Comment

‘PLR is not, and was never imagined to be, a cure for the economic anomalies of contemporary authorship’, wrote a supporter in The Author in the summer of 1981. But if there was to be a Bill for authors, that is precisely what it should have addressed itself to, and the defensive tone of the statement suggests the writer knew that was what the majority of authors sought—or, of those responsible for 40,000 titles a year, more would have registered.