My PLR top ten titles for July 2014 - June 2015

Every year the Public Lending Right sends registered authors a statement estimating how many times their books were borrowed from UK libraries. To compensate for lost sales, the PLR pays about six pence per loan. There's a maximum payment threshold [£6600] to prevent bestselling authors from draining the PLR's precious coffers of cash.

About 22,000 authors will get payments for the most recent PLR period [July 2014 - June 2015], with about 200 on the maximum of £6600. The fate of the PLR is in flux, as cash-strapped councils close libraries and eBooks alter reading habits. But authors still welcome this new year bonus.

It is free to register your books for PLR - just go here. Even if you only wrote [or drew, in the case of comics artist] part of a collection, you can still register your bit. I represent a tiny 3% of the Heavy Metal Dredd graphic novel, but it makes me a few pennies.

I’m a minnow for PLR payments, never getting more than £500 in any given year. With my focus on screenwriting since 2007, and no new novels published in nearly a decade, the size of my payment keeps tumbling as my dog-eared tomes disappear from libraries.

My 2000AD-related tomes dominate the list this time, no doubt thanks to the recent Future Shock documentary and the 2012 Dredd movie starring Karl Urban.

My last published novel - Warhammer tome A Massacre in Marienburg - remains in the top five here. Only one of my novels remains in physical print, Doctor Who: Amorality Tale, thanks to a new edition by BBC Books in early 2015 - but many are still available as eBooks.

Anyway, here are my top ten tomes for July 2013 - June 2014 (with previous year's placing in brackets). NOTE: this list was edited after the PLR office issued amended statements in March 2016:-

1. (1) Heavy Metal Dredd (graphic novel, published Apr 09)
2. (3) Fiends of the Eastern Front: Stalingrad (graphic novel, Oct 10)
3. (5) A Massacre in Marienburg (Dec 08)
4. (10) Fiends of the Eastern Front: Operation Vampyr (Oct 05)
5. (-) Doctor Who: Amorality Tale (new edition, Feb 15)
6. (-) Thrill-Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000AD (paperback, Feb 09)
7. (8) Fiends of the Eastern Front: The Blood Red Army (Apr 06)
8. (-) I Am The Law: Judge Dredd Omnibus (Oct 06)
9. (-) Fiends of the Eastern Front: Twilight of the Dead (Jul 06)
10. (-) Judge Dredd: Kingdom of the Blind (Nov 04)

Bubbling under - Thrill-Power Overload (hardback); Starring Michael Caine; and Judge Dredd: Bad Moon Rising