“Older royalty systems may require you to create a new contract for each product,” says Edwin Fager, president of the book publishing consultant company Kensai International. In general terms, “newer royalty software allows you to create one contract for all formats of a book—paper, hardcover, e-book, audio, chapter, anthology—i.e., one contract vs. 10 contracts.”

“The biggest hindrance to small and medium publishers interested in royalty software has been its price,” says Edwin Fager, also a distributor of Jeux de Couleur’s software Easy Royalties in the United States and Canada. “Many solutions traditionally sold for $30,000 and smaller publishers could not afford it. Now vendors are targeting small to medium-size publishers with more affordable solutions. Easy Royalties is priced at a one-time fee of $500–$10,000, based on the number of titles.”

However, the higher prices, Fager and others say, typically reflect the needs of major publishing houses, those who see multimillion-dollar revenue streams from their sea of content. They can afford robust software, and they need it….There is no one best royalty solution for all firms,” he adds.

The Easy Royalties web site has a royalty software guide that provides a concise list of  over twenty software solutions.

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Read the royalty software press release

1. Digital asset manager that stores scanned images of the signed royalty contract.
2. An option for authors to request access to their statements online. This is a service that makes life easier for the author and greatly reduces costs in terms of printing and mailing. The author will have a full history of statements over time accessible at will.
3. Statement currency by author. The CR&R system can now automatically identify the statement currency required from the author settings and generate that statement as required. This is independent of the currency settings for revenue currency and the publisher’s defined main currency.

Read Klopotek’s royalty software update announcement .

1. Author Imports: Assign royalty recipients a vendor type. This will allow you to filter your QuickBooks vendor contact list export to include only royalty receipients.

2. Product Imports: Add royalty defining fields to your items (products). If you have royalty rules that pay a different royalty based on product format; such as a 20% of net sales on eBook sales, you must define a new product field in your item list to reflect this. This will allow you to export product information from QuickBooks and import it into your royalty software.

3. Sales Imports: Apply sales discounts to each invoice line item. Most royalty software sales import rountines want to see the sales discount incorporatated into each line item (i.e. sales amount is the net after the discount is applied). Some QuickBooks users enter the discount  for the whole invoice as a single line item. Easy Royalties supports both line item discounts and invoice level discounts.

Easy Royalties royalty software sales import discount options:

4. Accounts Payable Imports: Purchase Transaction Pro Importer from BayStateConsulting.com. With this software you can import the royalty software’s calculated payments owed to royalty recipients into QuickBooks.

Read the Thomas Nelson Royalty Software Case Study

• Bradbury Phillips – Hall 8.0, Stand D956.
• Easy Royalties & That’s Rights – Hall 8.0, Stand L986.
• Klopotek – Hall 4.0 Stand E 1303. Klopotek offers a seminar at the Book Fair this year: “Standard Processes for Digital Publishing Workflows”.
• Publishing Technology – Hall 4.2, Stand L450.
• Virtusales Publishing Solutions – Hall 8.0, Stand S988.

Read the press release

Contracts, Rights and Subrights Module

“Using Biblio, particularly the Head Contracts module, has revolutionized my life…

…This may seem like hyperbole, but it’s not. Biblio allows for better management of the rights granted to Candlewick under the head contracts and enables me to quickly find precedent contracts and contract clauses. This strengthens my negotiating position with agents, authors, and illustrators. Prior to Biblio, I had no central repository in which to store the type of detailed rights information found in contracts. Each contract existed individually in paper and Word document form, but I had no means of drawing similar data together to analyze or leverage the information for future deal-making.

The head contracts are the assets of any publishing company. It is by virtue of the rights, terms, and conditions found in these documents that a publishing company can operate at all. Everything that happens to a book throughout the publishing process should be provided for in the head contract. As such, it is vitally important that the provisions contained therein can be understood and managed effectively, and Biblio is an excellent, robust yet easy to use tool for doing so.”

Becky Hemperly, Candlewick Press

The information flows in the order stated in the contract and is much less time consuming to enter. Scanning contracts onto the system is fantastic!

… in general, I love it!”

More than 300 record labels world wide use this software. You can choose from different modules to build the right package for your company’s needs.

Professional Royalty Processing:

• contracts can manage different shares for different territories, release types and formats
• territory sets can be defined per contract and release type individually
• profit split royalty calculation, even combinable with share-based contracts
• reduce royalty shares, based on price: Mid-Price, Budget, Clearance Sales, Sellout
• reduce royalty shares when products are advertised or sold by mailorder
• set the maximum number of concurrent reductions
• set a minimum share, regardless of possible reductions
• individual technical deductions for different formats, per contract
• automatic calculation of reserves for returns
• automatic release of reserves for returns in the next period or in multiple stages
• multiple contracts per licensor
• multiple contracts and licensors per track
• royalty splitting for single tracks (e.g. strip a remixer’s share from the share of your artist)
• additional contracts for releases (overrides, calculated alongside track-based royalties)
• one royalty statement per licensor manages all licensor’s contracts
• possible deductions for mechanicals on download and physical sales (for EU customers)
• full featured US mechanicals reporting tool
• contract groups allow fine-tuned setups of cross-colateralisation between contracts
• optional sublicense control tool with reminders for your licensees
• optional publishing module for all publishing income (account artists, co-publishers, etc.)
• download sales data can be compressed to the max for less clutter on your royalty statements
• sales reports allow you to monitor product and even track-based performances
• sales reports by territories and distribution channels / download stores
• one-click import of the new version of iTunes sales reports (July 2008)
• one-click import of beatport sales reports
• one-click import of Napster sales reports
• support for all sales reports that contain EAN/UPC/Catalog No. and/or ISRCs

Website: http://www.officer.de/index.html