DashBook - Software for publishing royalties

PayPal discontinues MassPay

2011-11-03T11:46:00.001-05:00

Normally when someone who is evaluating DashBook asks why they cannot send out royalty payments directly via PayPal through our software, it is because they simply did not set it up. It is a very quick and easy procedure consisting of logging in to one's PayPal account and requesting API signature information which provides the credentials that DashBook needs to communicate on behalf of their business account.

PayPal's MassPay does not work with personal accounts, so an upgrade to Business or Premier might be required. Why does DashBook use PayPal's MassPay system for electronic payments? MassPay is a great way to handle paying a handful or hundreds of royalty holders at once. It also fits nicely in the business model, as the sender pays a fee that is comparable to or cheaper than mailing costs, and the recipient receives the full funds without additional fees removed. Other methods of PayPal payments would have the royalty holder receive less than the royalties due.

PayPal MassPay has been a great system for DashBook users, who are primarily book publishers and music labels right now, although of course our system handles many more businesses interested in tracking royalties and licenses. It is very simple and easy. One screen shows all of the royalty amounts owed for the period chosen, and one click can fire off all of the payments and record that information into DashBook for account balance purposes. Life is good.

So when one of our new book publishers started asking about her inability to use PayPal, the answer seemed obvious. "Go to this PayPal website page to get your account information; paste it here in DashBook." Ah, but not so easy this time! Her PayPal system didn't have MassPay activated, and calls to PayPal resulted in her telling us that PayPal has discontinued MassPay for all but huge corporations.

What? Isn't PayPal for the little guys who don't already have large systems setup? If your company is already large, wouldn't you have EFTS (Electronic Funds Transfer - like direct deposit) to handle all your needs?

Well, after spending hours on the phone with various PayPal personnel, it looks bad. Whether their decision is due to "abuses" or "high risk" (their terms), they have indeed disabled MassPay from the majority of their accounts while leaving it intact for a handful of large multinational corporations.

This is huge news. Why isn't there outrage everywhere today? Maybe because they did this months ago, and perhaps our clients that use this feature only pay quarterly or semi-annually, etc.
[Edit: It appears those using it regularly have been grandfathered.]

What did PayPal recommend that we do? Trash our MassPay API program code, and rewrite it for their alternative Adaptive Payments style, which puts the burden on the recipient for the fees -- and those fees are much higher than the $1 USD cap that MassPay has.

If you've used MassPay, contact PayPal immediately to see if they will re-instate your account. [Edit: First go to your account, select Send Payment, select MassPay, and see if yours is disabled.]

If you have experiences about this, please reply to this post so that we can all learn. Unfortunately, change is not always for the better.

Streams versus downloads

2011-10-24T13:55:00.001-05:00

With DashBook, it is easy to setup one set of products that receive different types of royalties depending on the product's usage by using our Sales Channels feature.

For example, let's say that you pay 75% of U.S. mechanical for a particular song. For a 5 minute song, a 9.1 cent mechanical would be $0.06825. But if the transaction report you receive also has streams of this song paying you 2 cents, you'd lose over twice as much as you receive by paying mechanicals on streams!

So, in DashBook, you use Sales Channels such as "Sales" vs "Streams" to distinguish what happened with a song. Your royalty arrangement can then be set to 75% mechanical for all transactions on a "Sales" order, but 50% on all transactions on a "Streams" order.

So whether you are paying songwriters, publishers, or the artists themselves, DashBook can handle it.

QuickBooks for royalty accounting

2011-09-01T18:00:00.002-05:00

QuickBooks is a useful program for general accounting, but is inadequate for handling the royalty calculation needs of businesses like book publishers, record labels, music publishers, etc. That is why royalty software such as DashBook is so important. Royalty accounting can be so much easier with a great system.

On the other hand, while DashBook makes handling royalties very easy (import sales reports, email or upload royalty reports!), it does not handle all of the general accounting tasks.

Obviously, putting these two together makes sense. Already, one can generate sales reports from QuickBooks including product codes (ISBN, ISRC, SKU, etc.), quantity sold, and net received, and import those transactions into DashBook.

But we can always do better. One of our clients is growing so rapidly and has had such positive experiences with our DashBook team, that they've asked for our help. After discussions and consideration, we've turned the problem upside down to create a fantastic solution for them. Now they can continue their great growth, supported by an even better system. And they are pretty excited!

What can we do for you?

Music Master Royalties

2011-04-25T12:42:00.000-05:00

DashBook 4.5 is on our website available for downloading. One of the extensions of this version is the ability to specify a single master share percentage on a product. Each royalty arrangement connected to this product will be multiplied times this master share percent.

This means that you can create fewer royalty arrangements for artists or royalty holders who have songs on an album, of which you may not even know how many other tracks are there. If your song's share is 10% of an album, you can simply create the album product with a Master Share of 10% and point the royalty to a generic royalty for your artist. That generic might be, say 20%, resulting in .2*.1= 2% royalties for your artist.

You no longer need to multiply the master share by the artist percent, as DashBook v4.5 can now do that for you. By using a generic arrangement of 20%, that royalty can be used on many different products, each having a different master share.

We continue to enhance DashBook to make your work easier. Please let us know how we can help you!

Busy accounting season for royalties

2011-02-28T11:16:00.000-06:00

Whew! This is a busy time of year. It is not uncommon for businesses to procrastinate on their royalty work to the very end - or even long after their deadlines. As it turns out, they discover that they don't die after all!

However, all of this putting off of work just adds to the stress of operating a business. When you know that you have to start organizing all of your sales, update your Excel spreadsheets or QuickBooks system with the latest releases, go through each royalty calculation in detail, print and mail reports,.... Just the thought of it all is exhausting.

Of course, you know there has to be a better way. And there is. You google for "royalty software" and discover DashBook and other choices. Should you download and try? So much work to do.

There is a lot of work to do -- no denying it. But with some upfront time invested in setting up a royalty system, subsequent royalty and pay periods become so much easier. We have customers saying that they've gone from a week of pain to an hour or so of work and review. So yes, it is worth it!

The setup itself does not have to be painful. Consult with us, and we can do most of the work for you. We recently helped a music label setup a database within hours of receiving their CD Baby sales report and a little information about the percentages that they pay to the artists. DashBook created all of the tracks and albums sold during that period, along with connecting the artist and royalty calculations together, in a matter of minutes by using our import system. All the record label had to do was to add the additional tracks to the albums, and send out reports and payments.

Since they only paid their license holders via PayPal, a quick setup and a few mouse clicks, and they were done! They even took advantage of DashBook's ability to upload royalty reports to Box.net, so they didn't have a single thing to print or mail.

Whew! After years of agonizing, they finally have a system that just does it all for them, and it only cost them $499 for the license. We did all of that setup for free, and provided them the database in less than a day. Perhaps your setup might require more work for a small fee, but perhaps not.

As a friend of mine would say, "What a bargain!"

New Royalty System for Music and Books

2010-12-14T11:29:00.003-06:00

DashBook version 4.4 has just been released!

Although there are many refinements in this version due to our great customer suggestions, one of the largest changes is the segregation of the book and music businesses, which will be especially helpful for those new to DashBook.

Now, when one chooses that they are in the Music Business from the DashBook setup wizard, our royalty software program will configure itself so that the terms "author" and "ISBN" are no longer used. Music businesses will be able to see "artists" and "ISRC", etc. Even though DashBook has handled music calculations well for over a year, this terminology improvement will make DashBook fit more like a glove so that record labels, publishers, and distributors can easily handle their royalties and licenses.

Likewise, for those in the Book Business, DashBook will no longer present questions about track length and mechanical royalties which could have been a bit confusing.

Additionally, we have added a field for License Number on the royalty arrangement screen so that you can tag your calculation with the information needed to communicate with other companies.

These changes make DashBook conform to your business better, so that you do not have to change the way you think in order to use DashBook. If you have any further suggestions, please let us know.

Publishers improve royalty systems

2010-11-29T18:44:00.000-06:00

When we first started working on the design of DashBook, our software for handling royalties, we had great help from a book publisher who was dissatisfied with the systems out there. They had old interface styles with data crammed in screens, one was a web-based system that barely did anything, and others were very expensive yet you couldn't test them out by yourself.

Since we released DashBook a few years ago, we have had a wonderful welcome from the community of book publishers, and have been prodded by the music industry to make great enhancements in our system for them.

We can always come up with more ways to make our royalty accounting system better. There will be more ways to make it faster to use, have it handle more things automatically, and even still there may be some odd calculation style that can be added.

But what we value the most is our user feedback. Sometimes we have been staring at our screens too long to notice obvious improvements that someone who just downloads our free trial will point out. That's wonderful!

We are very happy that our customers and reviewers let us know how we can best change DashBook to suit their needs. DashBook has grown to be the best value out there in all price ranges due to our simply listening and reacting to the comments and suggestions we receive.

If you would like an alternative to generic accounting systems like QuickBooks, so that you can take advantage of easy specialized royalty calculations, importing of your sales data, and professional reports that are easily emailed or copied to folders on the internet, you owe it to yourself to check out DashBook! The program that your industry has grown.

Help other publishers

2010-11-02T14:48:00.000-05:00

Publishing is not a zero-sum game. If a customer were to only purchase one product (book, song, etc.) in their lifetime, then yes, that customer would no longer be available for any other publisher or vendor. But it doesn't work that way, of course.

We all know that consumers consume, and some of them do it quite often and in mass quantities. However, what they consume and how they consume it is fickle. There was a time when consuming media meant a newspaper or a book. Times have shifted toward multi-media information from the internet, electronically printed books, audio books, movies, etc. So help generate a feeding frenzy for what you have now.

What this means is that as a publisher of a particular media type or genre, it behooves you to embrace your competitors! If everyone but you abandons a field, you are alone, so you surely do not want your customers leaving your area of interest.

Seek out your competitors and start communicating. Perhaps you could team up to develop a convention or even a #tweetchat. When you brainstorm with your ~~competitors~~ new comrades, you will come up with many ways to target this common market that can be mutually beneficial.

Don't think that you have to "go it alone," as that is not the best way of doing it.

I'd love to hear your experiences of working with other publishers.

Share royalty reports using Box.net and Google Docs

2010-10-18T16:05:00.000-05:00

We will soon be releasing a new version of DashBook that extends our use of the internet, and gives another alternative to printing and mailing physical reports in addition to our current ability to email reports.

Our next version will allow you to batch upload reports to folders on Box.net and Google Docs. How might you use this? Let's say you have a folder for each royalty holder, and have shared that folder with her or him. After you've finished importing your sales reports so that DashBook can calculate your royalties, you can simply go to the royalty report you prefer and choose to Batch Upload the reports. Each royalty recipient's report will be generated and copied up to their particular shared folder on the internet without requiring any further action on your part.

If you upload to Box.net, all collaborators will be notified (default setting) when a new file is uploaded to the folder you share with them, so you won't even need to directly let them know that they have a new royalty report. It is all automatic!

This is just the latest of many features in DashBook that keep you productive so that you do not have to spend days working on royalty accounting. Leave all of the grunt work to DashBook!

Complex royalties like physical vs. digital with stages

2010-05-21T14:25:00.000-05:00

In our ongoing quest to make DashBook the best that it can be, we have released DashBook v4.1 that continues to extend the ease at which one can manage complex royalty contracts.

Version 4 added Generic Royalties, so that one can create only a single or handful of royalty calculation styles and apply them across many products (books, tracks, CDs, films, apps, etc.) and the entities needing to be paid (artists, authors, publishers, etc.). With a few more extensions, v4.1 is even more powerful!

v4.1 now has the ability to use Generic Royalties to describe sales channels (different percents based on how a product was sold) and breakpoints (different percents based on the staging or thresholds of sales).

As an example, it is very popular in the music business to pay different royalties on the same work based on what happened, such as the physical sale of a CD, the purchase and digital download of a single track or song, the streaming of a song, or a performance. DashBook has been able to handle this since its inception, but now it is even easier.

In prior versions, if you had certain sale thresholds (breakpoints) to meet, like a different percent for the first thousand units, that style was incompatible with a different royalty based on sales channels. Now you can easily have both at the same time.

From the product screen, you can simply reference that a particular royalty holder (author) uses a particular royalty agreement. Now you can restrict that royalty agreement to a particular sales channel, and that royalty agreement can already be making breakpoint decisions based upon sales levels. So you'll be able to reference a royalty agreement paying on mechanicals for only physical sales, and another agreement staging the percentage paid but only on digital -- well, whatever your contract requires.

I know that what I am talking about will not be easily absorbed by most readers, but believe me, this is huge. Contact us at DashBook, and we will help you setup your royalty system so that it handles everything you need, while making it very easy to maintain and extend.

It looks like we need more instructional videos!

Royalty calculator for iPhone

2010-03-23T14:33:00.001-05:00

Given how robust our DashBook desktop royalty solution is, perhaps the iPhone program is more aptly called a Royalty Estimator.

In any event, a few weeks ago we released our first iPhone app, entitled Royalty Calculator. This app runs natively on the iPhone and gives quick answers to the simple questions of, "How much royalty would a sale of so much be?" If you are in the music industry, you would be pleased to see that this app will calculate your U.S. mechanical rights for you based on your song or track length.

For all industries, the percentage calculator will instantly show you the royalty either before or after discounts.

This app can be good for publishers of books, music, etc. in estimating the royalties they might owe. It is also an excellent tool for the author, musician, etc. in determining how much they might make.

Right now and for the foreseeable future, this iPhone app is FREE! This link will show you screen examples, as well as provide a link to download Royalty Calculator to your iPhone/iPod or iTunes account:
http://dashbook.com/CalculatorIPhone.aspx

If you prefer a program that remembers special royalty deals for each author or artist, of course DashBook will do that job handily.

Royalties for iPhone Developers

2010-02-10T16:38:00.000-06:00

I have just learned that Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media will be giving a talk this Friday at MacWorld 2010 on the subject of "Building an iPhone Publishing House." What makes this session particularly interesting to me is that he will be discussing the securing of intellectual property such as content to quickly bring value to one's App, and after his exhaustive research of software to handle tracking such license payment requirements, Oceanhouse Media chose DashBook!

When Michel first approached us about using DashBook, we had only recently introduced our version 3 that supported importing sales reports to use as the data for royalty calculations. However, we did not yet have an import for Apple's iTunes sales reports. With Michel's input and the use of DashBook's extensible import mapping architecture, we were able to quickly send him an import map that allowed his trial version to import his sales from each of the seven regional reports that Apple generated. Needless to say, he was impressed with our rapid response. Of course, already having an import that could convert currencies, along with the existing royalty calculation abilities that supported multiple payees per product helped, too!

After Oceanhouse Media purchased a license to DashBook and began using it, they continued to offer great suggestions to refine DashBook for the market of iPhone and iPod (and now iPad) developers. One of his requests was the ability to easily specify the deposit fees that were charged, and automatically spread those costs across the apps sold in that period and region. Fortunately, DashBook already had an option to reduce the amount received by various costs, so he was able to bend it to his will. However, DashBook v4 will soon be released which will provide a simple entry during import to a cost item whose name will makes sense - "Payment Fees."

We are very happy to work with companies such as Oceanhouse Media who seek perfection in their operations. DashBook is a powerful system built on a flexible architecture, and our team is committed to providing the best system there is.

Thanks to everyone!

Your new royalty accounting system

2010-02-05T16:30:00.001-06:00

We are excited about our upcoming version 4 release of DashBook! As publishers stop paying high monthly fees for their old royalty accounting systems and switch to the powerful and more affordable DashBook, we have been getting an increasing interest in moving all of their pre-existing information to DashBook.

Way back in DashBook version 1, we included the ability to import contacts from your Outlook database, and we also imported complete information from older systems that small publishers used, like AnyBook. We continued enhancements to include the ability to import contact information from csv files and the old PUB123/JAYA123 systems with our version 2 update, I believe.

In version 3, we broke into whole new territory with our creation of Sales Report Import. By including a user-extensible system that came preloaded with the ability to easily import sales reports from Lightning Source, Fictionwise, Apple iTunes, MidPoint Trade, and many other book sellers and distributors, DashBook opened up to a new level of customer who loved this automation. Gone were the days of typing in orders!

Well, version 4 will be extending that slightly by adding import for Ingram reports (and yes, we handle just about all book distributors and a growing list of music sellers and distributors), but the big extension is the ability to import nearly anything. This was a requirement to migrate historic data from large older systems like Bookworks, Acumen, and Cat's Pajamas.

If you can get your data into text reports, DashBook will be able to move this information into a new DashBook database so that you can efficiently transition from your prior system, even if it is just spreadsheets, to DashBook. And of course, DashBook still uses an open database system that does not lock up your data from your own reporting tools or desire to move away from DashBook at your whim. (of course, we'd rather keep growing and improving DashBook to better serve you!)

If you have existing inventory, sales, royalty, or other information for your books, music, etc., let us help you get started in using DashBook today.

Music royalties for publishers and artists (percentage of sale price)

2010-02-04T16:50:00.000-06:00

Two blog entries ago, I wrote an article about using DashBook for U.S. mechanical rights interest calculations. With a little setup, DashBook makes this calculation automatic as you continue to sell, even if the rates change.

This time, I'll briefly discuss a very similar feature now -- the ability to specify a royalty on a track as a percentage of the sale amount. By setting up the royalty agreement as a percentage of the sale price, typically of net sales, DashBook will calculate the royalties using this percentage each time that this track is directly sold.

But what if the album is sold?

Well, DashBook now has the ability to use the price of the album (gross or net) divided by the number of tracks on that album -- automatically!

To see how to enter album products that contain tracks, I recommend that previous post.

There is one more thing about handling music or other royalties that I don't recall writing about: advances and recoupments. That'll be the subject of a future article, but feel free to email us if you'd like to know more about it now.

And don't forget that you can download a free trial of DashBook here.

Amazon Kindle vs Apple for eBooks. Is an Apple eReader app coming?

2010-01-20T10:44:00.000-06:00

The big news today is that Amazon will be offering 70% net royalties for Kindle sales soon. (press release) This announcement is just one day after the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple is working with HarperCollins to bring their eBooks to the iTunes store (WSJ article)

Since Amazon is currently only paying 30%, it looks like they are concerned about Apple. Amazon has other competition paying up to 80%, but that didn't cause them to blink. I suspect that they've known for a while that they would have to raise the rate, and had this plan in the drawer awaiting the need.

But what is Apple going to do? Obviously they will be selling eBooks through their iTunes store for buying and reading on iPod and iPhone devices. Most people expect Apple to introduce a tablet device on the 27th, with assumptions that this device will be running the same operating system as the iPod/iPhone. However, there is a strong possibility that they will be upgrading this from the current version 3.1.2.

Would Apple include an eReader from Apple or HarperCollins? Since the introduction of OS version 3 last year, users could purchase content while within the application. Amazon's Kindle app has yet to take advantage of this feature. But if Apple preloads an eReader onto every new device plus all current devices via an update, they could easily overtake Amazon's sales for books read on the Apple handheld platform.

Apple enjoys selling music, apps (some of which are eBooks), and videos on their iTunes network, but they get no rewards from current book sales from Amazon, even though these books may be read using the iPhone Kindle reader. When Apple provides books on iTunes, they'll take a cut from those sales. Surely they'll want to funnel as much buying to their own iTunes eBooks as possible, and having their own eReader would do just that.

Music mechanical royalties for publishers and artists

2009-12-14T16:54:00.000-06:00

Calculating music royalties can get to be a very large task, as there are many little things that need to be handled. If an album is sold, a royalty for not just the album but for each track needs to be calculated. Many people think that a song pays 9.1 cents in mechanical royalties, but that is an over-simplification. If the song is longer than 5 minutes, the rate is higher. If it is sold in a different year, the rate may be different, because this rate goes up over time.

DashBook makes it easy to calculate the statutory U.S. mechanical royalties on music, and to handle sales of both individual tracks and entire albums, whether they be physical sales or electronic downloads.

Here is one common scenario. I'll explain how to use DashBook to calculate mechanical fees owed to artists or publishers.

First, I recommend adding or changing the Product Types to include "tracks" and "albums" so that you can easily distinguish them later. (Setup->Products->Types) When you are on the product screen, you can set the product type to tracks or albums.

If an album has 13 tracks, create each track as a product in DashBook, specify the track or song length on the Measurements tab, and add anyone needing to be paid as authors for this track. A common retail price for a track is $0.99, so go ahead and use that. Now hit the Apply to save these changes, then click the Royalties tab on the first page of the product. If you press the "New" hyperlink, a new royalty will be created with this track and the next author not having an existing royalty agreement. Choose Mechanical Royalties, and type in 100% in the percentage field. Of course, you can choose 50% or any other ratio. Press OK to save these changes, and Apply on the product, and repeat for each track. DashBook has a royalty agreement copy feature, but this method is very easy. Oh, it might be a good idea to choose the non-stocking warehouse for the default for tracks, since you won't be interested in maintaining inventory.

After you have all 13 tracks defined as products, create one more product for the album itself. On the Components tab, simply select the tracks belonging to this album. If we are only concerned about mechanical rights, then this product does not need a royalty and the author/contributor column isn't necessary as well.

Now when you create an order that indicates the number of each track and album sold or downloaded, the royalties will calculate automatically. If the mechanical rate changes in the future, a simple update to DashBook (automatic internet download) will have the future rates updated with no changes required by the user. In fact, if you wish to input CD sale dates from 5 years ago, you'll notice that DashBook will use an older and smaller mechanical fee. Automatically.

Speaking of automatic, you don't actually have to enter the sales manually. For instance, you can create a customer called Apple, and ask DashBook to import your iTunes csv reports that you download from your iTunes account. (File->Import Sales Reports->iTunes) When importing reports for sales occurring in other countries, simply enter the currency conversion rate. DashBook will create the order/invoice for you, and leave it in an open state for you to review before closing it.

Even though you already own a spreadsheet program, you just can't afford to keep messing with it when DashBook is so easy and so cheap.

Automating publishing with a barcode scanner

2009-12-04T13:50:00.001-06:00

We continue to receive compliments on our DashBook royalty software from companies seeking to improve the management of their publishing businesses. Sometimes these companies have little or nothing to do with our original market of small book publishers, but due to DashBook's amazing feature set and ease of use, they realize that it is the best product for them.

Recently we were asked about barcode support for an organization needing to track their products from their warehouses. DashBook already supports adding to and shipping from multiple warehouses, so that is not an issue. But what about barcode scanners?

As it turns out, barcode scanners are little more than machines that read code and type what they see as if a human had typed it using the keyboard. Simply plug in a USB barcode scanner, and the operating system will detect it and configure itself to use it. Here are a couple of things I played with using our new barcode scanner:

Within DashBook, I created a new order. Because our Simple order style does not show product codes, I clicked the Advanced tab to go to Order Detail. I clicked into the ISBN/Product Code field, grabbed a book off of my shelf, and scanned it. DashBook immediately created an order line with that product, filling out the price and presumed quantity of 1, which can readily be changed. Because the scanner automatically added a cr/lf (carriage return/linefeed), DashBook was ready for the next book. Just by scanning one book after another, an entire order can be filled.

My next test was to go to the product section of DashBook to create products. I just clicked the + sign to create a product, and DashBook popped open an ISBN window before the main product form. I then scanned multiple books, which automatically typed their ISBNs into this window -- all in a nice column because of the "returns" at the end of each code. When I pressed the OK button on that window, DashBook looked up these ISBN codes on the internet, and created each of the product records, automatically filling in the book titles, summary description, and authors.

Wow. I love automation!

YouTube moves a little from the Dark Side

2009-09-15T14:36:00.006-05:00

YouTube is the place people go for music. Whether they want to listen to a particular song, watch a music video, or upload a collage dedicated to a loved one, YouTube is the internet destination.

In the past, that has greatly bothered me. As I tell people, I’ve made my living from intellectual property (computer software), so I couldn’t steal someone else’s work with a clear conscience. It is my understanding that it is illegal to make public, like uploading to the internet, copyrighted material in which you do not own the copyright. Likewise, similar to using stolen goods, it would be illegal to view or listen to such material.

YouTube, owned now by Google, does not require that the person uploading videos prove that he has the legal right to do so, just like web hosts do not prevent website owners from uploading illegal content. There is a bit of difference though. The two most popular illegal uploads to YouTube are music and music videos which have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. And these works are publicly available for purchase. This means that Google could discover the origin of these works, as opposed to confidential company information that was newly leaked. See “Detecting the Origin of Text Segments Efficiently” for an example of Google’s intelligence when it comes to deciding the origin of news. They aren’t ignorant, and they have the money to access BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, etc. to find the information required to abide by the law.

But they don’t do that. Why? I’d say they suffer from an aggression that lawyers phrase, “It is better to ask forgiveness, than to ask permission.” This can be interpreted as, “It’s OK to violate the copyright holder’s rights, and if they complain, we’ll remove the offending material.” Google also used this stance when it decided to copy millions of books to make them available to readers, without consulting the publishers of those books. Like an ignorant child who taunts “Finders keepers; losers weepers,” Google tried to gift to the world that which was not theirs by claiming that they will make out-of-print books available even though these books are still works bound by copyright law. Basically, they are acting criminally, and asking to be policed, rather than seeking to avoid breaking the law.

Well, YouTube has recently changed this posture. While copyright owners who do not police their works may continue to have them stolen, YouTube now allows these owners to register their works with YouTube so that any uploads that contain these works will accrue royalty payments. (Scribd and other sites friendly to violators should follow this improvement.)

This means that when someone uploads a video, YouTube will scan the audio portion to see if it matches one of their commercial customers’ songs. If it does, then each time this video is played, YouTube will pay the copyright holder for this performance. I imagine that a registering copyright holder can also request that their songs not be allowed to be uploaded from elsewhere, just as there would be a need to disallow playing based on location, since licensing contracts can dictate different owners of the copyrighted material for different regions of the world.

If you are uploading videos, you can use YouTube’s AudioSwap feature to include legal music directly, to ensure that you are not violating someone’s music copyright.

What does this mean to me? Well, it now gives me plausible deniability. I can now claim that each time I play a video from YouTube, that the royalty owners are getting paid for that performance. This makes YouTube my new favorite location for finding specific songs -- all the music without the guilt.

Lightning Source to royalties to authors

2009-09-11T14:36:00.000-05:00

When DashBook introduced importing sales reports, we received a lot of praise from our customers. Book publishers still are a large percentage of our customer base, and when a publisher can't justify printing thousands of copies of a title, they turn to print on demand (POD). This may be for the initial printing of a book or it may be a fallback to keep a book from becoming "out of print" when its popularity wanes.

Why do so many book publishers choose Lightning Source (LS) for their POD? This is very simple. Because LS is owned by Ingram, all books carried by LS are placed in Ingram's book listings. This means that all booksellers who use Ingram (that'd be every one in the U.S.A., plus) is able to see the LS book in the catalogue and order it. That would be fine for anyone expecting the readers to request a book from a bookstore, but it won't put a book on their bookshelf. No bookstore is large enough to carry every published book. Well...

then there is Amazon. While Amazon does not warehouse all of the books it sells, it does maintain a database of every book that it could sell. So to follow the thread, this means that all books in LS are listed in Amazon's database and are searchable and purchasable from http://www.amazon.com. Not only are the books listed, but Amazon keeps ratings and comments about each book, so if the authors or readers wish to comment on a POD book carried by LS, they can do so on Amazon - the largest seller of books in the world. (nope, I'm not gong to bother researching the veracity of Amazon's success)

So, now that many book publishers are using Lightning Source, they receive a nice report showing them their sales. Here's where we get back to Dashbook. Publishers generally need to pay authors and other contributors a percentage of the sales of books. The royalty contracts describing the conditions and amounts can vary quite a bit, and can become unwieldy to track without specialized software like DashBook. Within DashBook, a publisher can describe these royalty arrangements so that subsequent sales transactions will generate royalties accrued to each royalty recipient.

Now that DashBook has a built-in ability to import LS sales reports and perform a currency conversion (LS - U.S., LS - U.K., etc.), we save a lot of typing, which greatly reduces time and errors. In fact, when a publisher has a large list of book sales to import, this can save hours. When you add that savings on top of the time saved in actually performing the royalty calculations, publishers just can't afford not to use a great tool like DashBook.

Why don't all authors follow submission guidelines?

2009-09-01T12:59:00.003-05:00

The publishing industry is a very old one, which means that over the years the people in the industry have established procedures and guidelines meant to streamline the process of getting from book idea to print. Of course, such establishment works best in a static world, as can be seen by the frantic response to young publishers breaking the rules, creating eBooks, and setting low prices.

We have rules for grammar so that someone can know a language and understand books written to those grammatical rules.

One would think that an author would be capable of reading submission guidelines which were written in their native language, and follow them. Of course they could, but why do so many editors complain about submissions that do not follow the guidelines?

I think it is because the editors themselves have fallen into the trap of convention in the publishing industry. Everyone has "Submission guidelines" so they think that they must need them, too. Yes, it would be good practice to set rules for submissions, so do just that. Do not set guidelines unless you expect them to be read as helpful hints.

If you want to be forceful and reject submissions that are not within your standards, set standards instead of suggestions. How about using "Mandatory submission rules (not just guidelines)" to properly cast your requirements?

Can you be bold enough to not use old industry terms that apparently do not carry your intended meaning? What would be a new term that would properly convey your meaning to the thousands of authors out there who do not know your business?

This is your industry. Define it.

Import sales reports from iTunes Music and App Store

2009-09-01T12:36:00.003-05:00

This week we released DashBook v3.2. Yes, we sometimes just can't wait to get new features in the program and out the door!

Our prior version 3.1 introduced our sales report import ability. DashBook can import sales reports from text formatted files, such as csv and tsv. Although we provide a utility that you can use to create a mapping to the sales reports you receive, we also include a bunch of them directly in our package so you can focus on your business.

Both the music business and software development require a community effort that is often compensated by paying a percentage of sales to those involved in creation of the product. And one of the hottest places to sell these wares today is iTunes.

v3.2 added an import map for Apple's iTunes sales reports. This map allows you to import your iTunes sales whether they are from music sales or iPhone App Store sales. During import, you can enter a currency conversion factor. One of our customers noted that typing in the bank transfer fees as a sales commission percentage allowed him to pass the pro-rata of that expense to each of the products sold, so that the royalties he pays out are properly accounted.

Our import was also enhanced to enable creation of invoices for consignment sales. This was critical to properly add the reports for Midpoint Trade Books and Consortium, two more distributors used by DashBook customers.

If you have a distributor or reseller for which DashBook does not have a built-in import, please let us know so that we can help.

eBook readers get free library books

2009-08-26T16:53:00.004-05:00

Sony's announcement that their eBook readers will be able to access library books is huge! Amazon's Kindle set the revolution by providing free lifetime wireless access so that you can browse, buy, and download books straight to the device without having to juggle computer connections. There are free books available, but generally not of the latest publications.

Now, with the ability to check out books from the library, the eBook reader market will explode! I've checked out an audio book from the Houston Library using my laptop at home, and synchronized it with my Windows Mobile phone to listen to the book while jogging. It worked pretty well, and the book expired and disappeared at the end of its checkout period. I was even able to renew it. But this was a novelty for me.

Putting this type of power and ease on a device for the mass market is another story. It will cause people to buy eBook readers, and it will cause libraries to purchase more licenses for simultaneous checkout. Amazon would be foolish not to include this ability in their Kindle.

The need for book publishers to market their books to the library will increase, just as the sales to the library increase. Libraries. Hmm. Makes me think of another eBook angle.

Independent publishers' days are numbered

2009-08-21T09:22:00.005-05:00

In yesterday's post I wrote that most current eBooks are simple text, whereas multimedia eBooks are the real future. Since everything is in transition, know that I do believe there is a large market for text eBooks. I'm just pointing out that eBooks are becoming mainstream, so if you want to be on the leading edge, you have to go out further. Text eBooks will become the dominant force over the next few years. But what about beyond that?

We know the story. When radio came out, people said newspapers were dead. When television came out, radio was a goner. Now that movies over the internet are becoming more popular, broadcast and cable television will lose the spotlight.

You might be inclined to say that none of the obsolescent media have gone away. Although that is true on the surface, the fact is that their value has been eroded. Which is cheaper advertisement today, not counting production costs: three minutes of radio or television?

In terms of production costs, those has gone through the roof. When you add pictures to sound, the cost goes up. Likewise, when you add video to eBooks, the costs will rise.

Although anyone today can compose a novel and place it up for sale as an eBook all by themselves, collaboration is the key to greater works. Do you want to have nice photos, video, or the programming required for interaction? Here is where the networker or larger publisher will have the advantage. Greater investment will be required for the future's interactive multimedia. Publishers will have to hire the talent or contract for it. If independent publishing means an individual doing it all, they'll be left behind.

Simple eBooks are not the future of publishing

2009-08-20T10:07:00.004-05:00

Most people are pretty sure that traditional print publishing will be overtaken by electronic publishing. Currently, electronic book sales are a small challenge to print book sales (1% and growing), but as more people become comfortable with reading books on an electronic handheld device, this will change. The convenience factor of having all of your books with you at all times, even if the actual storage is on the internet and you only have a window into them, will overwhelm the value of the printed page. Stuck at an airport? You're not stuck with paying airport prices for a limited selection of books. Buy from more online, and start reading within minutes.

But I think that the current eBooks are kind of funny. They remind me of so many technology transitions of the past.

When I was young, my family moved to the country where we could explore far and wide. For me, one of the most amazing things we found was in the old decrepit barn. Tucked away in the corner, and camouflaged by color and cobwebs, was a small electric lantern. Yes, electric lantern. You see, prior to electricity, folks used oil-filled lanterns with large globes and wire bails (hoops for carrying). So it appeared that when the manufacturer of this lantern decided on an electric wire and lightbulb, they packaged it into a form familiar and presumed convenient for the existing purchasers of lanterns. How quaint!

Likewise, most of us have seen the original automobiles that look like horseless carriages. These are evolutionary changes, and so it is with the majority of current eBooks. Most are just transcribed books from print.

What do I want from eBooks, then? I always want more value. The convenience of buying and receiving instantly is great. The convenience of having my reading with me whereever I am is luxurious. But I'm reading them on a handheld computer that has much more potential. Yes, I'm talking about multimedia in all its rich, interactive forms.

There are a few good examples out there. Take a look at "Buddy the Bus" for the iPhone. This app uses full color, can read to you, and offers five language choices for both the text and the audio. And if you consider the now aging Leap Frog book reader, where you can touch the props on the pages and have them yelp, you can imagine books that go far beyond our old printed pop-up books. It won't be just kids who will appreciate full animation. Can you visualize the advantages of a "How to fix" book with video clips?

Come on; use your imagination, and you can be a leader in this expanding world of publishing!

Android Marketplace is developer unfriendly

2009-08-19T11:38:00.004-05:00

An iPhone app developer recently asked us to enhance DashBook's sales report importing to take advantage of an iTunes sales report feature that shows the country where an app was purchased. Naturally, we obliged. It will be nice to expand our market to the publishers of phone apps, as well as all of the indie music publishers who use iTunes. Developers also need to account for the royalties or splits as they contract out work to various talent. And of course, book sales on the App Store are quite common.

Well, that got my interest up to explore the other app stores. Having used an iPhone for a while now, I believe that Apple's tight grip can kill them. Not allowing a user to choose which apps can continue in the background is absurd. The Android system, on the other hand, is much more open and allows developers to write anything they wish, although publishing pornography is still forbidden.

Thus, the Android is my pick as the best competitor for Apple's iPhone system. So I started to research the Android Marketplace to see if I could find examples of their sales reports. Hmm. I have to pay $25 before I can read details about publishing on the Marketplace? Bizarre. Further research turned up inquiries by developers who are at a loss as to how to account for sales tax on their sales. Do they have to review each individual transaction to determine if U.S. sales tax was charged if the composite transactions report doesn't contain that detail? Wait! The developer is accountable for sales tax? Does Android Marketplace or Google affect the developers' nexus?

Oh, this is pitiful.

Apple's App Store and iTunes Store simplified this for publishers by taking on the role of a reseller, just like the prior online bookstores. If Android Marketplace does not do this, few developers will make the mistake of publishing there more than once.

Tracking documents

2009-08-11T10:27:00.002-05:00

DashBook is great at tracking royalties owed and paid, invoice pay status, shipping status, inventory whether at your warehouses or on consignment, and now we've added another ability -- track your documents within DashBook.

Have you ever generated a royalty report or thought through a royalty calculation but had need to look at the actual royalty contract for confirmation? Well, now you can attach your royalty contract to your DashBook royalty agreement. You can attach your standard contract or attach the specific signed contract. Actually, you can attach any document. Just click on your attachment to view it.

You're not limited to attaching documents to the royalty agreement, either. Perhaps you want to attach a purchase order to the sales order, a scanned business card to a contact, or event photos to a book.

DashBook v3.1 now allows attaching any document to many places of the program. We include the ability to view many of the file formats while within DashBook, such as pdf files.

As before, you can freely download DashBook to try it for yourself. Even if you've downloaded a prior version, such as our version 1.0 from just a year ago, please visit our website to see all the things that DashBook can do for you now.

Check it out at http://www.DashBook.com

DashBook v3.1

2009-08-05T17:08:00.002-05:00

It's a wrap! DashBook version 3.1 is out the door. Well, it is on the internet for anyone to freely download, and existing DashBook customers will automatically receive the update the next time they run DashBook.

As I wrote in the prior post, the big news for v3.1 is the ability to import orders from text files. We have included common vendors such as Lightning Source (LSI), Fictionwise, and Amazon, but also made the import flexible so that you can map your report columns to DashBook's expected data. Send us the maps you create so that we can add to our "out of the box" experience!

With the import, DashBook automates the process from beginning to end. You can start using DashBook by pasting in your complete list of ISBNs (if you're a book publisher), and DashBook will fetch your titles and authors. Now you can import your sales report to get orders created automatically, and you can still use DashBook's facility to electronically pay your authors and email them their respective royalty reports all at once. Job done. Move on to more fun.

I'll post later about another new feature in DashBook v3.1 that lets you attach your signed royalty contract to DashBook's royalty agreement.

Cheers!

Automating sales orders

2009-05-29T18:12:00.000-05:00

Did I fail to mention that we released DashBook 3.0? I tend to get much more excited about "the next thing," so after the beta, I'm ready to move on. More information about the changes for DashBook v3 are available here.

So that DashBook can calculate royalties or licensing fees, it needs to have events or transactions that cause the calculation. We made the brilliant decision to group these events together in what we call an "order." Amazing, right?

Well, many publishers are not very focused on the individual orders; they just want their royalties calculated. They may not be interested in knowing about orders to know who receives a shipment. They may have no desire for DashBook to handle inventory changes, especially if they are using electronic books (ebooks) or a print on demand (POD) printer.

Well, our upcoming update to DashBook not only handles this issue for publishers not focused on orders, but also helps to automate a time consuming and potentially error prone process. DashBook version 3.1 will add the ability to import the order information directly from the electronic reports that publishers receive from their distributors!

With a simple click - boom! a new order is created, containing all of the products sold and returned, according to the distributor's sales report. Our initial work includes the most popular book distributors used by publishers not handling inventory. Print on demand is led by Lightning Source, and ebooks are spread across Fictionwise, Amazon, and MobiPocket. We also received a sample from All Romance Ebooks (I understand Romance is a pretty big category for ebooks), so we've included them as well.

Please go to our website, www.DashBook.com to read more and request a beta to try this new feature yourself. Our new import is customizable, so you can add your own distributor's report for importing. If you do, please send the map file to us so that we can provide it to others. Or, contact us to create a map or import from your source.

Thanks for helping us make DashBook even more powerful!

Bigger and cheaper Kindle?

2009-05-04T11:58:00.001-05:00

There is not much doubt that a larger Kindle will be announced this Wednesday (http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/04/amazon-press-event-wednesday-may-6th-see-you-and-then-new-kind). By this news alone, one might assume that this device will cost more than the current Kindle 2, which already receives quite a bit of backlash from having a high price.

However, Amazon knows that their price is considered a purchasing barrier. Although I think they've already done a superb job of pricing given that each Kindle includes (currently) unlimited internet access forever, a lower price will surely help sell more.

How can Amazon lower the Kindle's price?
1) Advertising - a larger screen gives more space for ads in addition to content.
2) Subscriptions - Why hasn't a book-of-the-month club offered a subsidized Kindle?

With the New York Times as a partner of this newer Kindle, they have the opportunity to do both, just like they've always done with their print edition.

Personally, I am very comfortable with the size of the current Kindle 2, but wish all my books were e-books on it so that I have access to them at all times (note that I carry an iPhone at all times).

Another rumor is that Kindle will receive support from textbook publishers. If all textbooks needed by students were on this one device, that would make cross campus treks a lot easier!

Version 3 Beta

2009-04-16T11:39:00.001-05:00

We have been testing version 3 both in house and with select customers, and have now opened it up for public review. It shouldn't be many days before this one is ready for release, but we thought we'd give more people a chance to beat it up.

Due to outstanding suggestions, we have made many enhancements to DashBook. Some of the largest changes include:

Vista 32 bit and 64 bit support
Automatic mechanical royalty calculations for the music industry
Expiration dates for handling subscription sales and followups
Expenses tied to individual products, with royalties optionally adjusted
Ability to review and create royalties directly from the products screen
Ability to review order history directly on the customer screen
Option to use PayPal on the subset of authors having PayPal accounts

Please check out our beta (beta link expired; contact us if you wish to be on the cutting edge!). If DashBook does not handle something you need in your business of royalties or licensing, please tell us what you want!

Improved by customers

2009-03-27T11:00:00.000-05:00

While DashBook continues to add new clients, it is also continuing to grow in capabilities as well as ease of use. There is a wonderful synergy between our company and those of our clients.

I love when someone searches out a solution to their problem, usually being overwhelmed with handling all of their royalty or licensing contracts, and discover DashBook. Their excitement in finding an affordable program that they can easily understand is contagious. Almost everyone gives us great compliments. Our most recent quote was "BTW, the ISBN import function is genius. Nice work."

That feels great. However, our excitement doesn't stop after they purchase DashBook. Our users have fantastic ideas on how to further improve our system. Although we will soon be releasing DashBook version 3, the developmental thrill has subsided, though exposing our latest work to the world will be fun. I can't wait to start work on our new list of client-suggested enhancements. Some are so good while being so simple to do, that we should be following up with an update to our not-yet-released v3 pretty quickly.

I love making things better!

Fictionwise bought by Barnes & Noble

2009-03-05T11:48:00.000-06:00

Fictionwise has an FAQ on the deal here: http://www.fictionwise.com/bn.htm and the official press release is here: http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com/press_releases/2009_march_5_fictionwise.html

The e-book market is heating up. 2009 will be a great year for this industry. Barnes & Noble is apparently taking e-books seriously now. They don't have much choice, if they want to stay in business. Yes, e-books were only 1% of sales, but their sales growth is exploding.

Now that Amazon has supposedly sold half a million Kindle machines, just released the Kindle 2, and now the Kindle iPhone app, they are poised to take over the ebook industry. We know that they will release Kindle readers for other devices, which proves that they want to own the business of selling e-books. If Amazon decides to make retrieval of free e-books easily done in their Kindle store, they would totally blow away competitors like Stanza while not hurting their sales at all.

The Fictionwise Pendergrast brothers can see the Amazon storm building intensity, and they need serious help to survive it. Good Luck!

Hey, Steve and Scott, how about we work with you on connecting your system with DashBook, so your publishers and authors can easily keep track of their book sales and royalties?

Books on Consignment

2009-02-23T17:51:00.000-06:00

Whether you are trying to keep your books in the local bookstore, or having a national distributor warehouse pallets of books that they sell on your behalf, tracking consignments is easier handled when you have DashBook.

With DashBook, you can use an Advanced order to explain the details of your consignment arrangement. Here are the typical steps in the life of consigned books:
1) You create an advanced order, and mark the items as Consignment. For this order, you will be creating a shipment, but not an invoice. This tells DashBook that these units will be moving from your standard warehouse to the warehouse of your consignee. This is still stock that you own.
2) You receive a report from your distributor indicating that they have sold your books. Now is the time to add an Invoice to your order for the number of units that were sold. This means that the distributor finally owes you for something! Placing this invoice on consigned stock will instruct DashBook to reduce the inventory held at that consignee location. Do not create a shipment for these, as that work is done by your distributor.
3) Any returns can be handled on the Returns tab of your order. Simply tell DashBook how many units are returned for financial credit, and if any of them are physically being returned to your stock as opposed to merely increasing your consignee stock.

That's it! DashBook will allow you to create a special Consignment inventory report that will show you how much of each book is in each location. You can even ask for the details of every sale and return transaction on this report, so you can find out exactly what has happened to your books!

Upgrade from AnyBook and now PUB123

2009-02-05T13:37:00.000-06:00

As usual, we have been very busy improving DashBook. We are now releasing version 2.3 following the v2.2 just a few weeks ago. The enhancements were numerous, but this blog entry will be about our importing data from obsolete and obsolescent systems.

Since DashBook has now grown into the best choice for small book publishers to handle their royalty calculations, we have been getting requests to import from legacy systems. Publishers are moving from the old standards of AnyBook and PUB123/SOHO123 to DashBook, and are asking us to help them in their transition.

Well, we've responded with an automated import of current information and history so that users can now have the best of both worlds -- all of their history within the easy to understand and use DashBook system. Normally it could cost thousands of dollars to migrate history from one system to another, but we are offering it all at no extra charge within our $249 program. As a friend of mine would say with a smirk, "What a bargain!"

We import customer information, product descriptions, and yes, even royalty agreement definitions. Since DashBook can handle the sales channels of PUB123 as well as the breakpoint volume and discount tiering of AnyBook, the conversion was actually simple.

We also import all of the orders from each of these systems, so that you can review the history of your products and customer purchases within DashBook. Doing all of this work did point out a deficiency in DashBook. AnyBook has consignment ability, and one of our converts recorded Promotional copies sent out from consignment. Hmm. We hadn't addressed that in DashBook, but we have it now. You can now mark an order item as Promotional for a Consignment so that it removes those units from the consignee's inventory.

We have also greatly improved our Consignment Inventory tracking to be the best in its class, giving you the option of seeing changes as deep as individual orders, or just the totals for each consignee. Frankly, if you have AnyBook and used consignments, you need to import into DashBook if you wish to see accurate consignment inventory levels.

DashBook makes it easy to see how your data will look in a better system. If you wish to migrate to DashBook from a system that we currently do not import, let us know so that we can help you, too.

Tracking music royalties

2008-12-17T14:25:00.000-06:00

We have received a number of questions about tracking royalties on music.

Music royalties can get very complicated, and you can use DashBook to simplify your work. Typically, each song has a multitude of musicians and composers to pay. One person may get a fixed dollar amount for each song, plus a percentage of the sale. Or another gets ten cents each time her artwork is included. Additionally, each royalty receiver may get a different amount based on what happened to that song.

For instance, perhaps the royalty contract dictates that the musician gets a different royalty depending upon whether the song was sold as an electronic download vs. played on the radio. You can quickly see that there are many venues and media types that can be broken out as a special royalty amount or rate.

In DashBook, you can create many different arrangements having the same product and author/musician. If the music media or royalty event is vastly different, you may enter it as a different product. Alternatively, you could use a feature we call Sales Channels. This allows you to make one order that says all items of this order are using a Sales Channel called "MP3 download", whereas another order might be for a Sales Channel of "Radio Plays over 30 seconds". You can have an unlimited number of sales channels. In your royalty agreement, you can list a different royalty percentage for each sales channel. This reduces the number of products that you need to maintain.

Once you have a myriad of options listed, DashBook does allow you to easily see all of the royalty arrangements for either a product/song or a musician/author/royalty rights holder. And of course, view reports showing either totals due or every transaction that resulted in a royalty.

And one of the features I love -- you can go to the Pay Authors screen to see all amounts that are due for all musicians, and mark them paid with a single click if you do not wish to make individual adjustments.

If you have any questions about how to handle your royalty situation, please email us at support@financialsoftworks.com.

Little things in life

2008-10-15T14:50:00.000-05:00

Although big feature additions make exciting software headlines, it is often the little changes that add up to a comfortable and great experience. One of the "little things" we did in version 2 of DashBook is to add "copy" ability to many areas of the program.

As an example, if you already have a royalty agreement with a particular royalty rights holder such as a book author, chances are high that a subsequent royalty agreement for their next work will have many of the same characteristics. So rather than having to create a new agreement, you can now simply copy an existing one, and then alter it. Sure it sounds simple, because its usage is, but when creating software from scratch as we did with version 1, there are so many things to do that some had to be postponed.

Now that we have a lot of the necessities met, these continual refinements and enhancements make DashBook comfortable as well as proficient. Whether you want a big or small change, please let us know so that we can serve you best.

Pay Author Royalties with PayPal

2008-09-30T16:55:00.000-05:00

So, you have your product titles entered into DashBook (perhaps using the book ISBN import from the internet), you've defined the royalty agreements that dictate the amounts accrued to the rights holders upon sales, and you've entered sales. That's all you need to do, right? Well, almost. DashBook does automatically calculate the royalties that accrue, but upon your payment period, you'll need to actually pay your authors. You pay your authors the amount accrued above their payment threshold (no need to send 40 cent checks), then you record the amount paid within DashBook.

One of my favorite new features in version 2 of DashBook is the ability to pay royalties (to authors, musicians, cinematographers, etc.) directly using PayPal. We now have a single screen that shows all of the royalty amounts accrued above the respective holders' thresholds, and all you have to do is click to pay them all, and record those payments.

Yes, there is some setup involved in this. Aside from needing a funded PayPal account, you need to retrieve what is essentially password information from PayPal to enter into DashBook so that it can pay from your account. You'll also need to acquire the paypal account names for each author using this method, or simply use their email address and PayPal will invite them into the system.

PayPal charges a maximum of $1 for each payment, which is not much more than the cost of a stamp and envelope. What do we charge for this service? Nothing! All customers of any DashBook version above the free Lite version get this service free of charge.

How's that for making your royalty payments easier?

DashBook Version 2 Released

2008-09-25T11:53:00.000-05:00

We actually released DashBook version 2 a few weeks ago, but with the subsequent activities of Hurricane Ike, we have had our hands a bit full here in Houston, TX.

Here is a quick list of improvements made in DashBook:
http://www.dashbook.com/ver2.html

I will make a few more posts that cover some of these enhancements.

Although DashBook is normally set to automatically retrieve updates, we have not set version 1 to automatically update to version 2 at this time.

If you would like to get the latest version, please visit our site at www.DashBook.com.

Royalty Calculations for your Enterprise

2008-09-08T15:17:00.000-05:00

We will release DashBook version 2 soon, and one of the advances we made was supporting SQL Server in a new level of DashBook. Although DashBook was designed to handle multiple users, we had not finished our quality assurance testing of multiuser when version 1 was shipped, so we did not offer a multiuser version for sale.

So in addition to our inexpensive single-user license of DashBook, we will now have two additional levels. Multiuser will allow multiple simultaneous users to communicate with the DashBook database as it resides in a Microsoft Access database, while our Enterprise license allows multiple users to access the DashBook database on a SQL Server.

We were very pleased to see that even for a single user, running the database on SQL Server can result in a much faster system. Unfortunately, SQL statements are not very compatible between Access and SQL, but we've done the work so that not only will DashBook be able to process your data in either, but all of our included reports now have dual SQL statements so that any report will automatically use the correct SQL for your given database.

Now DashBook can handle businesses from small startup through large enterprise!

Free Software

2008-07-08T12:03:00.001-05:00

Yes, one can use DashBook to keep track of product sales, returns, inventory, and clients totally for free. All that is required after the initial 30 day trial period is to register to let us know that you are out there. DashBook Lite (the free version) is perfect for anyone not requiring automatic royalty calculations, so DashBook can be used for free whether you are a self-publisher or are selling goods on eBay. Tracking sales and printing invoices are part of every business, not just the book business.

So, why would anyone pay for DashBook? At this time, the only features not included for free is the automatic calculation of royalties and payments thereof. All reports, even the ability to customize reports, are available. The next version of DashBook will include the ability to not only record payments to authors, but to actually send them money!

By giving away DashBook Lite for free, we are providing a much better system to people as an alternative to trying to track sales with a spreadsheet. Our plan is that the many self-publishers and authors who use the free version of DashBook will expand their business to include the need to easily handle royalties. Once you experience how easy and straightforward DashBook is, you will be happy to continue using it for a small fee.

What's next?

2008-05-15T17:02:00.001-05:00

It has been over a month since the last blog entry, and we've been busy. Last week we released an update to DashBook that improves a few different areas of the program.

To assist new users of DashBook who already have many published books, the New Product button will now present a screen where you can paste in a list of ISBNs, and DashBook will retrieve the book titles and authors from the internet. If you have hundreds of book titles, this greatly speeds setting up the program for use. The only other things needed is to enter the retail price for each, and setup royalties for each combination of product and contributor.

When you have royalties for many products and contributors that overlap (multiple authors per title, and/or multiple titles per author), this next feature comes in handy! The Royalty Agreement screen now has grouping for viewing purposes. This does not affect the calculations, but does help to manage agreements when you have hundreds to track. You can group by product, which then shows all of the products on the left side of the screen, and for each product, the right side of the screen shows all of the royalty recipients for that product. There is even a Summary tab that allows you to see and edit all of the simple percentages for each author.

Similarly, you can change your view to "by author," and you will have a list of authors on the left, where each author presents a summary of the royalty agreements for this author along with percentages. This gives a nice overview of all of the projects you have with a contributor.

Another new feature enhances the value of customized reporting. DashBook uses hyperlink text to quickly show reports during input, like on the Order page. You can now right-click on a report hyperlink to edit which report it shows, as well as setting the parameters for the report. If a report asks for a choice where your answer never changes, you can preset your answer to not be bothered with the question. If you create your own version of a report, you can now setup the hyperlink to call your own customized report.

The development of DashBook is progressing swiftly. Our next set of improvements coming in a couple of months will put DashBook in a new league!

We have arrived!

2008-04-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

Well, today we have released DashBook version 1 as a product, ready to be utilized in production for publishers around the globe. The program is on the internet for download, our website has been revised and augmented with a shopping cart, and we are ready to accept credit card payment. You can see it here: http://www.dashbook.com/

A press release is in the works, and we'll have a lot to do in the marketing department now. But frankly, development is where my heart is. I am very excited about working on the enhancements that will go into the next version of DashBook that will make it even more powerful and easier to use.

Our latest revisions to version 1 include much speed improvement on the Order form, particularly as it relates to royalty calculation results. While working with one of our excellent beta testers who discovered a very odd way to trick our program, we realized that having over a dozen royalty recipients per product on an order with many such products caused the program to move too slowly from order to order. The user was not complaining about the speed, because he felt that his usage of selling music with complex royalties was beyond DashBook's intended scope, so he was happy that it worked as well as it did. We, however, were not satisfied until we improved it. Now, everyone's order display time is faster. Bonus.

Aside from that speed issue, we discovered that our program updates were not correctly replacing the report templates. This means that many users did not get to see a lot of our latest advances. Worse, their old templates may have failed completely due to incompatibilities with our latest program. Fortunately, that has been resolved, and version 1 will be installing all new report templates in addition to the program code improvements.

In reference to the royalties on music, we have been seeing an increase in downloads from people who are in the music business. I would like to speak with more people in that industry to ensure that DashBook is handling music well. I can imagine someone selling songs on iTunes and needing to account for the royalties to the musicians and other artists involved. Having to keep track of all of those dimes that could add up to millions would be a lot of work without good software. We want to help!

Almost the end of Beta

2008-03-14T14:10:00.000-05:00

We are getting very close to DashBook version 1 now, with today's beta release. While we may put out another beta before the end, this one has the last of major feature changes.

The brunt of effort in this beta was in the reporting area, where we have massive change. First and foremost is the transformation in the report viewing process. In earlier versions, one would choose a particular report, perhaps interact with a window of questions (parameters), and then see the report which could be printed. In this version, choosing the Reports toolbar icon or All Reports from the menu brings one to a listing of reports just as the toolbar did before. However, in this new version, each time a report name on the left side of the screen is clicked, the report automatically draws on the right side of the screen. As one changes the parameters above the report, the report automatically redraws to reflect those choices. The difference in user experience is amazing!

The reports have also undergone major change in presentation, using stylesheets to add needed character. In addition, many reports now have additional parameters such as start and stop date ranges, along with customization switches to turn aspects of the reports on and off. Many of our report additions and adjustments were based on the feedback from the publishers in our beta program, so we are very thankful to all our critics. To round out our complete package, a few utilitarian reports for printing envelopes and labels have also been added. With the addition and completion of reports, we have included more hyperlinks within the input areas of the program, such as the ability to print an invoice and envelope directly from an order.

Now that we have completed the major changes to the reports, we have finished the major enhancements to DashBook itself. We will be making a few corrections and refinements in the reports as well as other areas, but the feature set is now complete.

Along with the program code changes, this beta updates our help documentation system, so that discovering how to use DashBook has never been easier. Most areas of the program are now linked such that hitting the F1 key will bring up the help section for that screen. There are a few more screens needing documentation, and due to all of the modifications in the program, the help will undergo a lot of revision this month to synchronize with the final released version.

All of these improvements will soon be packaged together as our premier product – DashBook version 1. We are excited about releasing this product to assist all of the book publishers who have needed a tool that catered to their business. As we will soon begin work on our next version, we look forward to many more suggestions for improvement and new capabilities.

DashBook improved for Bookstores

2008-01-10T16:52:00.000-06:00

Although our original focus for DashBook was to provide a quality software tool for small publishers, of course, we wish to help a larger audience. One of our beta testers has an interest in using DashBook rather than Intuit's QuickBooks in a small bookstore.

As DashBook was designed for a small publisher with few titles, as expected, it failed miserably! She had over 4000 titles, with nearly the same number of authors. DashBook choked! Well, I've actually gotten ahead of myself. To facilitate this bookstore's transition to DashBook, we wrote a new import utility to import all of her products and corresponding authors from her existing Yahoo! Small Business store. Yahoo! has a nice facility to export their catalog.xml file once you've generated your storefront.

So, rather than having to type in thousands of entries, she simply imported the books (gifts, etc.) directly into a new DashBook database. It was during our testing before releasing this incremental feature that we saw how devastating the existence of thousands of products was to the DashBook interface speed. Fortunately, this slowdown was readily rectified so that working with thousands of titles is as fast as working with a handful.

More good news is that now DashBook's screens for Orders, Products, etc. are much faster when handling just a few titles as well. Everybody wins!

So, why did this customer choose DashBook over QuickBooks? Obviously, DashBook is focused on the idiosyncrasies of selling books. For her, this means that she can easily look up her products by author name - something she could not get QuickBooks to do. She also much preferred the way that DashBook handles sale discounts during the Order process.

Because she gave us great feedback, we were able to help her in implementing a superior system for her sales and inventory tracking needs. What would you like us to do for you?

Beta has begun!

2007-11-14T15:39:00.000-06:00

We have now released Dashbook into the world of beta testing. Dashbook is a Windows program that assists publishers with the sales of products such as books by tracking inventory, sales, returns, and royalties. Although there already are programs that do this, Dashbook does it better.

Dashbook was designed from its core as a Windows program, taking advantage of tabs to organize related information to reduce clutter and confusion, and it is infused with the innate ability to communicate through the web thanks to the Microsoft .Net Framework platform.

We have spent a lot of time designing Dashbook to work intuitively for both publishers and authors. Even though we worked closely with an established publisher, Trivium Publishing, we are anxious to get this into the hands of many more to learn how we can further improve our product.

Our site, www.dashbook.com has a sales tab which allows anyone to participate in the beta. Please download it, try it out, and give us feedback so that we can make it better for you.

Thanks!

Setup Wizard

2007-11-12T15:02:00.000-06:00

We've been working on a Setup Wizard to assist in getting started. The Wizard will prompt for publisher information (name, address, etc.), then information for each book, and if you are using royalties, each author and royalty definition.

Once that information is entered, sales can begin!

Of course, more books, authors, etc. can be entered (and edited) after this initialization. The Wizard is more of a good prompting tool to get the basic information in the program.

Dashbook has a website!

2007-10-29T16:10:00.000-05:00

We now have a website for our program, www.dashbook.com. Although we also have download availability from our new site, we are still refining the program before launching our beta.

The home page of our website has a snapshot of our Dashboard, which is basically a view of key performance indicators. At this time, our Dashboard shows four reports or charts:

Payments Due (Customers, amounts, and due dates)
Aging Receivables (as a pie chart)
Best Sellers YTD (pie chart of what's hot)
Re-Order Notice (inventory chart)

Obviously a Best Sellers chart has little value to a single product publisher, and would be too cramped for a book publisher of over a hundred titles. There is no doubt that customizations will become important.

For our beta version, this Dashboard has no user interface to change which reports are shown. However, the information for the Dashboard is contained in an html file which savvy users can customize.

In the beginning

2007-09-17T16:24:00.000-05:00

It has been just over a year since we started working on DashBook. Our technical writer alerted us to the absence of quality software for small book publishers, as the program that seemed to have the largest audience looks like it was ported from DOS while continually cramming more cryptic information onto the screens.

Creating new software takes quite a bit of time - at least it does for us. We have gone through a number of iterations of improvements across many areas of the program. As one might imagine, the section for entering orders is of prime importance. I am very proud of the simplification that we managed there, while retaining the ability for more complex orders.

This is an exciting time for us, as we will be entering our beta test period soon. On one track we have the development of our initial website for introducing the product and downloading the beta, while on the other we begin the excitement anew with ideas of our product direction and new features and capabilities.

It has been fun so far, and about to get intense!