Thanks PLR

David Bishop’s splendid blog prompted me to check my Public Lending Rights (PLR) account. (David’s blog is itself worth checking, too.)

Authors registered with PLR can get an estimate of how popular their books were in British libraries over the year. To compensate for lost sales, PLR pays about sixpence for each time a book was borrowed.

As the PLR Newsletter reveals, more than 37,000 authors have registered, and 62% of us will get some form of payment this year. To ensure  that people like J K Rowling don’t scoop the entire pot, there’s a maximum payment of £6,600, paid out this year to 250 authors (well below 1% of all registered authors).

In order of popularity, my most read titles were:

1. Torchwood: Another Life

2. Torchwood: Pack Animals

3. Doctor Who: The Ancestor Cell

4. Doctor Who: Kursaal

5. Doctor Who: Frontier Worlds

My Torchwood books are more recent, and so it’s no surprise that they were borrowed much more than my older and out-of-print Doctor Who titles. I have to share my loot with Steve Cole for “The Ancestor Cell”; people still seem to be reading and, indeed, reviewing it. Steve himself lives in a world where dinosaurs fly spaceships and cows use a time machine. Try not to judge him too harshly.

Meanwhile, hurrah for the PLR. And thank you to the thousands of people who have borrowed my books from UK libraries.