I've written before about PLR , the system that provides cash to authors when their books are borrowed from UK libraries. But this isn't the only unexpected source of potential income for authors - another fairy godmother of the writing business is ALCS, the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society . The ALCS is a group that looks for ways to pick up all those little bits and pieces of earning that writers might have missed out on. They also act as a campaigning group for authors' rights - but what we're interested in here is pure cash. Increasingly, the ALCS is acting as a conduit for other collection vehicles. This time round, for instance, it included money from the Irish PLR for UK authors who registered for that. And it is likely to be a gateway for payments from the dreaded Google Settlement when that is finally sorted out. But the thing that fascinates me most is the bread-and-butter earnings from ALCS. This is typically when a business or school photoco...