Author Relationships: The Royalty Management Lifecycle
Written by Administrator Administrator on November 18th, 2015

The process begins with the acquisition phase. Here, publishers and authors agree on a project and negotiate a contract. During this phase it helps to have the right tools for collaborating on contract negotiation and document sharing. Having the right tools to record the detailed terms of the agreement will also save a great deal of effort later in the cycle.

In the next phase, the publisher sells the books according to the contract. There are tools for every aspect of this, beyond the realm of royalties. However, royalty management and author relations in particular offer some low-effort opportunities that can help increase sales. 

As vendors make sales, sales reports come in. These reports come in a variety of layouts, file types, and currencies – some of which are exceedingly complex and not designed for import into a database. A tool for managing sales aggregation and reporting can save hours of effort each month and also reduce the risk of human error.

Now it is time to calculate royalties from these combined sales. The contracts that the publisher recorded during the acquisition phase will dictate the rules for calculating royalties. This process can be time-consuming and error-prone. A robust royalty system, such as MetaComet's Royalty Tracker, automates this task while providing powerful reporting. This can save tens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours of work while providing a professional, polished image to your authors. 

Once a book is published, the only communication between publishers and their authors typically comes through royalty statements and payments. This is the last phase of the Life Cycle. Statement delivery options range from traditional mail to online statement delivery through AuthorPortal.com. Distributing the statements doesn’t end with pushing “send,” though. There will always be questions about the statements. Being able to respond to them quickly and easily will save time and enhance your author relations

Each of these components of the cycle represent a challenge we can help you overcome. We have 3 sets of tools, all integrated to help solve these problems:

• Royalty tracker does all the grunt work of processing royalties
• AuthorPortal.com helps manage your author relations
• The sales aggregation tool handles the tedious time consuming task of consolidating all of your sales data from different sources into a single sales data base.

​All 3 of these tools work well together or you can use them all individually depending on your needs.

Consolidating Sales Data Effortlessly
Written by Administrator Administrator on July 21st, 2015

Most companies receive sales data from multiple sources.  For example, a book publisher may receive monthly sales files from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Apple, and so on.  A music licensing company may receive sales from iTunes, Harry Fox, ASCAP, BMI, etc. To have any practical use, these sales files must typically be consolidated into a single database.  This means aligning all the columns of each file so that they are in the same position, appending all the files together, converting currency when needed, and removing extraneous data.   When done manually, this process can take days of effort each month depending on the number and complexity of the files.

To help our customers optimize this aspect of the Royalty Management Life Cycle™, we developed our Sales Aggregation tool (available to subscribers of AuthorPortal.com). Many of our customers had voiced concern about the effort required to consolidate their sales files, that their current process doesn’t keep track of what files were received and when, and that the overall process was prone to human error.

MetaComet’s Sales Aggregation tool is very simple to use.  For each file you receive, simply inform the Sales Aggregator of the file type and upload the file, the Sales Aggregator does the rest; now all your files are stored in a central repository and all your data has been imported into a single, reportable sales database. Using AuthorPortal’s integration capabilities, you can easily share this data with other systems and people, such as Royalty Tracker.

In summary, AuthorPortal.com’s Sales Aggregation tools saves hours of effort and mitigates the risk of this critical component of The Royalty Management Life Cycle ™.

To learn more, please contact us at any time at 413-536-5989 x 3 or zlapponese@metacomet.com
http://www.metacomet.com/contact/

AuthorPortal.com: Latest New Features
Written by Administrator Administrator on March 17th, 2015

MetaComet Systems recently released several new features on AuthorPortal.com.  

Our aim is to help publishers enhance their relationships with authors while operating their businesses as efficiently as possible.  To aid in that goal, our latest enhancements include:

• Ability to comment on documents:  In addition to publishers and authors being able to share documents, they can now comment on any existing documents.  For example, if an author has a suggested modification to a new contract, they can simply add a comment to that document and their publisher will automatically receive an email.  The publisher can then respond, prompting an email back to the author.  This process can continue indefinitely, providing an audit trail for changes along the way.
• Private Documents:  Both publishers and authors can upload private documents that only they can access.  This enables authors to use AuthorPortal.com as a repository for all of their publishing documents, such as drafts, mockups, etc, that may be related to their projects.  Publishers can also use it to share relevant documents with others in their organization.  Our customers use it to vet artwork, share epub files, etc.
• Author Questionnaire Enhancements:  Publisher can now set the order of questions in their questionnaires.  You can also have both "author level" questions, and "title level" questions.  This enables your authors to provide generic answers about themselves, and specific answers about each book that they have published.
• Suppress Emails:  Publishers and Authors often want to save documents to AuthorPortal.com, but don't need to notify the other party.  For example, if you set up a pre-existing author and have multiple contracts, manuscripts, and illustrations to upload, you may not want the author to receive an email for each one.  Similarly authors may upload documents to help them with their work which may not be relevant to the publisher at that time, such as supporting documentation or outlines.
• Project Owners:  Publishers can now specify project "owners".  These are the primary contacts associated with a project - typically an editor or a royalty administrator.

You will also find dozens of smaller improvements such as bug fixes and usability enhancements.

As always, please let us know what you think!

 

Save Time, Reduce Risk with AuthorPortal.com's Sales Aggregation Tool
Written by Administrator Administrator on October 31st, 2014

One of the great features of AuthorPortal.com is its Sales Aggregator tool, which enables you to quickly consolidate sales files from multiple sources into a single sales database.

Check out this post on our system site, MetaComet.com, about how The Sales Aggregator can save you time and reduce your risks. 

Sales Aggregation is just one component of The Royalty Management Life Cycle(tm) Model.  To learn more about the Royatly Management Life Cycle(tm), check out http://www.metacomet.com/the-royalty-management-life-cycle-an-overview/.

And as always, please contact us if we can be of assistance!

Publishers: Getting Started on AuthorPortal.com
Written by Administrator Administrator on August 28th, 2014

Are you ready to start providing your authors the cutting edge author-publisher collaboration tools of AuthorPortal.com?  These two videos show you how to sign up and get started.

In this first video, we quickly walk you through the process of selecting a plan and signing up for AuthorPortal.com.

Now that you have signed up, you can start collaborating with your authors immediately.  This short video shows the basics of adding authors and titles to AuthorPortal.com.