The flipside of PLR: the books people don't want to buy

The media have just started their annual assessment of what can be learned from the library loans (PLR) statistics. The answer is - not entirely what they think can be learned. Someone needs to teach these journos about statistics. An article in the Guardian, for example, claims that fiction totally dominates borrowing because  most of the top 100 most-borrowed titles are novels. That doesn't follow. Bestsellers are less of a thing in non-fiction. There could be more non-fiction loans in total than fiction loans, but just spread over far more books so that few make the top 100. Indeed their table of 'loans by genre' puts fiction in second place (largely because they didn't include children's fiction, probably - but no matter).

But that aside - PLR figures tell you which books people borrow. Or, looked at another way, they tell you which books people don't buy. The Guardian is surprised that the only cookery book in the top 100 is Jamie Oliver's book on cooking for cheap (laughable, really, as his view of cheap is not everyone else's). That's not at all surprising. On the whole, you want to have a cookery book in the house so that you can use it again and again over a period of years, not borrow it for a couple of weeks. Cooking for cheap (whatever it's called) is an exception, and  is presumably borrowed because the book is so expensive that people who want cheap food can't afford it. (£26! WTF?)

The books people borrow from the library are those they can't afford to buy or don't want to buy. Some people can't afford any books (or think they can't - some just have different priorities) and so borrow anything they read. Then there are people, including me, who will borrow books that are very expensive and which they don't expect to use repeatedly. I do occasionally buy books that cost over £30 but I try not to.

Children's books are heavily borrowed. This is good, of course, as the children get to read the books. But it also indicates that people are unwilling to buy books for their children. Fine, many kids get through books at a rate of knots and it's too expensive to keep up with them. But that's not all that's going on. There is a perception of value related to book length. Picture books in particular are heavily borrowed - often because people think it's 'not worth' paying £5 or more for a book that's only a few pages long and has few words. I won't even go there. I've read the 19 words of  Duck is Dirty about 200 times in the last fortnight. And will read them again and again and again over the coming months. Plus all the times I read them 23 years ago, and 19 years ago. That was money well spent. Looking at my own PLR figures, I get way, way more PLR on very short illustrated children's fiction than on anything else.

What else don't people want to buy? Blockbuster/bestseller novels they would read once and give to the charity shop - hence Dan Brown being top of the 'not bought' chart. Obviously lots of people do buy these books - that's why they are bestsellers. But if I ever felt the need to read a Dan Brown novel, which I can't see happening, I would be quite likely to borrow it from the library and leave my book-buying budget for books I will value more and want to own.

Anyway, the cheque should come soon, so I shall be happy enough to benefit from people not wanting to buy my books. I hope those who don't get very much PLR are comforted by the thought that there are not many people who don't want to buy their books.

PLR number crunching

It's PLR time again - that joyous time when authors find out how much money they have earned from library loans in the UK.

As usual, some of us are celebrating, some being glum, and some relieved that it's not fallen too far. Is there a pattern? My PLR is up again, but it's up every year as I release a lot of new books each year. So I thought I'd stick all the figures into Excel and do a bit of exploring. And it's quite interesting...

I've looked at a total of 113 titles. I have more books than that registered, but I've combined the paperback and hardback loans for each title. I was careful to take account of books that came out during the last year and so aren't listed the previous year. In looking at the changes per book, I ignored one book that came out close to the end of the 2010-11 PLR year and so wasn't available for borrowing for most of the year. Thereafter, these my findings:

Thirrteen books show appreciable increases in loans. Of these, five are non-fiction (38%). Two of the  non-fiction are very simple reluctant-reader titles. One is an edition of Machiavelli's Prince. One is a photographic book about London, so possibly of more interest because of the Olympics. The last is a book about healthy lifestyles. All except the Machiavelli are children's books. The average increase over last year was 210 loans, with the largest non-fiction increase being 301 for London: A photographic exploration, published by Chrysallis.

All the rest of the increases (8 titles) were in fiction, with an average increase in loans of 872. The largest increase was 2,642 (up from 5,545 to 8,187) for Where's My Sock, published by Hachette.

And the losers? All non-fiction, with children's non-fiction losing faster than adult non-fiction. The biggest loser by a very big margin was Take Me Back (Dorling Kindersley), which dropped by 794. As I only wrote about 10% of it, I don't really care - but I can't see why, unless it's because it gets stolen a lot.  (It is very nicely produced.) A stolen book can't be borrowed again. The next largest loser was Kidnaps (Franklin Watts), a book about forensic science, which dropped by 230.

Overall, my loans have gone up by 15 per book on average (corrected for more books listed in 2012 than in 2011). That doesn't look significant. But:

• Fiction loans are up an average of 534 per book (using only books that were also out last year).
• Non-fiction loans are up by 7 per book.

And finally... 72% of my loans are from fiction, which represents only 13% of the titles (listed in both years). In fact, 56% of the loans were from just four books - the series All About Henry (with the sock). Why is this strange? Because it's part of a reading scheme. That means, kids are told to read it at school. So why the hell are they borrowing it from libraries? But no matter - please keep borrowing it!

How was it for you?

Still with PLR, but from a different angle today. The question this time is - can you maximise your PLR payments? I don't mean by visiting the sample libraries and borrowing your books, or even mobilising friends and family to do that. Borrowing books to raise PLR is a sad and desperate (and doomed) tactic that will cost more than it raises. No. I mean - to borrow a phrase from the Crabbit Old Bag of Help! I Need a Publisher - writing the right book at the right time in the right way to get as much PLR money as possible.

Some books are borrowed more than others. You're more likely to earn lots of PLR from a racy romance than a handbook on cello maintenance, for instance. People borrow books for different reasons. They borrow books that they don't want to buy - either because they don't want to keep them after reading them, or because they can't afford them in the first place.

Picture books get a lot of loans because many people can't afford to buy lots of books for their children. Many who could afford them think (wrongly) that the book will take 20 minutes to read and so it's poor value for £8.99 - forgetting they will read the book again and again. Genre fiction earns a lot because readers consider it disposable. They read a romance/western/sci-fi book and will never look at it again. They might get through several a week. That's an expensive habit if you pay for each book, so libraries are attractive suppliers. (Loans of genre fiction might soon be hit by Kindle use - we'll see.) Non-fiction loans seem to be down, probably because people are finding information online that they would previously have looked for in a book.

My PLR goes up, year on year, because I write a lot of books. But libraries are buying fewer books. That means that having a backlist already in the libraries is important, too. But old books fall apart and are thrown away, not to be replaced, so very old titles don't earn PLR.

So - what's borrowed? No detailed breakdown for this year is available yet (though the annual report from PLR is), so I took a look at my own titles to see what's earning most.

Of 150 registered titles, half the PLR comes from the top four titles - they are all children's fiction. Of the top 10 titles, 9 are fiction. More of my titles are non-fiction than fiction, so that's a very significant result. The non-fiction title in the top ten is a glossy, very visual book on volcanoes published by Dorling Kindersley. Of the 9 fiction, all except one are published by a very large publisher, and all published since 2007. The books with titles most likely to appeal to children (in my view) did not score higher than those with less intriguing titles. (The official info that has been released so far shows loans of children's fiction up slightly, loans of adult books slightly down.)

My top-earning title clocked up two and a half times as many loans in the UK as sales worldwide. It's called Too Dirty and is published by Hachette.  All the top-selling fiction titles were for children aged 5-6. Even though the PLR is split 50:50 with the illustrator on these titles, the books generate a third of their advance each year in PLR.

The lesson from all this is that over its lifetime a book may earn more in PLR and ALCS payments than in fee/advance/royalties so we should be thinking about library-appeal as well as bookshop-appeal. Of course, the publisher is less interested in library-appeal so this has to be a covert agenda!

Which are your most-borrowed titles? Can we crowd-source enough info to put together a profile of the perfect book to write to get loads of PLR? Or at least, you might be able to maximise PLR-potential on your next book...

[PS - No, this is not an entirely serious proposal]

PLR =/= income tax (a curmudgeonly rant)

Yesterday was PLR day - the day all writers in the UK can find out how much they've earned in Public Lending Rights. There's lots of comparing - did you get more or less than last year? Which was your top earning title? Can we spot any trends? There's grumbling and celebrating, misinformation, conclusions that reveal scant understanding of either maths or the PLR scheme and - most chilling of all - a rush of people who declare it's very nice but a shame they have to spend it all on their tax bill.

Perhaps they are not telling the truth - tax has to be paid by 31st Jan, but the PLR payment doesn't come through until February. But let's assume they are, since we should take people at their word unless we have good reason not to. (Probably all the disasters in my life stem from that naive principle - no matter.)

[Note for non-UK readers: In the UK, income tax on self-employed earnings is paid in January. You have to work out what you owe on the previous year's earnings, and pay half in advance for the coming year, on the assumption that you will earn the same. You can adjust this guess if you think your earnings will be different. You pay the second half of the estimate in July. The following January, what you've already paid is deducted from what you owe. If you earn the same every year, you effectively pay half in January and half in July. If your income increases, you pay extra in January as there's a catch-up payment.]

What's so wrong with using PLR to pay your tax? Two things - firstly, it's unpredictable. You never know how much your will get. It's worked out by tracking loans at a sample of libraries and extrapolating. Much more importantly, though, you shouldn't have to! Why ON EARTH are these writers not setting aside the tax on their earnings as they get paid? It is the ONLY sensible way to be a self-employed person. You put the tax in a deposit account and you don't touch it, NO MATTER WHAT.

Some authors have other jobs, and their personal allowance (the amount you can earn without paying tax) is used up on their employed earnings. So they need to set aside 22% (or 40%, depending on their income level) of their income from writing. That's really easy - no hard sums at all. Those of us who earn only from writing have a rather more complex calculation to do, but you can create a spreadsheet to work it out for you, and as a guideline if you set aside 25% of everything (so ignore the personal allowance) you will have about enough. If you expect to be paying higher rate tax, set aside 30-33% of everything, depending on how far over the 40% threshold you expect to go.

Yes, you have expenses to deduct - don't worry about it. You also have NI to pay. You might get some money left over in your tax account at the end - and the first time you can use that to make the advance payment. After a few years, you can afford to take out some of the excess and spend it. But not immediately.

And finally - the figures don't work. The amount of PLR you can earn is capped at £6,600, and this year (2010-11), 263 authors earned the maximum. Now, if you're earning £6,600 in PLR you are earning a lot from your books - your tax bill is going to be a LOT more than £6,600. Actually, it would be interesting to compare tax bills and PLR income: ignoring payments on account, my PLR this year is around an eighth of my tax liability - so it wouldn't be a lot of help. Most PLR payments (nearly 15,000 out of a total of 23,000) are for under £50, so that's not going to go far in anyone's tax bill. I assume, though, that these trifling payments aren't going to professional authors but to people who've written the odd one or two books, probably some time ago, and maybe on obscure topics.

Authors manage to look unprofessional enough - let's not look extra-unprofessional by screwing up our tax accounts, or even pretending to. It's not cool to adopt an 'I can't deal with accounts' pose, it just makes you look incompetent. If I were a publisher, I'd be wary of commissioning someone who doesn't have the sense to set their tax aside - they probably won't take deadlines seriously either. After all, tax doesn't come as a surprise! It's not as though you just landed on Go to Jail - you always knew it was coming. And while flights of fancy and working outside the rules may be essential to your creative work, there's a lot of uncreative work involved in being a professional writer, and you need your feet on the ground for that part.

OK, rant over. You can all rant back at me now :-)
.

A note on PLR

Today I got my notification of Irish PLR. Many writers I know have been saying their PLR payments have been dropping, year on year. (PLR is money from public lending rights, paid on books borrowed from libraries.) Generally, my UK PLR rises, perhaps because I keep writing books at a healthy rate. I'm not sure whether the Irish is up or down, but I thought I'd do a little statistical analysis to see which books earn the most.

I write children's non-fiction (trade and schools and libraries), children's fiction, and adult non-fiction (trade and academic). Here's the breakdown:


Type of book                     % of my registered titles            % of Irish PLR earnings

Adult non-fiction, trade             11                                              3
Adult non-fiction, academic        6                                             0
Children's non-fiction, S&L     58                                             19
Children's non-fiction, trade       11                                           23
Children's fiction                         13                                             56

Conclusions? If you want to maximise your PLR, write children's fiction - more than half the PLR income came from around a ninth of my books. Children's trade non-fiction is much more profitable than schools and libraries titles, showing that children are more interested in reading for fun than doing their homework. Who's surprised? Not me.

(And another conclusion? I haven't registered all my books.... though I did exclude some that are so old I don't really count them. Still, the total is seriously lower than the number of books I've actually published, so something has gone wrong somewhere.)

How to read a publishing contract (7)

This is a short and easy clause. You just have to make sure it's there, really.

7. Author's Name and Copyright Notice

The Publishers undertake that the name of the Author shall appear on the title-page and on the cover or binding and jacket of every copy produced and that the following copyright notice shall be printed in every copy of the Work:

Copyright in the text Stroppy Author 20**

**indicates the first year of publication

You should make sure the publishers include this: it's vitally important to keep your copyright if you possibly can. It should always be possible with fiction, though if you are writing for a series sold into schools you might have to argue.

In the case of children's non-fiction, particularly that commissioned as part of a series intended for sale into schools and libraries, you may not have this clause. This type of work is often considered 'work for hire'. You can, if you wish, try arguing that you want to keep copyright and license the text to them, but I don't give much for your chances. Full sale of copyright is standard in many areas of children's non-fiction. I don't argue about this one, nor do most children's n-f writers. If you don't have the copyright clause, the work will usually pay a flat fee and no royalty. The publishers can re-use the work, re-issue it without telling you (though that is not polite) and produce it in different formats without paying you more or telling you. As long as you retain moral rights (we'll come to that) they can't just ransack it and use gobbets, or rewrite chunks of it.

This clause might say that the publisher will 'endeavour' to show the author's name on the cover, etc. This is not acceptable. They have the power actually to do it, and to make it a condition of any co-edition agreement. Make sure it does say it will be on the cover and title page - occasionally a publisher will miss your name off the cover, and some will even miss it off the title page. It is vitally important that you get your name on the title page as you need that in order to claim PLR in the book. If it is not mentioned in the contract, make sure you get it added. If you don't remember what PLR is, there is an earlier post on it and an article in the Bookseller about the importance of registering.

It is standard with licensed character work that your name will NOT be shown on the cover or title page, and you won't get this changed. The argument is that the book is usually presented as 'belonging' to the character (eg Angelina Ballerina's book of ballet shoes) and so it can't 'belong' to you. In addition, the character belongs to the original creator (which is a fair point) and they probably don't want your name on it. It is work for hire. There is nothing very imaginative in doing licensed character work - it follows a formula and adheres to a strict style and content guide. Accept that you won't get copyright or a cover/title page credit - if you don't like that, don't take the work. However, you may be able to get your name included on the imprint/acknowledgement page and as long as NO ONE has their name on the title page, you can still claim PLR on the book. It's worth arguing to have your name somewhere if it is a book that is likely to go into libraries (eg not a sticker book, or an activity book that is destroyed or defaced in use).

20**: the copyright date is always the date of first publication. If the book is reprinted in a later year, the copyright date stays the same. If the book comes out in a new edition, the copyright date changes when the text changes, but usually first copyright date is also shown.

.

Dividing the spoils

As tomorrow's the last day to register your books for PLR, here's a quick reminder of how to work out the share you should register as yours.

• 100% if you wrote all the book and it is not illustrated, or if you wrote the book and illustrated it and no other author or illustrator was involved
• 50% if you wrote OR illustrated a picture book
• 80% of the text share if you retold or adapted an existing book AND the original author is named on the title page; 100% of the text share if the original author is not named on the title page
• a %age of the text share if you co-wrote a book; the %age must reflect your contribution (so if you wrote one of four stories, for instance, your share would be 25%)
• a %age of the whole if you wrote or illustrated a book and the illustrator/author is named on the title page; the %age must reflect your contribution. Unless it is a picture book (50:50) the author's share is likely to be more than half, reflecting the balance of text:pictures and should be agreed with the other party/parties
• 30% of the text share of a translation
• 20% if you edited the book and contributed at least 10% or 10 pages of the material
• 50% if you compiled a book from different sources and did a good deal of work on it, including adding some original text
• 80% if you compiled a book for primary sources and the work took many years of research and included additional original writing.

And finally:

• if other contributors are dead you can't claim their share
• if other contributors live abroad you can't claim their share
• if you are not named on the title page OR entitled to a royalty, and others are named on the title page, you can't claim anything
• if you are not named on the title page BUT neither is anyone else, you generally can claim a share.

If unsure, register what you think and query because if you miss registering while waiting for an answer you can't register late. You can only register books that are actually published - a book that comes out in July (yes, I have one too) can't be registered until next year.

Now, go claim your money. You'll get the filthy dosh in February.

Money for nothing (but no chicks for free)

Once your book is in print, you need to register for PLR - public lending rights. Under this scheme, authors, illustrators, translators and adaptors are paid for the use of their books in libraries. Great, huh? I suppose it's not exactly money for nothing, as if there were no libraries, some of those readers might have bought the book. But it feels like money for nothing when it turns up.

The beauty of PLR is that you don't have to share it with your publisher - it's all yours! The money is paid in January or February each year on the basis of library loans during the previous year. No, you can't fiddle it by borrowing your own books lots of times and getting all your friends and relatives to do likewise. The payment is based on a sample of libraries, which changes each year, and is scaled up to give an estimated figure for total loans.

This is how it works. The fund available for PLR (currently about £6.8 million) is divided amongst registered authors (etc) for their registered books. The amount you will get is calculated from the number of times your books were borrowed, with the payment being approximately 4p per loan. There is an upper limit of £6,600 to prevent Jacqueline Wilson and so on walking off with the entire pot. If you earn less than £1 it won't be paid but is carried over to the next year. You will receive a statement in January and the money will be paid into your bank soon afterwards.

You can't just sit back and wait for the money to come. You have to register each new book before 30 June to be included in that year's calculation and payment. You can't claim retrospectively, so if you don't claim your books one year, you can't pick up the cash for that book later (unlike ALCS payments - more on that another day). This is becaues the amount per loan is calculated by dividing the whole pot by the number of loans of registered books, so if your book isn't registered, it's not included in the calculation.

It might sound easy, especially when you have only one book, to keep on top of your PLR registration. But you need to register each edition (each new ISBN) of each book if you are to get all that is owed to you. That means you have to register the hardback and then the paperback, and if there are any further editions, you have to register those, too. Often, publishers don't tell you when your book comes out under a new ISBN (eg library binding rather than standard hardback). To keep on top of it, search for yourself on Amazon. Once a book is registered, it is carried on from one year to the next, but you do need to keep checkng for new editions of old books (reprints are OK - they have the same ISBN). One book can have three or four different ISBN numbers.

What now? The deadline for registering books to be included in this year's calculation and payment is 30 June. If you're late, your book(s) won't be counted until next year, and you'll lose your money. You need to register yourself with the PLR agency (www.plr.uk.com) and give your bank details so that you can actually receive the money. Then you need to register each of your books in each of its editions. You will receive a confirmation to show what you have registered. You can't register books that aren't yours - there is a checking system in place and all your book registrations will be checked. Your name must appear on the title page of the book - that's the rule. However, if NO names are on the title page (as with licensed character books) you can still claim the PLR as long as you can demonstrate you wrote/illustrated/translated the book.

If more than one person is named on the title page - the illustrator and writer, or writer and translator, for example - you can claim only a share of the PLR. The standard is split of 50:50 author:illustrator for picture books. Adaptors can claim 80% if the original author's name is on the title page, or 100% if it isn't. (You can vary this if you both agree.) For illustrated chapter books, anthologies and so on, you will have to agree the proportion with your collaborators. You share will reflect the proportion you contributed, so if you have 10 poems in a book of 100 poems, you can claim 10% of the PLR. This means you have to talk to the other collaborators - the PLR agency won't do it for you.

PLR relates only to book loans in the UK, so there's no point registering the ISBNs of your US editions, for instance. (Money for loans in some other EU countries is collected by ALCS.) VAT is not payable on PLR payments (only useful info if you are VAT-registered.) And PLR continues for 70 years after you die, so your descendants can use the January cash to toast your memory.