PLR Twitter campaign sees 70 new authors sign up

A Twitter campaign to encourage more authors to sign up to Public Lending Right has been successful, according to Tracy Chevalier.

Seventy authors registered for PLR in the first week of the campaign, led by Chevalier - an increase of 400% on the same period the year before.

Chevalier, chair of the PLR advisory committee, organised the campaign by “recruiting” 50 people – many of them authors – to tweet on a regular basis about PLR, which remunerates authors when their books are loaned out by UK public libraries.

The first tweets went out earlier this month, and in the first week of the campaign 70 authors registered, compared to 14 during the same week in 2013.

Of the 70, 23 heard about PLR from Twitter.

“However, PLR is likely to have lodged in the minds of the authors, agents, publishers and other industry people who saw those tweets,” Chevalier said. “We are hoping that spurred them on to contact writers to remind them. I know I did that – I emailed a newly published writer and told him about PLR and he said he would sign up.

“So we think the PLR twitter campaign had both a direct and an indirect impact. We’re really pleased with the result. Twitter is a useful tool when handled in the right way: to inform but not to annoy.”

The PLR Twitter account @PLR_UK also got 44 new followers in the week of the campaign, which Chevalier said was “also good, as that is 44 people who will now get regular reminder tweets”.

For the year to June 2013, the PLR rate per loan was 6.2p. Responsibility for PLR lies with The British Library.