/index.jsp
Germany - http://www.vgwort.de/
Germany - http://www.bildkunst.de/
Ireland - http://www.icla.ie/index.php?index
Italy - http://www.siae.it/
The Netherlands - http://www.lira.nl/
The Netherlands - http://www.pictoright.nl/nieuws/actueel.html
Spain - http://www.cedro.org/inicio.asp
Further Collecting Societies across the world can be seen here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_collection_societies
Simon is a tutor for the Writers Bureau and a full time writer. He’s the author of the bestselling ‘One Hundred Ways For A Dog To Train Its Human’, published by Hodder & Stoughton, and eight other books on a wide range of topics including gardening, walking and grant funding. He’s also written for a variety of UK publications including ‘The Lady’, ‘Heritage’, ‘In Britain’, ‘The Observer’, ‘Daily Express’, ‘Country Walking’, ‘Cumbria’ and ‘Trek and Mountain’. His short stories have appeared in the UK, Ireland and Australia.
