how do royalties work? and how can you track your sales?

hi everyone

my name is matthew slinn

i just published my first book with macgraw hill. its a non-fiction book and its part of their "build your own" series of books.

i wanted to ask all you more experienced types about royalties. i.e. how do royalties work? and how can you track your sales?

i know in my contract it says i get 10% (i couldn't negotiate any higher)

but how can you track the number of copies you sell? is there a data-base somewhere? do you get payments ever month or what?

Thanks in advance

Hi Matthew,

Congrats on your book. There is no way to track your sales; you are dependent on the publisher's annual royalty statement. If you think the numbers are questionable, you can instigate an audit (at your expense).

FWIW, www.novelrank.com is a third-party site that tracks Amazon sales.

I have been told that if an author requests a audit of a reasonably successful book, nine times out of ten the audit pays for itself in unpaid royalties recovered.

It isn't that publishers intentionally set out to cheat authors. It is that they are not as diligent as they could be in accounting for their own accounts payable, and when something slips through the cracks, it is usually in their favor.

But something you should know. If you negotiate a multiple book contract, or if you have several books published under separate contracts with the same publisher, make sure the contracts specify that the books are accounted for independently with respect to royaliy advances and payments. Otherwise, one in the tank can suck royalties away from the others.

Good advice from Al. My royalties are paid every six months. I have found errors on every statement for the last two and a half years, nearly always to the publishers favour. The sums can be substantial. On the last statement I found errors to the value of £850 UK sterling I have found errors to this kind of value before. The statement is dated April and I am still waiting for the finance department to reply to my query. I could arrange an independent audit and if they find an error greater than £50 the cost of the audit would fall to the publisher. However, I worry as to the impact this would have on my relationship with the publisher.

Welcome to the forum

how much does an audit cost?

mike bryon wrote:

However, I worry as to the impact this would have on my relationship with the publisher.

This is what I have been told about that: It should have no impact if you are dealing with a reasonably prominent and established publisher. Your acquisitions editor has no ties to accounting. She wants you to succeed, make money for them, and write more successful books for her.

How much does an audit cost? I have not commissioned one so I don’t know. My publisher have just paid the equivalent of over $US 1,500 which was underpaid on the last statement because of errors they made. I identified the errors and they investigated them, apologised and made good the amount. This makes me believe that in most situations you don’t need one. I guess an audit could be as short as a day where an auditor undertakes a series of tests. If they find errors then the discrepancy could be used to decide if a full audit will pay for itself. If your contract has a clause regarding the publisher meeting the cost of the audit if the errors exceed a certain figure (as mine do) then once that figure is exceeded the auditor can be instructed to dig deep.

Regarding Al point about relationship. I am sure my publisher would still commission work from me if I sent in an auditor. However, I am a series editor as well as an author, my publisher helped pay for my website, they were cool when a manuscript was late, they agreed when I asked to deliver works in a different order than commissioned and so on. The relationship is premised on us both acting reasonably. For this reason I would only instruct an audit as a last resort.