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.
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 as long as we were recasting it for the web, we made it work for multiple presses at once.
The system currently aggregates sales reports from:
Asterism Book
Brookside (Ireland)
Direct sales (can be entered manually, or via a spreadsheet)
Draft2Digital
EBSCO
Gazelle (UK)
Ingram
KDP (Amazon)
Snipcart
Small Press Distribution (defunct)
More report types are planned — we expect that other presses will come with new kinds of reports we'll need to parse and import, and new ways of calculating royalties. Sales reports do need to be uploaded manually for the time being; we're very interested in finding ways to pull in data automatically where that is possible, though. We'll also be integrating payments, if you want to pay authors through this portal, but you'll always be able to record external payments as well.
There are a lot more features, which we'll document soon.
This is still alpha-quality software, 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 it and seeing if this system would work for you, please contact us.