Publishing Industry Solutions for
Royalty Management Chaos

A November 21 article from The Bookseller reports on the publishing industry’s “hidden epidemic” of chaotic royalty management, payments, and communication. (Heloise Wood, “Royalties survey sparks calls for change as Society of Authors reveals ‘increased reliance on hardship grants.’”) There’s an immediate need for publishing industry solutions to conquer the chaos. 

Literary agent Lizzy Kremer of David Higham Associates is quoted as saying, “Errors take weeks to resolve. It is getting worse every year.”  

Authors and agents are demanding, “more structured procedures, regular payments, and more accountability,” and some are calling for penalties such as “pursuing reversion of rights,” or establishing contractual late fines. 

Kremer blames, “Inefficiencies and errors in royalty accounting…. Teams are under-resourced and seem to lack good training for new staff…. The systems of royalty reporting and delivery are so unfit for purpose and marred with errors of understanding or of implementation.”  

The saddest part of this story is that there is a better way to handle publishing industry royalties, and a solution that’s available right now. 

MetaComet® software is specifically designed to solve these problems and deliver accurate and transparent royalty calculations and reports without stressing out your team. The products are scalable to provide efficient solutions for publishers of any size. 

You can set up Royalty Tracker® in as little as two weeks, and its intuitive interface makes training new staff quick and easy. It automatically generates payment files which can be delivered to Tipalti or another finance system for instant, reliable royalty payments. 

The Royalty Portal application integrates directly with Royalty Tracker® for transparent communication with your royalty recipients, eliminating the friction and frustration that The Bookseller describes, without adding to your workload. 

All MetaComet® royalty solutions are purpose-built to handle the potentially complex terms of publishing industry agreements. 

In response to the article, The Society of Authors published a list of demands including, “Regular and detailed accounting statements to be sent to authors by publishers by default.” 

Your publishing company can deliver all that, and more, while cutting down your time spent on royalty management by 90%. 

Let’s fix this problem. Talk to us about royalty automation today. 

MetaComet® Systems provides publishing industry solutions that make royalties easy.