This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
Your authors want to know how their books are selling. That’s a perfectly reasonable expectation. But if you only run royalties quarterly or biannually, there’s a long stretch of silence where authors are left guessing. Some will email you asking for updates. Others will just quietly wonder. Either way, the gap between royalty runs creates an information vacuum that puts unnecessary strain on your author relationships.
The problem with waiting for royalty statements
Formal royalty statements are the backbone of your relationship with rights holders. But they only go out when you run your royalties, which for most small publishers means every three, six, or twelve months. In the meantime, authors have no visibility of their sales.
This is especially frustrating in the months right after a new release, when authors are eager to see how their book is landing. They might be doing their own marketing, running events, or pitching to media. They need to know whether those efforts are showing up in the numbers. Making them wait months for that feedback isn’t just inconvenient. It chips away at the trust you’re building through transparent reporting.
Some publishers try to bridge the gap by pulling numbers from distributor dashboards and typing up informal email summaries. It works, but it doesn’t scale. If you have 20 or 30 rights holders, manually compiling and sending individual sales updates each month is another half day of admin nobody budgeted for.
What authors actually want between royalty runs
Authors aren’t asking for a full financial reconciliation every month. They just want the basics: how many units sold, which formats, and where. A clear, simple summary they can glance at and understand.
Monthly sales reports fill this exact need. They’re lightweight PDF summaries that show units sold and KENP reads for each title format, grouped by the rights holder’s contracted titles. No royalty calculations, no financial transactions. Just a snapshot of what happened last month.
This is useful in several situations. New releases where the author is watching early sales closely. Backlist titles where a sudden uptick might indicate a promotion is working. And seasonal patterns where seeing month-to-month trends helps authors plan their own marketing activity.
How Royalties HQ handles monthly sales reports
In Royalties HQ, you’ll find monthly sales reports under Reports. The page shows a month selector (going back up to two years) and a summary of all the sales data you’ve imported for that period, broken down by marketplace and distributor.
When you’re ready, click Send Sales Reports. The system shows you exactly what will happen: how many rights holders will receive a report, how many will be skipped (because they’re inactive or have no email address), and whether you’ve already sent reports for that month. One click sends a personalised PDF to every qualifying rights holder.
Personalised PDFs. Each report is generated specifically for that rights holder. It only contains data for their contracted title formats, so authors never see each other’s numbers.
Imprint branding. If you run multiple imprints, each PDF automatically uses the correct imprint’s logo, name, and reply-to email. Authors receive a report that looks like it came from the right publisher.
Delivery tracking. After sending, you can review the status of every email. A delivery report shows which messages were sent successfully, which failed, and the specific error for any failures.
ZIP download. Prefer to review the reports before sending, or need copies for your own records? Download the entire batch as a ZIP file.
Author Portal access
If you use the Author Portal, your rights holders don’t even need to wait for you to send the report. When portal sales reports are enabled in your settings, authors can view their monthly sales data directly in the portal and download their own PDF at any time.
This means the reports serve two purposes. They’re a proactive communication tool when you email them out, and a self-service resource when authors want to check their numbers on their own schedule. Either way, you’re not the bottleneck.
Less admin, more trust
Monthly sales reports are one of the simplest things you can offer your authors, and one of the most appreciated. A short PDF that says “here’s how your books did last month” goes a long way toward keeping authors happy and reducing the flood of “how are my sales?” emails that hit your inbox between royalty runs.
For a broader look at streamlining your entire royalty workflow, read the complete guide to royalty management or explore the reports documentation.
