Once a year, authors receive their PLR statements. For those of you who don’t know, PLR stands for Public Lending Right and is a payment to authors in recompense for the loss of sales due to people borrowing their books from a library.
While we receive a royalty for each copy of our book bought by the library service (as we would from any other book buyer), PLR recognises the fact that that single copy is then borrowed many times over.
The scheme selects a sample of libraries across the UK each year and monitors what readers borrow over the course of a year.
Our statements give us that breakdown, showing how many times each of our books has been borrowed.
For me, my most borrowed books for the last PLR year (1st July 2016 to 30th June 2017) were:
- The Positively Productive Writer,
- Best Walks in the Welsh Borders,
- Fundraising for a Community Project.
Which just goes to show how important libraries are. And it’s at times like this that I believe PLR should stand for People Love Reading.
So if you’ve borrowed one of my books from a library recently, then thank you.