A very happy surprise landed in my inbox last week.
An email came through saying I had a statement from ALCS.
Ah yes, that mysterious little outfit. Can’t remember exactly what it does or how, but I do remember it sometimes coughs up cash.
Expecting something in the region of £400, I opened up the statement and to my ABSOLUTE SHOCK AND DELIGHT I saw the figure: £7,380.61.
I put on my glasses to check the figure wasn’t in pence (it was early in the morning). Sure enough, not only was I right the first time but within a few clicks, I found it already sitting in my bank account. A really big fat juicy WOW!
For any of you freelancers who aren’t familiar with ALCS, it stands for the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Owned by its members, it’s a not-for-profit organisation that makes sure authors get paid when anyone copies or uses their work – anywhere in the world. It collects money for ‘secondary uses’ of work – such as photocopies – and then periodically distributes the cash among its members.
Any freelance journalist or content creator can apply. You just have to join up and complete an online form, adding information about all the articles you’ve written including titles, date of publication and the name of the publication. Ok, so that bit’s a bit of a pain but if you pick a rainy afternoon and listen to a podcast at the same time, you get into a groove and it’s quite gratifying remembering all the work you’ve done.
In my case, I had taken a few years out of freelance writing – when I was employed full time – so it had been several years since I had logged any freelance work. Also, you can only log work in the previous three years and unfortunately work published in newspapers doesn’t count. I therefore only added work in UK magazines, which took me a couple of hours.
To any MJA freelance writers who haven’t done it already, I encourage you to do so. Thanks to ALCS, the next holiday is paid upfront! https://www.alcs.co.uk
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