New Abacus Features: Royalty-Splitting Tool for Co-Authors
PublishDrive Abacus is the only service out there for efficiently splitting book royalties among collaborating writers and publishing teams. The service saves hours of time by calculating co-author royalties, keeping track of team costs, distributing royalty reports to contributors, and way more. Bestselling author Michael Anderle said:
“Before PD Abacus we’d spend approximately 20-25 hours per month calculating, checking, and distributing royalty information to authors. We anticipate cutting that time to between 2-4 hours per month with PD Abacus.”
(Download our free case study to learn how indie authors and publishing teams are saving tons of times with PD Abacus.)
PD Abacus was first launched to support KDP/KU coauthors who distribute directly to Amazon. Since then we have expanded its capabilities to meet the needs of authors and publishers managing their collaborative gigs far and wide. We are stoked to announce fresh features for PD Abacus where indies can:
- Calculate co-royalties by simply uploading sales reports to PD Abacus for six additional channels. They include IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Kobo Publishing / Subscription / Plus, Google, Apple Books (iTunes), and PublishDrive.
- Fix currency conversion rates automatically for different countries and stores with optimal accuracy, with no headaches.
We go over just how easy it is to use the features below. Ready to save more time in your publishing business? If you’ve yet to use PD Abacus, it’s free to create an account and check it out:
Easily import sales reports from different stores
Until today, indies could split co-author royalties and generate team reports by manually adding their sales info to PD Abacus. To save even more time, it now takes a simple file upload of the book sales report. Whether your team sells through KDP/KU, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Kobo, Google, Apple Books, or PublishDrive, we guarantee seamless royalty calculations.
How to do it? When you log in to your PublishDrive account and navigate to PD Abacus, click on “Add Data”. Then click to select or drag and drop your file. ⇩
After that, view your book title and add contributors to your title. You get a preview and summary to finish your import. Add another file and repeat the quick process for as many you need, for any number of books. For a more detailed breakdown of PD Abacus and its functions, see our help guide.
Fix currency conversion rates for accurate reporting
With managing sales made in other countries, we saw the headaches that came with them. That’s why PD Abacus now automatically pulls currency rates for countries and stores. This ensures accurate reporting and calculation of royalties for team members.
How to do it? Find the fix rates feature by navigating the drop-down menu at the top right corner of your PD Abacus dashboard. You will see a list of all the sales reports uploaded organized by months, along with exchange rates by country.
You can edit the conversion rates manually. But to sync them without the hassle, go to the bottom and you’ll see the option to upload a file of your store’s payout report. ⇩
Then, view the month’s current rate with the rate from your report and tick the respective boxes to update the ones you’d like. Click “Update FX rates’ and you’re done! Remember, the current rate is usually the default rate. You’d want to update your rates for utmost accuracy.
Streamline your work with others
For indies, publishing wide to more stores and international markets helps with discoverability. And in digital publishing, setting up multiple revenue streams is key to building a sustainable business. Exploring other tactics like co-writing has become a lucrative route (hence, the need for a service like PD Abacus).
PD Abacus is filling a gap in the industry by providing an easy and transparent way to calculate co-author royalties and other costs. It's the alternate solution to traditional publishers at publishing houses. And it's essentially a financial tracking and management tool for indies working with one another.
Author David Berens said that PD Abacus “makes our split look more legitimate. As in, I’m not cheating you… My co-author can log in and see the report on their own as well.” 👌
The PublishDrive team will continue developing our one-of-a-kind tool. As we add more channels and features, we hope indies do the same with their distribution strategy. Widen your reach with methods like co-authoring a book and collect those royalties! It's free to sign up for an account and check it out.
Interested in more? Watch our video tutorial! ⇩