It’s the day of the year when all good authors get a pleasant bonus for their work from the good people at the Public Lending Right, and learn how many of their books were borrowed from UK libraries over the past few months.
If you’re not familiar with how the PLR helps writers in the UK, here’s my annual explanation:
If you are a writer/editor/illustrator/etc., a resident of the UK or Ireland and you ever need a reason for donating your books to the library – on top of all the obvious ones like promoting reading and supporting this valuable and increasingly undermined public service – this is it.
Administrated by the British Library, the PLR is a system where authors who’ve written books that are in public libraries get a little revenue each time somebody borrows their works. It’s a way to repay writers who won’t be earning a royalty from a sale in a bookstore.
The PLR office pay a nominal fee based on how borrowed you were – and in the interests of fairness, you can’t earn more than around £6000, so the big names don’t get to hog all the money.
The PLR and our libraries are constantly under threat from government cutbacks, so if you are a writer or a reader, please do your bit to help support both as best you can.
The last few months have been particularly tough on the PLR team, thanks to a crippling cyber-attack that brought down the British Library’s computer systems (read more about that here – and let me just say, what kind of people target a library, for crying out loud?) but they’ve worked diligently to get things back up and running. Librarians are book heroes!
And so, here’s the Top Ten Library Loans of my novels for 2022-2023 (with the previous year’s position in brackets)…
1 (1) Rogue
2 (7) Airside
3 (2) Outlaw
4 (3) Ghost
5 (6) Nomad
6 (4) Shadow
7 (5) Exile
8 (9) Firewall
9 (8) Garro: Weapon of Fate
10 (10) Ghost in the Shell
My Marc Dane novels once more dominate the chart, with the 5th book Rogue holding on to the top slot, with over 15,000 combined loans of the series in total! I was also pleased to see my first stand-alone thriller Airside jump up 5 places to the #2 position from last year. And I’m quite amazed to see my novelization of the movie Ghost in the Shell still clinging tenaciously to #10. Just bubbling under the Top Ten are my Doctor Who and 24 tie-in novels Peacemaker and Deadline, but because for the issues mentioned above, my latest thriller Dark Horizon and the Splinter Cell tie-in Dragonfire didn’t get registered in time to make this year’s report.
As always, my thanks go to the PLR team at the British Library, especially in the light of the very testing circumstances they’ve had to work through – and also to everybody out there who borrowed my books in 2022 and 2023.
I can’t say it enough: wherever you are, support your local libraries and keep reading!
