How it works
Consonance breaks down royalty processing into two steps, calculating:
- the total royalty due per product across all contributors within the royalty runs section. Data is gathered from the contract’s royalty specifiers and sales information.
- the split between those contributors within the royalty statements section. Data is gathered from the royalty run and the contract’s payee split information.
Prerequisites
To begin royalty processing, the system must already know:
- works and products
- contacts
- contributors
- sales channels and masterchannels configuration
- company statement months in the Company > Company settings section
Run royalties as a new publisher
- Add product royalty rates. Consonance gets royalties rates, payees, reserves and other data direct from the contract, so add this data to the contracts even if you don’t plan to use the contract PDFs generated by the system. For the minimum data required, read how to add royalty specific contract data. If you have a lot of this data in spreadsheets already, we can help you import royalty contract data.
- Add or import payees. Many will already be in the system because they are book contributors, but there may be non-contributing payees that need adding, such as literary agents, estates and other recipients who may not yet have a contact record in Consonance.
- Import sales for the period of your first royalty statements.
- Calculate royalties.
- Generate statements.
Get help
Raise a support ticket in the usual way to book a training session to get started with royalties. It’s necessary because your royalties set up is unique to you and the way you want to run your business.
The training consists of two stages: initial and top-up.
The initial training session is a walkthrough of the whole process – using one of your actual products, to make the training sticky
. This will provide you with the context you need to make the decisions about your royalties set-up in Consonance. The walkthrough includes:
- A ten minute overview of the whole process, then looping back to the start to cover each of the following points in more detail.
- How to choose channels
- How to input royalty rates
- How to import sales
- How to do a royalty run
- How to do a statement run
- How to record payments
Later, you’ll schedule a subsequent top-up call, when you have more data, either in a Q&A style or repeating the above.
Training costs £110 ex vat an hour and is delivered over video call, which is recorded, to which you can later refer. All training is also backed up with the written documentation you’re currently reading on this website.