FAQs

All writers and beneficiaries to the estates of writers are eligible to join. See more about who can join on our dedicated page.

You can use our royalty search function to see if we have already collected money for your works. We can’t confirm exactly how much is owed until you have joined as a member, and we have verified your works and your contributions to them. Please note that we can only hold any royalties we collect for you for a maximum period of three years. Join as soon as possible to make sure you receive all the money owed to you.

See our dedicated section on secondary rights.

No, PLR collects and distributes money allocated to authors from the lending of their books from libraries in the UK. ALCS collects some money from the lending of UK authored books in European countries, however our main source of income is from the photocopying of books in the UK. See more on where ALCS money comes from, or see more about PLR.

We receive money from a number of different sources, and the information varies on those sources. See more on where ALCS money comes from.

This is entirely up to you and is dependent on the agreement that you have with your agent. We’ll follow your instructions as to how you would like to receive your payments. Once you sign up, you can indicate your payment preferences in your account.

Yes, although depending on where you live it might be more appropriate for you to join your local collecting society. ALCS holds reciprocal agreements with over 55 collecting societies around the world to whom we can transfer your money if we have collected payments for you.  If you would like information about your local collecting society please contact us.

ALCS is funded by a commission fee that is deducted from each payment that we make to our Members.

• Read about the commission fee on our dedicated page.
• ALCS is a collecting society and is governed by a Code of Conduct. Read more about how ALCS is run.

Firstly, please check your junk and spam folders. Occasionally emails may end up being caught up in places they shouldn’t.

If it’s not there then contact us and we’ll check that we’re sending emails to the correct address. You’ll need to answer a few security questions about your account before we will update your account.

To change your email address with us, login and edit it in the personal details tab of your account. If you’ve forgotten your password and no longer have access to your old email address, get in touch with the membership department. Please don’t register again with a different email address, this will lead to duplication of your account and may affect your royalties payments.

You can do this two ways. You can either login to your account and edit it in your personal details, or you can request a new password via the login page.

Please login to your account and update your address in your personal details page.

If an ALCS member has died then we need to put their account on hold. Please contact our membership department to let them know. If you are the beneficiary of an ALCS member then you are eligible to become a successor member. Please see our page on estates for more information.

Changes of details can be made by logging in to your account.

You can also call our membership team and provide new UK bank details over the phone. See our contact page for the membership team details.

Changes of details can be made by logging in to your account. Or, as above, you can contact our finance team with the relevant information. See our contact page.

Read all about VAT and self-billing.

Read all about Tax and deductions.

There could be a couple of reasons for this:

• Are your bank account details correct and up to date? Login to your account to check them out.
• It could just be that you weren’t due a payment (you will have a statement ready to download in the members’ area if you were).

If you do have a statement and weren’t paid, please get in touch with the membership team.

If you don’t have a statement, you weren’t due a payment this time. Payments are in March and September, so make sure all your works are up to date and check back in the next distribution.

Read why there can be fluctuations in payments.

Some books may take a while to earn secondary royalties. See why.

For books, you go as far back as you can account for.

However for journals and articles the claims period is for the last three years (not including the current year we are in). See the articles page for full details of the current claim period.

We have to do some additional checks on some titles to make sure we’ve got everything correct, and we’ll complete those checks just as soon as we can. This has no impact on your payments from ALCS. Work that you can ‘edit’ has been accepted, but can be edited if a member spots a mistake in the information that has been entered.

If the work entered is in the valid claim period, then it will be accepted as soon as we can possibly process it – we get thousands of updates close to deadline, but we will process yours just as soon as we can.

However sometimes members enter work that was published in the current year. Those articles will be accepted when the new claims period changes as we don’t pay for articles in the year they are published. For more detailed information on how it works, see the journals FAQs at the bottom of this page.

ALCS does not currently pay for newspaper articles or articles in newspaper supplements.

See our section on where the money comes from.

If you’ve made an error in your works list that you can’t edit, please contact the Published Works team who will be able to help you. If you have a lot of work please do take care to make sure your details are correct.