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.