Freelance members of the Guild inclined to submit copy within a whisker of the deadline (don’t we all?!) should take note that the ALCS deadline for submitting works qualifying for a pay-out has been brought forward a month to the end of October this year, writes Peter Hill.
ALCS (alcs.co.uk) is the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society; it receives income from Copyright licensing schemes and distributes it to authors of books and to freelance journalists and photographers.
Several freelance Guild members are signed up to the society and say it’s well worth doing for the payments received.
How does the scheme operate?
Becoming a member of the society (for a £36 one-off fee) enables freelance journalists to log articles they’ve had published in magazines or online.
The same applies to both freelance journalists and professional photographers with regard to published images.
Claiming for published articles and images on the ALCS website is very simple; in the case of articles, it just requires the publication title, the publication or website’s ISSN number, the subject matter (not necessarily the word-for-word title as published) and the word count.
A web search will help find an ISSN number, although there are one or two publications that are not registered for an ISSN, which they should be.
Note that if an article or image is published both in print and online it can be claimed only once and that newspapers and their supplements are excluded.
To a large extent, this is an “honesty box” scheme but occasional checks are made by ALCS asking for examples of as-published copies of articles or images claimed.
Each claim period is for a year, so by the end of October Guild members signed up to ALCS can claim for articles and images published in 2025 in anticipation of payments in March and September 2027.
It’s a pretty big deal – last year, ALCS paid more than £36m to just over 112,000 members, with 80% receiving between £100 and £1,000.
And it’s good to read on the organisation’s website that it now receives income from licensed AI uses of works, which will be shared amongst members.
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