Getting Started with Royalties HQ

Welcome to Royalties HQ! This guide will walk you through the essential steps to set up your account and run your first royalty calculation. By the end, you'll understand how to import your data, configure your settings, and generate professional royalty statements for your rights holders.

Before you begin

Before diving in, it's helpful to have the following information ready:

• A list of your titles and their ISBNs (by format)
• Your rights holders (authors) and their contact details
• Ownership percentages for each title format
• Recent sales files from your distributors
• Payment records showing what you received from each distributor

Step 1: Configure your settings

Start by configuring your team settings. Navigate to Settings from the main menu. Here you'll set up:

Publisher details

Enter your publisher name, country, and currency. The currency you select will be used for all royalty calculations and cannot be changed once you've completed a royalty run.

Contact information

Add your contact email address. This will be used as the reply-to address when you send royalty statements to rights holders. You can also add a BCC address to archive copies of all outgoing emails.

Royalty run defaults

Set your default royalty period (monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.) and minimum payout amount. Rights holders won't receive a bill unless their total owed meets or exceeds the minimum payout threshold.

Step 2: Add your titles

Navigate to Titles and add your catalogue. Each title can have multiple formats (hardback, paperback, ebook, audiobook), and each format has its own ISBN.

You can add titles individually through the interface, or bulk import using our CSV template. When you add an ISBN, Royalties HQ will automatically fetch cover images and metadata where available.

Step 3: Add your rights holders

Navigate to Rights Holders to add your authors and other parties who receive royalties. For each rights holder, you can store:

• Contact information and email address
• Payment details
• Tax information
• Contract documents (PDF or Word files)

Rights holders can be individuals or companies. You can also create a rights holder record for your publisher to track publisher-owned percentages.

Step 4: Set up ownership

Ownership determines how royalties are split between rights holders. Navigate to a title format and configure the ownership percentages for each rights holder.

Royalties HQ supports three royalty calculation models:

• Net Receipts: Royalties based on what the publisher actually received
• Retail List Price: Royalties based on the cover price
• Retail Minus Discount: Royalties based on cover price less retailer discount

You can also configure tiered royalties where the percentage changes based on units sold or total net receipts.

Next steps

Once you've configured your settings, titles, rights holders, and ownership, you're ready to:

• Import your first sales files
• Link publisher income payments
• Create your first royalty run

Need help getting started? Contact us and we'll walk you through the process.