Supporting the creative process – why it pays to be a member
Set up in 1977, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) was founded by writers on the premise of protecting authors’ rights and ensuring they receive fair remuneration for their work. Here ALCS’s Alice Donovan looks at how it protects authors’ work and talks to Manjeet Mann and Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick about their experiences with ALCS.
O
VER 40 years and with over 110,000 members, ALCS has paid out more than £500m to writers
that they would not otherwise have received. We not only pay out money to authors for the reuse of their work, but we’re also involved in advocacy work, both internationally and in the UK to ensure that the rights of the writer are heard and considered we work on copyright education projects to try and show the benefits of copyright to creators, and research into the status of authors’ earnings.
Primarily, we collect and pay money out to writers for the secondary uses of their work. This includes money for photocopying and scanning that takes place in education institutions like universities and schools; businesses; and government institutions – as well as money that is collected for scripts when TV, Film and Radio shows are rebroadcast.
We pay out this money to ALCS members twice a year; ensuring writers receive the reuse royalties they are rightfully owed for their work. This money, while not necessarily enough for writers to use as their sole incomes, can be crucial in helping them maintain their writing careers. As part of our aim to encourage people to think about the importance
of copyright, we support prizes and programmes that are shaped around helping writers develop their careers and teaching people about why copyright matters to creators. This work is part of a bigger copyright education campaign that ALCS is dedicated to. We think it’s essential that all creators understand copyright and how it protects their work, so they can check their contracts for copyright loopholes and go into contract negotiations with the knowledge that they don’t have to give away their rights if they don’t want to. While some writers may not think twice about copyright, Carnegie-shortlisted author Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick thinks about it in terms of the royalty payments these rights can secure for people: “Every time someone on Twitter proposes limiting copyright to 14 years, I think of it and the importance to authors of small, but reliable, yearly cheques.” Our relationship with the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway (CKG) Children’s Book Awards has flourished for over 10 years now and in that time, we have encouraged children to think about how copyright affects writers by asking them to get creative themselves. By learning to connect copyright with their own work, we hope to show them that their work belongs to them and it’s their choice what they do with it. However, it’s not just the copyright
Alice Donovan (
communications@alcs.co.uk) Communications Executive at Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS).
www.alcs.co.uk.
message we hope to spread through our work with the CILIP CKG Awards. We also aim to use this partnership to celebrate children’s writers and illustrators. The Awards are the UK’s oldest and best-loved children’s book awards, and a large portion of our membership is made up of children’s writers, so we have a particular passion for this sector of the industry. As of March 2021, we are actually holding over £2.5 million worth
Spring-Summer 2021
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