Our recommendations to book publishers is largely based upon their size, the type of products they produce and their plans for the future.
A small publisher concerned about cost will likely select Easy Royalties. The price of this software starts at $500 and it can handle complex royalty contracts. As the publisher grows they can expand its functionality with That’s Rights, a rights management module.
A book publisher with revenue of of $5M to $70M will have more choices. For these publishers the cost of software will start at $30,000 or more for stand-alone software or $12,000 a year for a hosted solution. These software solutions are highly scalable and incorporate strong internal controls. The vendors I tend to recommend to publishers in this segement are:
- Elan Rights and Royalties (hosted) – known for its ease of use
- Klopotek Rights and Royalties (hosted) – powerful and expandable
- Publishing Technologies Advance Rights and Royalties (hosted) – highly customizable
- Royalty Tracker (hosted) – your can outsource your royalty operations to them
Media Services Group’s Elan Rights and Royalties is known for its ease of use. The menu system asks you questions – Do you want to generate statement? Do you want to add an author? They use an intelligent search logic that knows what fields to search based on what you keyed in. Example; if you enter a phone number it will search for a phone number without you having to specify search for phone number. I found that you can begin using Elan without any training. This is a relatively new product used by fewer than 40 publishers.
Klopotek Rights and Royalties is probably the most powerful royalty solution on the market for book publishers. It is available in a hosted solution for medium sized publishers. Larger publishers can select a more customizable version (that is more expensive). They have 300+ clients.
Publishing Technology’s solution is the easiest to customize and they offer powerful graphical work process controls not found in competitive systems. McGraw-Hill Education recently selected this software.
Royalty Tracker from Metacomet is highly scalable and has a track record of rapid implementations. Rowman and Littlefield; which generates over 100,000 statements uses Royalty Tracker as does Taylor & Francis. A large publisher can go live with Royalty Tracker in about 3 months.
If the publisher’s financials systems runs on Microsoft Dynamics NAV I will suggest that they also look at knkPublishing software. This software offers seamless integration with Dynamics NAV.
If a publisher’s sales exceed $100M they should also look at:
- Real Software System’s Alliant software
- SAP IPM (Intellectual Property Management)
SAP IPM excels at handling the requirements of large publishers with multi-national operations. Oxford University Press (revenue of $800M USD) uses SAP IPM to manage 110,000+ royalty contracts. C.H. Beck, one of Germany’s largest privately owned publishing houses uses SAP IPM.