Like many self-published authors, I was disappointed with the number of sales I achieved upon publishing my first book. Firstly, this meant that I wouldn’t be able the recoup the cost I’d sunk into the book, and, more importantly, meant that people weren’t reading the book I had spent so much time and effect creating. Of the two, it was certainly the latter that bothered me the most.
Then along came libraries.
Overview
This blog post is primarily aimed at UK-based self-published authors. However, there’s likely to be some read-across, so feel free to continue reading. I will cover the following:
- Why to donate books to libraries
- How to donate books to libraries (with examples)
- What kind of response to expect from libraries
- How to get paid by donating books to libraries
- Two graphs!
Why to donate books to libraries
By donating your books to libraries, you place your books within reach of readers who would otherwise never have heard of it. While some self-published authors may manage to convince a few local, independent bookshops to stock their title or make some kind of deal with the Devil to get them into Waterstones, the chances are that your books will spend a lot of time sat in your loft/clogging up your hallway/piled in the corner of your study (that’s where I keep mine). Therefore the highest chance of getting your books into readers’ fingers, is to give them away. I appreciate this is annoying. First you paid to print all those books, now you have to pay to send them to someone else.
“It’s not fair!” I hear you cry.
Well tough. Self publishing isn’t fair. Even traditional publishing isn’t fair – just look how many celebrities have decided they can write a book only to be given massive advances and marketing budges based primarily off how famous they are, not how good a writer they are. If you’re after fairness, then writing probably isn’t for you.
Tagline: If you have more books than you need and you’re willing to put in the time (and a little bit of money), then donating books to libraries will increase the likelihood of someone reading your book (and perhaps even loving it).
How to donate books to libraries
The answer to this is simple – email the libraries. The execution is a little tougher and will require you to invest some time. The primary issue is that there is no single place you can send your books to and have them distribute them across the country. What you need to do is email the individual library councils. What makes this harder is that it is not always obvious where these councils are. Sometimes it’s county level, sometimes it’s smaller, like a borough or a city.
When identifying the library councils in the UK, I suggest the following approach:
- Search by country: e.g. “Surrey county library” and find their contact page. This should include their library email address: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/contact-us/libraries
- Remember that the UK is more than just England and look at the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland Counties
- Larger cities will likely have their own library councils. This is true of the following: Blackpool, Bolton, Bradford, Brighton, Cardiff, Derby, Doncaster, Dundee, Edinburgh, Huddersfield, Hull, Inverness, Kingston, Lancaster, Leicester, Leeds, Liverpool, Loughborough, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Newport, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Reading, Slough, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Swansea, Swindon, Telford, Wokingham, Wrexham, York (not an exhaustive list)
- London is very large and split into 32 boroughs. Each one of these boroughs has its own library service
- If you think the town may be large enough to have its own library council, search for it on Google and see what comes up
While some websites will list an email address for the library service, others won’t Don’t fret, there’ll still be a way to get in contact with them, you just need to do some digging.
Here’s what to do if you cannot find an email address:
- Look at the page that list library branches. Sometimes when the library council doesn’t have an email address listed, you may find that the individual libraries have their email address next to their postal address and opening hours. If possible, try and contact the “Central Library”. Chances are there’s more likely someone who works there that makes buying decisions
- Most library email address are a little basic. So even if the email address is not posted on the website, doesn’t mean that it’s not posted elsewhere on the internet. If you search for a variety of email addresses in quotes using Google, you’ll probably turn up a few. Here are some searches to get you started:
- “central.library@”*”.gov.uk”
- “library@”*”.gov.uk”
- “libraries@”*”.gov.uk”
- The asterisks above is a wildcard in Google search and will return email addresses that start with the first quote (e.g. “library@”) and end with the second quote (“.gov.uk”). For example library@slough.gov.uk
When contacting libraries, it’s important to be polite, not to beg and provide information about your book in a clear manner. You can offer them free books, but it may also be worth offering them a review copy which they can use to decide if they want to buy the book through their suppliers.
I suggest including the following in your email:
- What you are offering (free books/review copy)
- What the book is about
- Book information (genre, page length, ISBN, format (e.g. B-format)
- Cover
- Links to professional reviews (e.g. Kirkus)
Here is an example of what I sent for my latest book, The Archivist. I tried to make the email seem less generic by including the name of the county or city the library council is responsible for, thereby making the email appear less like spam. If you do this, be careful to make sure your sender and the library council you represent are the same!
What kind of response to expect
Even though you are donating your book for free, at your own expense, not every library will want a copy. In fact, most libraries won’t even respond to you. I contact 182 library councils and independent libraries offering them a copy of The Archivist, and this is a breakdown of the responses.
So for three out of every four enquirers, I received no response, and of the quarter that did respond to me, approximately a quarter of those declined. Not a fantastic response rate, but this did result in me donating 88 copies of The Archivist to libraries, which I am please by. As for the libraries that rejected me, this was largely a combination of:
- Only accept books about the locality as donations (e.g. Hampshire – which is a little annoying as that’s where I live)
- Not accepting self published books due to quality concerns (e.g. Birmingham)
- Not currently accepting donations due to too many donations or other unspecified reasons (e.g. COVID policies)
What is interesting to note is that there has been a change to how libraries respond to these requests compared to 2017 when I self-published my first book, The Keeper of Portals. When I approached libraries with that book, my email was much more basic, practically, “I’ve written a book, do you want it?” and yet I managed to donate nearly 200 copies to libraries, many of which are still in the library system. Slightly annoyingly, some of these copies are in libraries that rejected The Archivist because it’s not about the locality *cough* Hampshire.
As more people are self publishing, and more of those authors offer their books to libraries for free, there are additional hurdles to getting your book into the hands of library readers. But, with enough perseverance it can be done. Just remember the following:
- Be polite when contacting libraries
- Include all relevant information
- Make sure your cover is excellent
- Demonstrate the book is good with links to professional reviews (and probably some Goodreads reviews)
How to get paid donating books to libraries
Spoiler! You don’t get paid a lot, possibly enough to buy yourself a new book every year unless you’re able to donate a lot of copies and prove popular with the borrowers. What you do get, that I think is more useful, is information on how many times your book has been borrowed in a 12-month period.
To sign up (and this is for the UK only) go to Public Lending Rights, which is run by the British Library. From there, you just need to set up an account and register your book(s). As a self published author, you’ll be entitled to 100 % of the payment (unless you have a co-author).
As of today (18 October 2022) the payment is 9.55 pence per loan and you’re able to earn up to £6,600 – though don’t expect to get anywhere near that top figure as a self published author, that’s more for the J K Rowlings of the world and equates to around 69,000 loans per year.
Below are the total loans for The Keeper of Portals, which was published in January 2017.
Over time, you should expect the numbers of loans you receive to reduce as libraries replace the old stock. However, while the numbers are very small, it’s nice to see that there are still some picking picking up The Keeper of Portals five years after it came out. As for The Archivist, that won’t be eligible for the 2021/2022 reporting period as it runs from 1 July to 30 June, and it was only after 1 July that I started donating copies to libraries. This means I’ll need to wait until January 2024 to see how popular it is.
That’s your lot. I hope you’ve found something of value in this post. If there’s anything you’d like more clarity on, please comment below and I’ll expand some of the sections or create a new section, if required.
