ALCS: A Passive Income Source for Authors

You may be able to collect royalty payments from “secondary uses” of your work

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

ALCS, the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society is a non-profit organisation open to authors in the UK. The organisation secures funding for authors in situations such as when their work is loaned out by libraries or copied for use as class material.

The works can be academic or mainstream literature, recorded material, book chapters, journal and magazine articles, and scripts. The material can be published in print or online.

ALCS was established in 1977 by writers working to support the legal rights of authors and currently has over130,000 members. The organisation works on behalf of authors who would ordinarily not be able to access these funds. In addition to lobbying for these rights they work to gain recognition of what authors are due.

What are secondary rights?

Royalties are usually paid by publishers on primary rights and uses of published material. That is the royalties paid when books and magazine articles are sold. However, when an article or a book chapter is photocopied for a class, or a book is checked out of the library, authors don’t receive royalites for those uses. The ALCS closes this gap, providing authors with payment for secondary use of their work. These payments come from fees charged by organisations, such as the CLA (The Copyright Licensing Agency), who handle licensing fees for library loans and reproductions of works for educational or commercial use.

Secondary uses include photocopies, cable retransmission, digital reproduction, and educational recording. It is when a third party uses a work that has already been sold, such as when schools photocopy books or articles for classes, when libraries lend books, or overseas TV companies re-transmit UK TV programmes.

Who qualifies?

The organisation is based in the UK, but is open to international memberships. However, in order to benefit financially, the author must be a UK resident.

However, if you are not a resident of the UK, the organisation has over 55 reciprocal societies around the world that are connected to ALCS. ALCS maintains a list of these organisations and contact information. If the secondary rights of your work has been used in the UK, the ACLS can transfer the fees to your local organisation.

The ALCS has a lifetime membership payment of 36 GBP, However, that can be deducted from first payment.

Payments made twice a year in March and September

What qualifies?

To qualify for payments, journals and magazine articles need to be published in a periodical based in the UK, however books can be published in any country. It can be any genre, as long as the material has an assigned ISBN or a UK ISSN.

In the case of books, they can be entire books you have written, translations of books, or individual chapters, short stories, essays, or poems that are part of a collection or anthology.

Artists can also apply for the use of secondary rights for photos, illustrations (drawings, paintings, prints), charts, and diagrams that have been published in a book or periodical in the UK.

The website has a form to fill out that includes your name, the title and type of material you published, and the ISBN or SSN. When you submit the form, the information about your publication is logged and you can see it, and all the publications you submitted on your member page. Authors can update it with new publications as soon as the material is published, but there are deadlines before pay periods. If a deadline is missed, then any payments will be included in the following pay cycle.

ALCS as a lobbying organisation

ACLS also works on the national and international scene to gain recognition of the rights of authors and for them to be rewarded for use of their material. The organsiation has a regular newsletter that includes articles about what they are doing, along with reminders of deadlines. Recent news articles include issues such as how AI affects copyright and licensing, reports on events that promote literacy and authors, and news about grants and awards.

The website also has information about current copyright law.

Membership in ACLS is an important consideration for academic authors since academic journals and book publishers do not pay authors. This provides a much needed income stream for authors who would otherwise not be paid for their work.

For more information, check out the ALCS website: https://www.alcs.co.uk/