Orders and Customers

Customer Classes

These are different types of accounts with whom your publisher has a sales relationship. They give you money, you give them books. Whether they’re people you meet at your brick-and-mortar, distribution companies who go on to sell your books elsewhere, or something else, these customer classes add up to create your audience. Differentiating between these classes is important because they all give you different kinds of insight into how and where your books are selling.

• Direct to Consumer: Exactly what it sounds like. These are orders where you’re selling books to the reader directly through your website, at markets/pop-ups, or at your storefront.
• Trade: Namely, the book trade! These are the fair bookstores across the world that sell your books to customers alongside possibly hundreds of other publishers’.
• Specialty: These are retailers that use books to convey their mission statement.
• Library: Publisher sales directly to libraries (public libraries, academic institutions, etc.) We’ve heard firsthand that libraries love buying books from indie publishers. Often, indies are the first to give libraries mutually beneficial deals (like fair pricing, or eBook licenses that don’t expire). Once you sell your books to libraries, your authors’ reach grows by entire communities.
• Gift: Gift retailers intermix books with other product lines, like food, toys, dishware, or thematic displays for impulsive sales. A shoppy shop, if you will.
• Distributor: You may or may not have a distributor, a company that carries stock of your books and ships them to buying accounts for a percentage of proceeds (and, often, an exclusive license to do so). Distributors often have a hand in marketing the books, from sales representatives to catalogs and review copy dissemination.
• Wholesaler: Companies who don’t actively utilize a sales force but list the availability of your books to retailers on their platform. Unlike a distributor, they don’t necessarily engage with a publisher through a close relationship, additional fees (ha ha), or sales reps. 

Expense Categories

When your publisher spends money, that’s an expense. Creating custom Expense Categories will help you track the money that your publisher spends, for your own financial reporting as well as tax purposes. We recommend using categories that make sense to you and help out when tax season comes around, such as “Start-up costs,” “Marketing and Advertising,” “Utilities,” etc. 

Navigate to Settings > Expense Categories to add your own. Once you add an expense category to WorkingLit, it’s available in a dropdown menu every time you log a new expense.

Payment terms (for Orders)

When does a customer pay for the books they have ordered? Common payment terms include “COD” (Cash on Delivery, also seen as “due upon receipt”) or “Net xx” (their payment is due xx days after the invoice date, often 30,  60, or 90). You can add these terms and more to WorkingLit to keep track of invoices with ease.

Products

BISACs

A topical categorization system to define a book’s genre and subject. Or basically, the publishing version of the Dewey Decimal System. Notably, Amazon does not use BISAC codes on its customer-facing portal. Publishers may also see requests for Thema, the European version of BISACs. The full list by subject is available on BISG’s site and updates yearly.

Our marketing and sales manager, Sara, loves a BISAC brainstorming session.

CSV

This is the file format WorkingLit uses to import and export information. It’s an extremely common spreadsheet format because it’s a really simple way to edit and share structured data. You can open CSV files in any spreadsheet program like Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers.

If you’re working in another spreadsheet program and want to upload the file to WorkingLit, just Save As > .CSV. 

ONIX (or “ONIX-formatted”) 

ONIX is a commonly agreed-upon distribution method for your books’ biographical information. Many, but not all, publishers use this format to disseminate metadata. WorkingLit uses ONIX-friendly terminology in our Products tab, so if you’d like to create an ONIX XML to share with accounts, you can easily do so (however, we’ve found that a ton of accounts are just as happy with a CSV…).

List Price

Also known as “Retail” or “Sticker Price,” this is the standard price at which you’re selling the book. Whether you’re communicating with a distributor or bookstore buyers, this is one of the key pieces of information they will need in order to sell your book. 

Wholesale Price

Wholesale refers to the price at which you sell products to retailers for resale. Unlike the retail price of a book, this might be flexible depending on the bulk size of the order, or the regularity with which a retailer orders from you.

Royalties

Regional Royalties Accounting

This is one you may not have to worry about if you’re just starting up. Some contracts require the publisher to pay different royalties on the same ISBN for sales in different countries. In WorkingLit, you can build custom defined regions to apply to any author royalties. Our royalty statements will generate payments to the author automatically, based on the region of sale per order. You don’t have to leave the app to share details with the author, either!

Royalty Terms

If your creator is collecting royalties, they are making a percentage of proceeds based on each sale of the book. How much they make, and the number that percentage is based on, depends on your choice of royalty terms.

• List Price: The sticker price of the book, or, what the book sells for in retail environments. If a book sells for $15.95, the author will make their royalties based on that number, whether you’re selling the book through a distributor that takes a cut, or directly to a consumer.
• Net Receipts: The book’s actual sale price, not the list price. If the publisher sells books at 20% off, the creator will receive royalties based on that discounted number. This kind of term is often used for eBooks.
• Net Profits: Money the book makes once it has paid off any expenses incurred in its creation. In this case, the author won’t collect any money from day one, but only after enough copies are sold to outweigh the cost of production, marketing, etc.
• True Profits: Also called “profit sharing,” this model is rarer among traditional book contracts (especially at large publishers). In this case, the author makes a percentage of proceeds from the publisher on the whole, once the company is in the black.

Royalty Tiers

Remember how we talked about “net receipts” vs. “list price” above? Well, there are some subtleties you’ll commonly see in contracts. Often, once a publisher sells a certain number of copies, or if the book is sold at a really heavy discount, the creator’s royalty payments will change. 

WorkingLit has simple workarounds for both scenarios. In one click, create royalty tiers to reflect different royalty payments depending on the number of units sold. Or specify a different royalty payment percentage if the book is heavily discounted from its list price. 

Reporting

Profit & Loss

One of the most useful facets of financial reporting, a Profit & Loss (P&L) statement will show you how money has come into your business (“Gross Revenue”), and circulated out of your business via Expenses. With your Expenses and Revenue on hand, you can figure out your Net Profit: how much money your publisher actually made.

In WorkingLit’s Reporting section, we offer quick-view tables and graphs to give you a visual rundown of your Revenue Vs. Expenses, along with other stats.

Profit in Period 

Your Gross Revenue, minus your Expenses, for any given time period. WorkingLit offers this option in the “Profit and Loss by Product” reporting section, so you can track profits for a specific book or series. 

When you track the profit your products make in each period, you can tell how quickly they sell — and then you can infer other vital information, like how quickly you might need a reprint.

Operating Margin

This is the percentage of revenue you keep as an operating profit. It’s expressed as a ratio, so it gives you the percentage of your revenue (money coming in) that’s profit (revenue minus expenses).

Expense Ratio

Just like your Operating Margin is a percentage, so is this! It shows you the flip side of your business’ health: the ratio of Expenses to Gross Revenue.