Royalty management presents a challenge for many of us in the small press/micropress world. The amounts of money involved, significant though they may be for publishers and writers, are often small, yet the complexity of the problem doesn't scale down with them: sales come from many different sources, with reports in different formats, all of which need to be dealt with manually. One can hire an accountant to take care of it all, but that's expensive; there are also commercial software solutions, but they aren't cheap either, especially since their pricing tends to be per-title, and small presses are apt to have a lot of titles, most of which sell little.
At Sagging Meniscus, we struggled with these problems for some years, mostly unsuccessfully. Then, a couple of years ago, we wrote a rough in-house application that ingested all the reports we had from different sources and spat out PDF royalty reports, which was a big step forward. Sending out the reports, however, was itself a chore. Sagging Royalties is a rewrite of that system with a web portal for publishers and royalty holders. Authors are interested in their sales, and with this, they can examine them to their hearts' content. It brings transparency about what has happened and what is owed. It's easier on the publisher side, too, and therefore we decided, as long as we were recasting it for the web, we shoud made it work for other presses also.
The system currently aggregates sales reports from some common sources in the small press world, including:
Asterism Books
Draft2Digital
EBSCO
Gazelle Books (UK)
Ingram Lightning Source/IngramSpark
KDP (Amazon)
Snipcart
Small Press Distribution (defunct, but we like to have historical as well as current data)
Direct sales (entered manually or through file uploads)
We also support the creation of custom channels with custom report formats. Some of these can be configured without our intervention, while others may require custom code from us. We expect that other presses will come with new kinds of reports we'll need to parse and import, and with new ways of calculating royalties. Sales reports do need to be uploaded manually for the time being, but we're very interested in finding ways to pull in data automatically where that is possible.
We ingest your catalog of titles, and information about the formulae used to calculate royalties for each title. Each royalty holder may be invited to join the portal and see live reports of their sales and expected royalties, and download periodic PDF reports.
This is still alpha-quality software, without guarantee, and for the time being is free to use. When it is mature enough to be worth paying for, we will charge something, but something small presses can afford.
If you are interested in learning more about this system and seeing if it would work for you, please contact us.