This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
You’ve just signed a new author. The contract is countersigned, everyone is excited about the project, and your editorial team is already planning the launch. Then royalty season arrives and you realize you never collected a W-9, you don’t have a mailing address on file, and the author’s bank details are sitting in an email thread from six months ago that nobody can find.
This is a surprisingly common scenario. In the rush to acquire and publish, the operational side of onboarding gets pushed down the priority list. The result is a scramble before every payment run. This checklist covers exactly what you need to collect from every new rights holder before their first royalty period closes.
Legal name and contact details
Start with the basics. You need the rights holder’s full legal name as it appears on their tax documents. This matters because the name on their royalty statement needs to match the name on their tax filings. An author writing under a pen name still needs their legal name in your system.
Collect a primary email address and a mailing address. The email is essential for sending royalty statements and, if you offer one, author portal access. The mailing address is needed for tax correspondence and physical checks if that is your payment method. Keep in mind that some rights holders are companies rather than individuals. Where a company is the legal entity owning the rights, the company name and registered address should be on file.
Payment details
Before you can pay anyone, you need to know how to pay them. Collect bank account details or whatever payment method you use. For domestic payments, this typically means a routing number and account number. For international authors, you will need SWIFT/BIC codes and IBANs.
Verify the details before the first payment. A wrong digit in an account number can send money into the void, and recovering misdirected payments is a headache you do not need. Some publishers send a small test payment first, though this is not always practical at scale. At a minimum, double-check every field against the source document.
If you are managing advances against royalties, payment details become even more important. Advance tranches need to land in the right account on schedule, and any delay caused by missing or incorrect banking information reflects poorly on your operation.
Tax documentation
Tax compliance is non-negotiable. For US-based publishers, you need a W-9 form from every domestic rights holder and a W-8BEN (or W-8BEN-E for entities) from every foreign rights holder. These forms establish the rights holder’s tax status and determine whether you need to withhold taxes from their payments.
Collect tax forms before you make any payments. If you pay a rights holder without proper tax documentation on file, you may be required to withhold at the maximum backup withholding rate, which creates problems for everyone. The IRS does not care that you meant to collect the form later.
For publishers outside the US, equivalent documentation requirements apply in your jurisdiction. Whatever the local rules, the principle is the same: get the paperwork done upfront, not after the fact.
Signed contract with royalty terms
No royalties should be calculated without a signed contract that spells out the terms. At minimum, the contract should define the royalty rate, the basis for calculation (net receipts or list price), the products covered, and the rights holder’s ownership percentage.
If your contract includes tiered royalty rates that change at certain sales thresholds, those thresholds need to be clearly documented. The same goes for any special terms like different rates for different formats or territories.
Store contracts in a central, accessible location. When a question comes up about an author’s royalty rate two years from now, you do not want to be digging through email attachments or filing cabinets. A shared drive, document management system, or your royalty software’s built-in contract storage all work. The key is that anyone who needs to reference the terms can find them quickly.
If you want to download our free guide on improving your royalty workflow, the section on contract management covers organizational strategies that scale as your catalog grows.
Pause payments until onboarding is complete
Here is the most important step on this checklist: do not pay a rights holder until every item above is collected and verified. It sounds obvious, but it is remarkably easy to let an incomplete onboarding slide when a royalty run deadline is approaching.
The practical way to enforce this is to set the rights holder’s payment status to Paused when you first add them to your system. In this state, royalties will still be calculated and statements will still be generated, but the rights holder will be excluded from payment downloads by default. Once you have confirmed that their legal name, contact details, payment information, tax documents, and signed contract are all on file, you switch their status to OK to pay.
This approach protects you in two ways. First, it prevents accidental payments to rights holders whose tax or banking details are incomplete. Second, it creates a clear audit trail showing that onboarding was verified before any money changed hands.
Assign a unique identifier
Every rights holder in your system should have a unique rights holder code in addition to their email address. This might be something like “RH001” or “SMITH-J.” Codes make it easier to reference rights holders consistently across imports, reports, and internal communications, especially when you have multiple authors with similar names.
Establishing a consistent coding convention during onboarding saves time later. If you are importing rights holders in bulk using a CSV, codes are what your system uses to match and update records. Without them, you are relying solely on email addresses, which authors change more often than you might expect.
Retain records for the long term
Publishing contracts and royalty obligations can span decades. Plan to retain onboarding records for at least six to seven years, and longer if the contract is still active. This includes tax forms, signed contracts, payment verification documents, and any correspondence related to the onboarding process.
Digital storage makes this straightforward. Set up a folder structure by rights holder and make sure files are named consistently. When an auditor, tax authority, or the rights holder themselves asks for documentation years down the road, you will be glad you kept everything organized from day one.
How Royalties HQ helps
Royalties HQ makes onboarding straightforward. You can add rights holders individually or import them in bulk via CSV, capturing all the details you need in one step. Each rights holder can be set to Paused payment status until their onboarding paperwork is complete, and the system supports both individual and company rights holders out of the box.
Rights holder codes, email addresses, mailing addresses, and payment details all live in a single record. When onboarding is verified, switching to OK to pay takes one click. Combined with features like the author royalty portal for self-service access and centralized contract storage, the entire process from first signature to first payment is covered.
Build the habit early
The best time to establish an onboarding process is before you need it. Whether you are a new publisher signing your first author or an established house bringing on your hundredth, having a consistent checklist prevents the kind of last-minute scrambles that delay payments and erode author trust. Collect everything upfront, verify it before the first royalty run, and store it where you can find it years later. Your future self will thank you.