In Royalties HQ, a rights holder is any individual or company that owns rights to intellectual property (IP) and therefore is due royalties following sales of that IP.
In practice, many rights holders are authors, but not all are. Non-author rights holders can include illustrators, narrators, companies, and benefactors (e.g. after the death of an author).
Required fields #
Each rights holder requires at least one of the following:
- email address, or:
- rights holder code.
The rights holder code is a unique code that you assign to each rights holder, for internal use only.
Royalty Payment Status #
Royalty payment status allows you to optionally withhold royalties from selected rights holders.
- OK to pay: Royalties owed to this rights holder will result in a bill in Royalties HQ, which indicates they will be paid. This is the default.
- Paused: This indicates that any royalties owed to this rights holder will be withheld. A bill will be generated for the rights holder; however, by default, they are not included in the bills’ download.
A rights holder’s royalty payment status affects the email content sent to rights holders with their royalty statement. This variable email content can be customised in Settings.
Company is the rights holder #
‘Company is the rights holder’ is a checkbox for rights holders.
This is designed to be used where the legal entity owning the rights for a title format is a company, not an individual.
When checked, the company name field becomes the name of the rights holder. This is then used in royalty statements and wherever rights holder names are presented in Royalties HQ.
Active rights holders #
The default state for a rights holder is active.
An active rights holder will receive a royalty statement when they have ownership of at least one title format which is included in the current royalty run. The rights holder will receive a statement, including for their title formats that have had no sales during this royalty period.
Inactive rights holders #
When a rights holder is inactive, they can still be owed royalties for any title formats that they have ownership of. Even if the title format is also inactive.
Therefore, an inactive rights holders continue to receive royalty statements for any title formats they have more than 0% ownership of, where royalties are due.. This includes title formats with a status of inactive.
An inactive rights holder will not have a royalty statement created in any of these scenarios:
- The rights holder has no royalty allocations for any title formats in the royalty run.
- The rights holder has ownership of a title format but there are no sales lines for that title format in the current royalty run’s period.
The principle here is that any royalties received by the publisher are owed to rights holders.
Publisher rights holder #
The Publisher Rights Holder is the rights holder that represents your publishing company. There can only be one publisher rights holder.
The Publisher Rights Holder is configured in Settings.
When the ownership of a title format does not total 100%, the remaining ownership is effectively owned by the Publisher Rights Holder.
During a Royalty Run, The Publisher Rights Holder is allocated the remainder of any royalties for a title format. For more details, see the Royalty Run section of this User Guide.
Deceased rights holders #
In the event that a rights holder is deceased, rights are typically inherited by benefactors. The new rights holders should be added in Royalties HQ, replacing the deceased rights holder.
You may wish to add a note against the title to indicate the change of rights holder.
Agents #
Literary agents may act on behalf of one or more rights holders. In this scenario, the literary agents usually prefer to receive their authors’ royalty statements and royalty payments from the publisher.
To accommodate this, we recommend that the author is added as the rights holder; however, with the email address of the literary agent. This way, the literary agent will receive the Royalty Statement email on behalf of the rights holder.
A drawback of this approach is that – when an agent represents more than one rights holder – it requires multiple email addresses for each agent. This is because each rights holder on Royalties HQ must have a unique email address. We are exploring options to improve the handling of agents in Royalties HQ, and we welcome your suggestions.