This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
More publishers than ever are selling books directly to readers through their own websites. Whether you are running a Shopify store, a WooCommerce shop, or another e-commerce platform, direct sales offer obvious advantages — higher margins, direct customer relationships, and full ownership of your buyer data. But when it comes time to pay your authors, direct sales introduce a royalty processing challenge that most publishers are not set up to handle cleanly.
The problem is straightforward. With distributor sales, you receive a report and a payment. You know exactly what you earned on each title, and your author contracts are structured around that number. With direct sales, there is no distributor in the middle. You are the retailer. And that changes how royalties need to be calculated, tracked, and reported.
Why publishers are going direct
The economics are compelling. When you sell a $25 book through a distributor, you might net $10–$12 after retailer discounts and distribution fees. Sell that same book directly through your website and you keep the full sale price minus a small payment processing fee — typically 2–3%. On a $25 book, that means you are keeping roughly $24.25 instead of $11. The margin difference is enormous.
Beyond the money, direct sales give you something distributors never will: a direct relationship with your readers. You get their email addresses, their purchase history, and the ability to market to them again without a platform standing between you. For publishers building a brand around a niche or a particular set of authors, that data is invaluable.
But there is a trade-off. Distributors provide neat, structured sales reports that your royalty software can ingest. Your Shopify store does not. You are now responsible for extracting, formatting, and importing your own sales data — and you need a contract structure that makes sense when you are both the publisher and the retailer.
Use percentage-of-sale-value contracts for direct sales
This is the single most important recommendation in this article. If you are selling directly and paying royalties on those sales, structure your direct sales contracts as a percentage of sale value — either the list price or the actual sale price.
Here is why. With traditional distributor sales, publishers typically use a net receipts royalty model. The distributor sends you a check for $10 on a $20 book, and the author earns a percentage of that $10. Simple and fair — you only pay royalties on what you actually received.
But with direct sales, you are the retailer. There are no “net receipts from a distributor” because no distributor was involved. The customer paid $24.99 and your payment processor took $0.75, leaving you with $24.24. So what do you base the royalty on? The full $24.99? The $24.24 after processing fees? What about shipping costs — do those get deducted? What about returns reserves? Platform subscription fees?
This is where things get messy fast. A net receipts model applied to direct sales opens the door to disagreements about what counts as a legitimate deduction. The cleaner approach is a percentage of the sale price.
Example: Your author’s contract specifies 15% of the sale price on direct sales. A book sells for $24.99 on your Shopify store. The author earns $3.75 per copy. It does not matter what your payment processing fees were, what you spent on advertising, or how much shipping cost you. The calculation is transparent, predictable, and easy for both you and your author to verify.
You might set the percentage lower than what you would offer on a net receipts model for distributor sales — that is normal and expected. The point is clarity. Both parties know exactly what the number will be before the sale is even made. For more on how different contract structures affect your bottom line, see how to calculate book royalties.
Preparing your direct sales data
Your e-commerce platform will not produce a file that looks anything like an Ingram or KDP report. Instead, you will need to export your order data and map it to a format your royalty software can accept.
Most platforms — Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace — let you export orders as CSV files. The export typically includes order date, product name, SKU or ISBN, quantity, sale price, discounts applied, and customer information.
From a royalty processing perspective, you need to extract a few key data points from each order:
- ISBN (or whatever product identifier maps to your titles)
- Quantity sold
- Sale price per unit (after any discounts but before shipping and tax)
- Currency
- Sale date or royalty month
Strip out everything else — customer names, shipping addresses, tax amounts, and fulfillment details are not relevant to royalty calculations. What you want is a clean file that says: this title, this many copies, at this price, in this currency, during this month.
Using the Royalties HQ custom import template
Since direct sales do not come from a supported distributor format, you will use the custom sales import feature in Royalties HQ. This gives you a flexible template that accepts sales data from any source, including your own website.
The required fields in the custom import template are:
- isbn — the ISBN-13 for the title
- royalty_month — the sales period (e.g., “2026-03”)
- currency — the three-letter currency code (USD, GBP, EUR, etc.)
- royalty — the royalty-bearing amount per unit (typically the sale price for direct sales)
- royalty_on_sales — the total royalty-bearing amount for the line (royalty multiplied by units)
- units_sold — number of copies sold
- sales_channel — set this to “other” for direct sales
- marketplace — use something descriptive like “Shopify,” “WooCommerce,” or “Website”
The marketplace field is especially useful here. It lets you distinguish direct sales from distributor sales in your reporting, so you can see at a glance how much revenue and how many royalties are flowing through each channel.
Step by step: from e-commerce export to royalty import
Here is the practical workflow, month by month:
- Export your orders from your e-commerce platform for the completed month. Filter by order date and export as CSV.
- Filter for book sales only. If your store sells merchandise or other non-royalty-bearing products, remove those rows.
- Map to the RHQ template. Create a spreadsheet that matches the custom import format. Populate ISBN, royalty month, currency, sale price (as the royalty column), total sales value, units, sales channel as “other,” and marketplace.
- Handle discounts. If you ran a promotion and sold books at $19.99 instead of $24.99, use the actual sale price — $19.99 — as the royalty amount. This keeps your data honest and your author payments accurate.
- Save as CSV and upload via Add New Sales in Royalties HQ. Select the custom import format.
- Review and import. The system validates your file and flags any issues — missing ISBNs, unrecognized currencies, or duplicate periods. Fix any errors and import.
Once imported, the sales data flows through your royalty run just like distributor data. Contracts are matched, rates applied, and statements generated automatically.
Handling refunds and returns
Direct sales come with returns, and you need a plan for processing them. When a customer returns a book purchased through your website, the refund should be reflected in your royalty data.
The simplest approach is to include returns as negative quantities in your next monthly import. If a customer bought two copies in February and returned one in March, your March import file should include a line with units_sold of -1 and a negative royalty_on_sales value. This deducts the returned sale from the author’s earnings for that period.
If your return volume is low, you might batch returns quarterly rather than monthly. The important thing is that returns are eventually captured so royalty statements remain accurate. For publishers who also manage reserves against returns, direct sales can be handled separately since return rates on direct-to-consumer orders tend to be lower than wholesale.
Tips for keeping it clean
Organize exports by month. Create a folder structure — something like Direct Sales / 2026 / 03 March — and save both the raw e-commerce export and the formatted import file. If you ever need to audit or re-import, you will be glad you kept the originals.
Reconcile with your payment processor. Cross-check your monthly sales total against what your payment processor (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) actually deposited. If the numbers do not match, investigate before importing. Discrepancies usually come from refunds, chargebacks, or failed payments that still appear in the order export.
Track shipping separately. Shipping revenue and costs should not factor into royalty calculations. If your e-commerce export includes shipping charges in the order total, make sure you strip those out before mapping to the import template. Royalties should be based on the product sale price only.
Be consistent with your marketplace name. If you label your direct sales as “Shopify” in January and “Website” in February, your reporting will split them into two channels. Pick one label and stick with it.
How direct sales fit alongside distributor imports
Direct sales are just one piece of your overall import workflow. Most publishers will run direct sales alongside imports from Amazon KDP, Ingram, and other distributors. The beauty of using a custom import for direct sales is that once the data is in the system, it behaves identically to distributor data — same royalty runs, same statements, same reporting.
If you are building out your full import workflow, these guides cover the distributor side:
The goal is a single, unified royalty run that covers every sales channel — direct and distributed — so your authors receive one clear statement that accounts for everything.
Get the complete workflow
Direct sales royalty processing does not need to be complicated, but it does require a bit of upfront setup — the right contract structure, a repeatable export-and-import process, and consistent data hygiene. Once those pieces are in place, processing direct sales becomes just another step in your monthly routine.
If you want to see how the full workflow fits together — from sales imports across every channel to automated royalty calculations and author statements — download our free guide for a complete walkthrough.