PD Abacus calculates royalty splits for co-authored books

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Ebook distributor PublishDrive has released a new tool called PD Abacus which allows writers and publishers to calculate royalty-splitting on co-authored books.

You don’t have to distribute books through PublishDrive to use PD Abacus as it’s available to everyone and it’s free for an initial period but will cost $2.99 per title when the beta period ends in mid-August.

What does PD Abacus do?

  • Directly imports KDP data, so no changes to authors’ books or KDP accounts are required.
  • Calculates co-author royalties for books directly published via Amazon KDP (including Kindle Unlimited Books) and more.
  • Generates detailed royalty reports to share with co-authors and contributors.
  • Splits royalties between non-author contributors, such as illustrators and editors.
  • Helps independent publishers that need to streamline co-author royalties across large-scale collaborations, such as multi-author anthologies. 
  • Distribution through PublishDrive is not required, and PD Abacus can be used by authors enrolled in KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited.

Many of PD Abacus’ features were developed using input from Michael Anderle and LMBPN Publishing, which PublishDrive say helped them to pinpoint what authors need.

PublishDrive released Team Royalties a few months ago and that tool does require distribution through PublishDrive as it is a feature that sends out separate royalty payments to your entire team of co-authors every month.

PD Abacus differs in that it calculates co-author royalties for books published directly at retailers and generates royalty reports for your team. The service is available to anyone.

How PD Abacus works

  1. To get started, create a free PublishDrive account, log in to your account and navigate to PD Abacus on the dashboard.
  2. Drag and drop your KDP sales report into the import wizard. Your KDP sales report can be found in your KDP account under the Reports tab. Then scroll down and click Generate Report.
  3. PD Abacus will automatically separate your books according to their ASIN or ISBN. After importing all of your sales data, you can: 
  • Select the titles and months you want to include in the co-author royalty report.
  • Invite contributors so they can view royalty reports.

PublishDrive picks up 700 new authors since introducing ‘100% royalties’ for $100 monthly fee