A New Tool to Help Indie Authors and Small Publishers Calculate Royalties

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PublishDrive has recently launched Abacus, a standalone royalty-splitting service for self-publishing authors and small publishers

As experienced self-publishing authors know, most retailers and self-publishing platforms lack a mechanism for co-authors or collaborators to easily divide royalties on a project. What happens instead is a workaround: one person acts as the account owner, and everyone else must trust the account owner to distribute the earnings in a fair and timely manner. Even if that trust exists and is well placed, the account owner then bears the burden of royalty accounting on a regular basis.

Earlier this year, the ebook distributor PublishDrive began offering a feature called Team Royalties. This feature—available for a fee to co-authors using PublishDrive as a distributor—automatically divides and pays royalties directly to each contributor every pay period. Royalty sharing is enabled only when all parties confirm the arrangement. However, authors who began using Team Royalties immediately raised a new question and issue: How could they easily calculate and divide royalties on sales made directly through the biggest retailer, Amazon—or on any sales outside PublishDrive? There’s now a solution.

PublishDrive’s Abacus is a standalone royalty-splitting service for authors who distribute directly to Amazon and other retailers. You do not have to distribute through PublishDrive to take advantage of the Abacus service, but you must create an account with PublishDrive to get started. The beta version of Abacus launched for free on July 12; the paid version released on August 12. Abacus calculates royalties for co-authored books based on sales report files you receive from Amazon or Audible—but also allows you to manually input costs and other sources of revenue that must be accounted for. This means that even though PublishDrive doesn’t currently accept sales reports from every retailer out there, you can still manually plug in your own numbers to come up with a royalty report that includes sales from all channels. (However, PublishDrive’s CEO, Kinga Jentetics, says they are developing the importer to accept other retailer source data to further automate the process.) The cost for Abacus is $2.99 per title per month. If you want to see Abacus in action, PublishDrive offers a helpful two-minute video overview (part of which we’ve clipped for the GIF below).
PublishDrive’s Abacus may be attractive not just to co-authors, but also to small publishers. In fact, PublishDrive began developing Abacus based on the insights of indie publisher LMBPN Publishing, which led to the development of specific features, such as a contract expiration date. Jentetics says, “For indie publishers, it is essential to keep track of their contracts when they split royalties. Also, during the beta period, we could see that not just collaborators but other indie publishers with a growing catalog started to use PublishDrive’s Abacus.” Stephen Campbell of LMBPN is a featured testimonial for Abacus, reporting that LMBPN’s royalty calculation process has shrunk from days of staff work each month to just a few hours.

Bottom line: Existing royalty accounting software—almost always meant for traditional publishers—carries high price points and doesn’t cater to the needs of independent authors. (Probably the most affordable software is EasyRoyalties; you can browse a list of possible options at the IBPA site.) Abacus looks like a no-brainer for co-authored self-publishing projects or independently published multi-contributor sets and anthologies—as well as a good starting point for small publishers who don’t yet have the sales volume that would justify investment in a more expensive system used by larger publishers.

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