Mixing up a work and its edition in a spreadsheet makes it impossible to answer the one question an author asks: how many copies of their book have sold, across every edition? And splitting royalties with a single flat rate rather than by cumulative sales tier is the most common mistake in a royalty statement. This application keeps the work separate from its editions, works out royalties by cumulative tier, and prepares, each year in France, the statement of accounts owed to every author.
Who the application is for
For book publishing houses, independent or mid-sized, that manage several editions of the same work and must, in France, give each author every year the statement of accounts required by the intellectual property code.
What the application does
- Keeps each work separate from its editions — hardback, paperback, digital, audio — each with its own ISBN, cover price and print run.
- Logs sales figures by edition and by period, distinguishing copies sold from copies returned, to keep only net sales.
- Splits every copy sold into the right tier of a cumulative royalty scale, across every edition of the work, rather than applying a single flat rate.
- Manages a contract signed by several authors, with a royalty split whose shares are checked to add up to one hundred per cent.
- Shows the advance still to be earned out on every contract, and refuses payment while it is not fully covered by the royalties worked out.
- Prepares, for each financial year, the statement of accounts for every work, and refuses to finalise it while the copies manufactured or the year-end stock are missing for an edition, naming it.
Day to day
- You create the work, then each of its editions with its ISBN, cover price and print run.
- You build the publishing contract: the signing authors and their shares, the cumulative royalty tier scale, and any advance.
- Each time a distributor's statement arrives, you log the copies sold and returned by edition and by period.
- At year end, you open the contract's statement: sales are picked up on their own, you fill in by hand the copies manufactured and the stock for each edition, then you finalise it.
- You put the royalties into payment once the advance is covered; any remaining balance carries over to the next financial year.
What the application does not do
- It has no interface with a printer: the number of copies manufactured is entered by hand.
- It has no interface with distributors: sales figures are entered from the statements received.
- It does not manage foreign rights or their agents, and sends no digital feed to booksellers.
- It keeps no general accounts and issues no invoices: a payment recorded confirms that a payment happened, it does not trigger its accounting execution.
- The statement of accounts it prepares matches the French obligation under the intellectual property code: check that obligation if your contracts fall under another country's law.
Free and full editions
The free edition already carries the catalogue of works and their editions, sales figures and the net sales calculation by edition and by work, with no limit at all. The full edition installs on top without losing anything, and adds author contracts with their cumulative tier scale, the split between several authors, the advance earned out over time, and the annual statement of accounts.
Getting started
Create your works and then their editions, with their ISBN, cover price and initial print run. If you move to the full edition, then build your publishing contracts with their signing authors, their royalty shares and your tiered royalty scale.
Going further
To find out whether this application suits your business and how to activate it, compare the plans or write to us.