Splitting Author Royalties

Earlier this week PublishDrive announced the launch of their Team Royalties feature. But what is this, and how can it benefit you as an indie author? If you’re not collaborating with other authors on a multi-author gift set or a co-authored book, then team royalties aren’t really relevant to you. But if you’re looking to work with other authors on joint projects and are worried about who will manage the splitting of the royalties, then PublishDrive’s new feature is an ideal solution to help you figure out the back-end financial details of making sure all authors get their fair share of the book royalties.

First let’s look at some different author collaboration projects that could benefit from this Team Royalties feature.

Multi-author gift sets

I interviewed travel memoirist Joe Cawley about author collaboration, and one of his collaboration projects was to join voices with other authors in his travel writing niche to self-publish a multi-author gift set. Their How Not to Move to Spain three-book set includes a book by Joe Cawley, Victoria Tweed, and Alan Parks, all of who write travel memoirs set in Spain.

Co-authored Books

In order to split the writing tasks, some authors who write in the same niche, band together to co-author a book. The first time I heard about this was Joanna Penn joined forces with J.Thorn to co-author Risen Gods.

Joanna recorded a podcast How To Co-Write A Book. Collaboration And Co-Creation With J Thorn, and her financial agreement with J.Thorn is “fifty-fifty forever on everything and anything that comes of it”. So here’s another example of a successful author collaboration requiring back end royalty splitting.

Up until now, authors have had to split shared royalties manually, but this new royalty feature launched by PublishDrive will put an end to the manual accounting requirement.

Team Royalties

When royalties are received, the author who set up the gift set or co-authored book under their profile has to manage the payout of royalties to the other authors. But under the new PublishDrive feature, those royalties would be allocated to each author automatically. Here’s how the team royalties works:

You don’t have to move all of your books under PublishDrive, you could just set up an account with them to manage your co-authored projects. It means one more aggregator account to set up, but in the long-term, having PublishDrive be responsible for monthly accounting and royalty allocation is a big time saver.

So if you’ve been contemplating a collaboration project with another author, but the idea of having to track and account for the monthly royalty tracking and payments, setting up a distributor account with PublishDrive to handle these co-authored books or multi author box sets, is a low maintenance option—as long as you don’t mind paying for this premium service.

If you’ve been seeking a more streamlined way to split co-author royalties, then you’re going to love Team Royalties. Team Royalties will be a paid service, but all users who activate the service from now until the end of April 2019 can use it for free through the end of the year. PublishDrive

For more information about Team Royalties:

Introducing Team Royalties: a Hassle-Free Solution for Splitting Co-Author Royalties

Have you co-authored a travel guide or non fiction book and would like to share your experience on this website? Please leave a comment below, so we can share your experience with other authors.