1. Ye Olde Librarie Service
Once up on a time there was a little girl who loved stories. She read everything in the house – the family Encyclopaedia Britannica, the backs of cereal packets, her mother’s HG Wells collection (her favourite being The Invisible Man) – and then she ran out of stories. So her mother took her to the local park, where there was a place called a library with shelves and shelves full of children’s books.
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| Ye Olde Librarie |
(it looked a bit newer back then!)
The little girl thought she had died and gone to heaven. She borrowed her maximum allowance of three books every Saturday morning, read them all curled up in the armchair by the fire that afternoon, then impatiently spent a week at school waiting for the following Saturday, when she could swap her old books for three more.
Eventually, there came a time the little girl had read all the books in the children’s section of the library, and so she started writing her own. Her first became “The Story of Flax”, about a palomino foal called Flax and his misadventures as he grew into a beautiful pony. She lovingly illustrated each chapter
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| The Story of Flax |
and she enjoyed writing it so much, she wrote another story, and then another. Her stories got longer and longer and she started sending them out to publishers. And, 27 years later, one of those stories got made into proper book:
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| Element 1st edition hardcover |
This book won the Branford Boase Award and was bought by libraries for other children to read. And every time a child borrowed her book, our heroine got paid a few pence under the Government's Public Lending Right (PLR) scheme. And so our little girl, now a rather bigger girl, lived happily
until…
Several years later, her publisher let her books go out of print to make room for new shiny titles, and the rights in her stories reverted back to our big girl. Meanwhile, her books left on ye olde librarie shelves got tatty from being read so many times, quite a few libraries were closed because the Government could not afford to keep them open any more, and others cleared their shelves of older books to make room for computers and all those new shiny books her publisher was producing. Eventually, a whole generation of children could not read her books any more.
So our big girl sat down and cried her eyes out
until…
Ye New Amazon Ebook Library*
When she got bored of reading the backs of tissue boxes, she started reading the blogs that were springing up all over the internet at the time. On one of those blogs, she read about Amazon’s kdp and their Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. By this time, another publisher had bought the rights to Song Quest and published a shiny new gold-foiled edition for ye olde libraries to put on their shelves. But children still could not read her other out-of-print books. So our big girl dried her eyes, made them all into ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle, and entered some of them into Amazon’s Lending Library.
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| Spellfall is available from the KOLL |
Today all the little girls and boys whose parents have an Amazon Prime membership can borrow her ebooks just as easily as borrowing paper books from their local library. And every time a child borrows one of her ebooks, our heroine gets paid out of Amazon’s loan fund, replacing some of her income from PLR.
A happy ending? Or a sad tale? Have your say below.
A happy ending? Or a sad tale? Have your say below.
Some fun figures:
Ye Olde Librarie Service
Cost to borrower: none, except fines for late returns/lost books.
Cost to UK tax payer: Upkeep of library buildings, staff costs, book and computer purchases, up to £6,000/year per author under PLR scheme.
Cost to Amazon: none.
Benefit to author: Currently around 6p per loan, up to a maximum of £6,000/year, based on a sample of UK libraries.
Kindle Owners' Lending Library
Cost to borrower: Kindle (or other electronic device with free Kindle app) plus annual Amazon Prime membership.
Cost to UK tax payer: none.
Cost to Amazon: KOLL monthly loan fund (variable).
Benefit to author: currently around $2 per loan in US (UK to be confirmed) with no upper limit on earnings, based on accurate loan figures.
*Since October 2012, the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is available to Amazon Prime members in the UK as well as the US.
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Katherine Roberts is the author of the Pendragon Legacy quartet about King Arthur’s daughter Rhianna Pendragon, published by Templar in “ye olde librarie” friendly chunky hardcovers, as well as paperback and ebook formats:
Book 1: SWORD OF LIGHT
Book 2: LANCE OF TRUTH (hardcover)
Book 3: CROWN OF DREAMS (February 2013)
Book 4: GRAIL OF STARS (October 2013)
More details of Katherine’s books, available from a library (possibly not very) near you, at www.katherineroberts.co.uk
