• April 2013: How to use Pivot Tables to analyze sales information.
• May 2013: Using the Microsoft PowerPivot add-in for Excel to analyze sales data stored in Easy Royalties.
• June 2013: Generating royalty statements
• July 2013: That’s Rights – our optional module for managing rights sales
• August 2013: Sales Imports, including how to import the multi-currency Amazon KDP sales files.

Time and dates are posted on the first of each month. Attendance for each seminar is limited to 20 people.

Budget

How much can you afford to spend on royalty software? In general, we recommend that you budget 1% of your annual royalty expense on software.

A small company with $100,000 in royalty payable should spend no more than $1,000. A company with $10M in royalty expenses should plan on spending at about $100K for software.

There are three costs tiers for royalty software;

1. Low – This tier consist of  software priced from $500 to $10,000. The PC based Easy Royalties is in this tier.
2. Medium – Hosted software solutions from Klopotek, Media Services Group, Publishing Technology and Virtusales will cost about $24,000+ a year.
3. High – Stand alone solutions from IPX, Klopotek, Publishing Technology, Real Software Systems, SAP and Virtusales will cost from $100,000 to $1M USD.

Requirements

Scalability

How many contracts, licenses, properties, products, transactions and users does the solution need to support.

McGraw-Hill Education has over 250,000 royalty contracts and 1,000,000 ISBNs. They implemented Advance Rights and Royalties from Publishing Technology. Advance is a powerful and scalable solution used by large publishers.

If you need more than 5 concurrent users or and will be importing more than 150,000 sales transactions monthly we strongly recommend that you look at other solutions that can better handle these large volumes of transactions.

Royalty Rules

What are your requirements for processing royalties?

Example: Escalators

Easy Royalties supports escalators based on LTD sales, quantity sold, royalty earnings, list price and retail price. It does not support escalators based on YTD sales.

Example: Sales Basis

This includes list price, sales price, net receipts, gross profit and net profit.

Example: Territories

Are your royalties territory based? Do you need to handle multiple currencies?

Example: Sets

Do you sell products in sets? If so, you need software that can allocate sales among the set’s components.

Competition

We recommend that you evaluate 3 to 4 competitive products before selecting any royalty software

Example:

• Midsized companies looking at Elan you should also look at Metacomet and Bradbury Phillips and AcumenBook
• Large companies looking at Real Software Systems should also look at Klopotek, Publishing Technology, SAP and Virtusales
• Music publishers looking at Easy Royalties should also look at Musicalc and Counterpoint.

Customer List

You want to purchase software that services companies that are similar to yours.

Easy Royalties/That’s Rights has client in over 19 countries with over 40 Easy Royalties clients in the United States.  Our book publishing clients range in size from startups to publishers with sales of about $50M.

With this update your royalty escalator options include;

• Net receipts
• Quantity sold
• Royalties earned
• Unit net price
• Unit retail price

Net receipts bases the royalties earned on the life to date sales for the product.

Quantity sold assigns a royalty rate based on the life to date quantity sold.

Royalties earned assigns a royalty rate based on the royalties earned by the recipient.

Unit net price assigns a royalty rate based on the selling price of the product.

Until retail price allows your to select a royalty rate based on the suggested list price.

EasyRoyalties version v 3.11.121 provides the following corrections or new features. This list shows all changes since the last announcement; some minor updates have been released in the interim – check your current version of EasyRoyalties to determine which changes apply.

• (v 3.11.106) Author contracts view: column added for last statement to-date

• (v 3.11.106) Licenses view: column added for reporting cycle months

• (v 3.11.106) Invoices: title added to the item description.

• (v 3.11.106) Author/contributor detail, Titles tab: list of titles can now be sorted by any of the columns in this window.

• (v 3.11.106) Improvements to Purchase Summary document

• (v 3.11.106) Author contracts view: added quick command to change author on a contract (royalty statements, advances, payments, etc. are retained and moved to the new author)

• (v 3.11.108) Author detail: change author from Person to Organisation and vice versa now enabled.

• (v 3.11.109) Author royalty statement, multi-title format: columns can now be selected (i.e. show/noshow), and the column header text is user-defineable.

• (v 3.11.112) License fees -> ‘Ignore for author royalties’ option: if option is selected, author royalty estimate (tab on payment-received detail) will now show no royalties.

• (v 3.11.112) Tools -> Backup: suggested (default) filename no longer includes the full folder path name as part of the backup file name, resulting in (much) shorter filenames. Also, suggested (default) location changed to the same folder as the data file being backed up.

• (v 3.11.112) Payments received view: columns added for ‘Country’ and ‘Language’ (showing country of licensee and language of license, respectively)

• (v 3.11.112) Royalty statements, sales-based reserves format: reserves brought forward were not showing in the detail section (though the summary section was correct). This has been fixed.

• (v 3.11.113) New report: Royalty Rights Aanalysis: shows total royalty expenses by royalty rights (rules). Also shows which activities with no royalty rule assigned.

• (v 3.11.115) Registration information moved to different location in the Windows registry (from CURRENT_USER to LOCAL_MACHINE)

• (v 3.11.116) Added ‘SelectedReviews’ field to Import -> Titles & properties

• (v 3.11.116) Sales detail report -> Export: return quantities were incorrectly showing as positive numbers; this has been fixed.

• (v 3.11.116) Author royalty statement — multiple titles format: the ‘unearned opening balance’ now includes amounts from any advances paid during the period.

• (v 3.11.116) Sales by title report: incorrect alignment of quanty totals. This has been fixed.

• (v 3.11.116) Author contract groups: total advances showing incorrect amounts (on-screen views). This has been corrected.

• (v 3.11.118) Author royalty statements, landscape & sales-based reserve formats: certain combinations of selected columns resulted in rightmost column being too small. This has been fixed.

• (v 3.11.118) Author royalty statements: Save As (e.g. to .rtf) – some statements that printed correctly might crash when saving to .rtf. This has been fixed.

• (v 3.11.119) Author payments: the ‘paid/unpaid’ status now remains unlocked even after accounting on a royalty statement (so that unpaid advances which were reported on statements can be subsequently marked as ‘paid’)

• (v 3.11.119) Agent’s package: new document: Author Invoice (invoice for commission on payments received)

• (v 3.11.120) Submissions -> Quick command -> Modify: if the following fields were left blank, the command was incorrectly blanking out the corresponding fields in the selected items: language, license type, season, account executive. This has been fixed.

• (v 3.11.120) Titles view -> Advanced lookup: keywords search enhanced to allow for ‘all keywords’ or ‘any keywords’ searches.

• (v 3.11.120) Title cataologue: show keywords now optional

• (v 3.11.120) Companies view & People view: added ‘Company type’ and ‘People type’ (the ‘view as’ settings) to search criteria.

• (v 3.11.121) New submission: the ‘Lookup’ command for the ‘submission-to’ field was not including companies of type sub-agent. This has been fixed.

• (v 3.11.121) Royalty statements: in certain non-English regional settings, a royalty statement with certain printing options set (title editions details), an error would occur; this has been corrected.

• (v 3.11.121) New submissions for multiple titles or multiple companies: improved warning for duplicate submissions (allows for ‘Yes to all’ and ‘No to all’)

To download and  install this royalty software update, log in to the client support website at http://www.thatsrights.com/clients/.

NOTE: if you have multiple users sharing a single database, all users may need to update at the same time. For more information, log in to the client support website or see your system administrator.

If you have any questions please feel free to contract support@easyroyaltiesusa.com or call 516-593-0480.

Book publishers can configure the royalty software to accept only valid ISBN’s. This is done from the Options, settings & lists > Personal options > General tab.

Select Validate ISBN numbers on data entry to accept only valid ISBNs. Leave this box unchecked to turn validation off.

View Video

Royalty software customers needing support during this period can email support@easyroyaltiesusa.com. These emails will be answered by our London office.

At Kensai International we advise our clients to implement a four tier backup plan.

Tier 1. Online Backup

Online backup ensures that your royalty data is automatically backed up to a secure location. Small companies tend to use affordable backup services such as Carbonite, Mozy or SOS Online backup. Large companies use more expensive backup services from Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and EMC.  What’s the difference? In the event of a disaster these Fortune 500 companies can call on resources that are not available to smaller online backup services.

Small Company: Carbonite, Mozy, SOS Online

Large Company: IBM, EMC

Tier 2. Local Backup via a USB hard drive or a Network Attached Storage Device

Though an online backup services is good, you always need a 2nd line of defense. Why? First, you never want to place all your eggs in one basket. Second,  in the past some backup services have experienced problems that delayed backup recovery by up to 7 to 21 days. Third, restoring data from a local device is a lot faster.

Small Company: Seagate Backup Plus or Western Digital MyBook

Larger Company: IoSafe Fire and Waterproof USB or NAS drives.

Note: Companies with small data files supplement this with a periodic backup to a CD. Companies with large data files will supplement their hard drive backup with a tape backup. The tape backup is stored in a fire & waterproof safe.

Example: Daily online and USB hard drive backup. Monthly tape backup.

Tier 3. Surge Protection

Surge protectors  & power conditioners protect your royalty files from the data corruption and drive failures that result from large power fluctuations. Pricing ranges from $25 for a simple surge protector to $300 for a ZeroSurge surge protector. ZeroSurge protectors are used by government agencies; Department of Defense, NASA, US Army, US Navy, etc., and Fortune 500 companies  such as AT&T, Boeing, Exxon, Federal Express Lockheed Martin. If you have over 5,000 royalty contracts we recommend that you protect the hardware storing your royalty data with a ZeroSurge protector and a UPS device.

Small Company: APC or Isobar surge protectors or UPS devices.

Large Company: ZeroSurge (www.zerosurge.com).

Tier 4. Data Recovery Procedures Manual

The data recovery procedures manual is a step by step action plan on how to recover your royalty software and its associated data files.  It contains the contact information for the software’s vendor and you how to recover the data stored in your online and local backup drives. Twice a year the IT manager (or royalty manager in small companies) will test the recovery procedure to ensure that it works and that all contact information is valid. The recovery procedures manual is stored online and in a local fire & waterproof safe.

If you have any questions or comments about the information in this post please email info@easyroyaltiesusa.com

The Windows 8 platform features two major security improvements along with a modern tile based interface designed for tablets and smart phones.

Security Improvements

First, secure boot; on supported PCs, allows properly signed and authenticated components are allowed to execute during operating system startup. This is explained in the MSDN blog post below:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/22/protecting-the-pre-os-environment-with-uefi.aspx

Second, Windows 8 loads your internet security software before all other startup apps. Malware cannot load first and turn off your security software.

Tile Based Interface

Windows 8 also present users with a new modern tile based start screen. Traditional programs; such as Office 2010 and Easy Royalties, run in the Windows 8 desktop environment.

If you want to reduce the learning curve for Windows 8 and preserve the traditional Windows 7 desktop look we recommend that you purchase the Start8 Windows 8 add-in ($4.99 USD) that provides;

• Windows 7-style Start menu with Windows 8 enhancements
• Search for Windows 8-style (Modern UI) apps
• Pin desktop and Metro apps
• Boot directly to the Windows 8 desktop
• Windows 8 Start screen accessible from the Start menu

You can purchase the Start8 add-in from http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/

If you have any questions about running Easy Royalties under Windows 8 please feel free to contact us via email or phone.