If you’ve ever had an author ask you to donate a portion of their royalties to a charity, you know what comes next. You open the spreadsheet, find the right row, calculate the percentage by hand, adjust the author’s statement, create a line item for the recipient, and hope you got it all right. Next quarter, you do it again. And again.
It’s the kind of task that sounds simple until you’re actually doing it. And it only gets more complicated when you have multiple authors making donations, different percentages on different books, and recipients who need to see what they received and where it came from.
The Spreadsheet Shuffle
For most small publishers, royalty donations start as a favour. An author wants 10% of their earnings on a particular title sent to a charity they care about. You say “sure, no problem” and add a note to your spreadsheet. But that one-off favour turns into a recurring task you have to remember every single royalty period.
Before long, you might have a handful of these arrangements running at once. Maybe one author donates to a literacy nonprofit. Another splits royalties with a co-author who isn’t formally on the contract. A third wants to contribute a share to a publisher’s fund. Each one is a manual calculation, a manual adjustment, and a manual entry on someone’s statement.
There’s no audit trail. If someone asks “how much have I donated this year?” you’re digging through old files. If you make a mistake, it’s hard to catch until someone flags it. The whole process is fragile, and it doesn’t scale.
Common Scenarios
Royalty donations come up more often than you might expect. Here are the situations we see most frequently:
Charity contributions. An author wants a percentage of their royalties on a specific book sent to a charitable organisation. It might be 5%, it might be 50%. Either way, it needs to happen automatically, every royalty period.
Co-author splits. Sometimes a contributor isn’t formally listed on the contract but still deserves a share. A donation rule is a clean way to route part of one rights holder’s earnings to another without rewriting contracts.
Publisher or organisational contributions. Authors occasionally want to direct a portion of their earnings back to the publisher or to a specific fund. A donation rule handles this without any extra bookkeeping on your end.
Set It Up Once, Then Forget About It
In Royalties HQ, donations work through simple rules. You’ll find them under Adjustments, then Donations. Setting one up takes about a minute.
Each donation rule defines the donor (the rights holder whose royalties will be reduced), the recipient (the rights holder who receives the donation), the product it applies to, and the percentage. That’s the core of it.
But there are a few extras that make all the difference in practice.
Percentage flexibility. You can set any percentage from 0.1% all the way up to 100%, giving you precise control over how much gets donated.
Maximum amount caps. If a donor wants to give 10% of royalties on a title but cap the total at $500 per period, you can set that directly on the rule. No need to monitor it yourself.
Date ranges. Donation rules can have a start month and an end month. If an author only wants to donate for a calendar year, you set the dates and the rule handles itself. When the period ends, the donations stop automatically.
No compounding surprises. If there are multiple donation rules for the same donor and product, they don’t compound on each other. Each rule calculates independently from the donor’s balance, which keeps the maths predictable and transparent.
Calculated at the Right Time
Donation amounts are worked out automatically during your royalty runs. The system calculates them from the donor’s balance after advances and expenses have already been deducted. That means donations are always based on what the author actually earned, not a gross figure that hasn’t accounted for other obligations.
If you ever need to reverse things, that’s straightforward too. Deleting a bill reverses all the associated donation transactions cleanly, so you’re never left with orphaned adjustments cluttering up your records.
Full Visibility for Everyone
One of the biggest headaches with manual donation tracking is keeping everyone informed. With Royalties HQ, donation details appear automatically on PDF royalty statements for both the donor and the recipient. Your authors can see exactly what was donated and where it went. Recipients can see what they received and which title it came from.
If your rights holders use the Author Portal, they get even more visibility. They can view their donation transactions and see the active rules that apply to them, all without needing to email you for an update.
And on your side, every donation is tracked with a full audit trail. If anyone ever asks about historical donations, you can pull up the details in seconds instead of hunting through old spreadsheets.
One Less Thing to Worry About
Royalty donations aren’t complicated in theory. The challenge has always been doing them consistently, accurately, and transparently, period after period. Royalties HQ turns a recurring manual task into a set of rules that run themselves.
If you’re ready to stop managing donations by hand, take a look at Royalties HQ and see how much time you could save on your next royalty run.