Spring is in the wallet

IT'S SPRING celebration time for all freelance writers who are signed up with ALCS and have lately benefitted from one of the two payouts each year – the big one, which covers magazines and more. The autumn cycle mainly covers books.

ALCS – the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society – collects on licences for photocopying and an increasing range of new-fangled digi-outlets via institutions and companies - if, that is, you have retained copyright in your works.

It distributes the proceeds to the copyright owners, individual freelances or mogul publishers as the case may be.

In 2023-4 this yielded a record £33 million bonanza. Out of that "friends of the Freelance" scored anything from a couple of hundred to - in a cluster of cases - amounts in the £2000s. However, our annual quest for a new all-time record – currently around £7500 – stalled this time. We couldn’t lay hands on the lucky f…reelance.

So if it’s you or you know who and what, please do let us know what the figure was – in confidence, anonymously, strictly hush-hush etc. The idea is simply to encourage as-yet-unsigned freelances to get in there and claim their entitlement. Join up via www.alcs.co.uk/join-alcs

And photographers can get the same deal via DACS – the Design & Artists Copyright Society, at www.dacs.org.uk/payback

Yes, even Freelance contributions count toward ALCS payments because it’s got an ISSN.

Join ALCS

DACS Payback