If you are published or self-published there are a few
other things you should do as a matter of course.
PLR
Public Lending Right - https://www.bl.uk/plr/
Register your book for this. Even if you’ve only written a
chapter in a book, you can get some PLR. Don’t forget to register for Irish PLR
at the same time. This means that every time some-one borrows your book from a
library, you get a small payment or a proportion of one. It varies from year to
year and is about 6p with an upper cap of about £6000. On contracts for our
anthologies we tell you which % to claim.
This is well worth doing. Several of my books that have been
out for many years earn more in PLR than they do in royalties.
ALCS
Authors' Licensing and Collecting Agency Register at https://www.alcs.co.uk/. This can be very
lucrative as well for any articles you have had published. Register with them
everything you have published.
They collect money from photocopied and broadcast works.
They also collect foreign PLR.
We can't dictate which proportion of the book you can claim
– ALCS works that out. They award a generous 30% to editors.
They charge a modest one-off fee for registering but you
don't have to pay this up front. They set it against your earnings.
If you are a member, the Society of Authors pays this fee
anyway.
You'll earn at least enough each year to cover your Society
of Authors membership fee.
Author Central
This is run by
Amazon and can be found here: https://authorcentral.amazon.co.uk/. You can list all of your books here and keep track of sales rankings.
How about giving a tweak to each week's lowest ranking book?
Perhaps more
importantly it allows readers to find your other books easily.
Occasionally if you
are in an anthology Amazon will at first not allow you to list the book. Then
you are invited to write to them. They usually respond quickly and positively.
We design our books so that it is easy for them to see that you are a
contributor.
You can also add
multi-media, blog feeds and events to your author page.
Amazon Associates
This allows you to earn money from advertising on your
sites. I'm not advocating that you cover your sites with advertising and
Facebook won't let you do this anyway. However, you can link to your books and
even embed attractive pictures of them into your sites. When someone clicks on
that and then buys the book, you earn a small percentage. If they then go on
and buy more form Amazon, you earn a small percentage of those sales as well.
I once earned quite a lot when someone bought a copy of one
of my books and then went on to purchase several boxed sets of popular TV
programmes.
Good Reads Author Programme
Do join this.
You have to be approved but it is well worth it. Again you get information
about how many people are engaging with your books. It increases your
visibility as an author.
If you have a blog
you can also link so that it gets uploaded to Good Reads every time you
post.
You will also get a
lot of information about what to read.
They do organise
giveaways and you always lose money on this. However when I ran one recently I
noticed that in the week after it had finished the sales rank on that book on
Amazon went right up. The extra sales more than covered the cost of the books
I'd given away.
Want more tips like this? See below.
