And the Most Borrowed Book Is...

Posted on 10th March, 2020

You may know that writers, illustrators, audiobook narrators etc all get paid a small amount each time a work is borrowed from a public library in the UK. The lending year runs from July 1st to June 30th. The statements are then put together and the authors etc are informed of the lending figures early in the following February, with the payment for that year being made towards the end of February.

 

Currently the amount per loan is 9.3 pence and this is divided between those who have contributed to the book, eg as the sole author of a print book (as opposed to an audiobook), the author receives the whole amount; but with, for example, a children's picture book for which the author and the illustrator are two different people, the 9.3 pence is shared between the two of them. Likewise, the payment for an audiobook loan is shared between the author and the narrator.

 

A few weeks ago, I received my statement for the year July 1st 2019 - June 30th 2019. At that point, The Deserter's Daughter and A Respectable Woman had been available all year as hardback, paperback, large print and audio. The Sewing Room Girl had been out in hardback for seven months and the paperback for five or six weeks. The audio had only just been released and the large print was as yet unpublished. And The Poor Relation had been published in hardback in May 2019 and was in the lending statistics for just five and a half weeks.

 

I am proud to to tell you that my most borrowed book for the year was A Respectable Woman, with a total of 9,417 loans.

 

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Huge thanks to all of you who borrowed it and I hope you all enjoyed it.

 

 

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