Review sales, royalties, and rights
Review sales and royalty-reporting access
Know where your sales and royalty figures come from, make sure you can access them, and read the first statement closely enough to ask questions while they can still be answered.
Authors often hire help with this: legal or contract.
Why it matters
Royalty statements are the only account you'll get of how the book sold, and errors in them aren't unusual and are rarely deliberate: a format missing, a rate misapplied, a subsidiary sale not credited. Most contracts limit how long you have to query a statement. Reading the first one carefully, and knowing how to get the next, is basic care of your own income.
Your part
- What you do
- Verify. Someone else may do it. Inspect the result yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Agent. Publisher issues; agent reviews where there is one; author reads every statement
- When
- After the first statement, then at each statement date in the contract (Review sales, royalties, and rights: after publication, then at every reporting period)
Your part changes with your publishing route.
How to do it
The full walkthrough
A royalty statement is the publisher's periodic account of copies sold, returns, revenue, the royalty earned, and what is owed after any advance is recouped. For traditionally published authors it arrives on the schedule in the contract (often twice a year), through a portal, an agent, or the post. For hybrid authors the schedule and format are in the contract and vary widely. For self-published authors the equivalent is the sales dashboard on each platform and the payment reports that follow.
Before the first statement, confirm the practical things: when it is due, how it arrives, whether there is a portal and whether you have a login, and whether your agent receives it first. When it arrives, read it against what you know: the formats that were on sale, the period covered, the price, the royalty rate in the contract, and any special sales or subsidiary rights income that should appear. Note anything you do not understand and ask.
Agents review statements as part of their job, and an author with an agent should still read the statement, because two readers catch more than one. Authors without an agent should ask the publisher's royalty department directly, and should not be shy about it; questions are normal.
After the first statement, review each one as it arrives and keep them together. Patterns across statements (a format that never appears, returns that seem high) are only visible with the set.
Common mistakes
- Not knowing when the first statement is due and assuming its absence means no sales.
- Filing the statement unread because the number at the bottom was fine.
- Missing a format or a subsidiary rights sale that should have appeared.
- Letting the contract's query window pass before asking about a discrepancy.
What done looks like
- The statement schedule, delivery method, and portal login confirmed before the first statement is due.
- The first statement read against the contract's royalty rates, the formats on sale, and the period covered.
- Questions sent in writing to the publisher's royalty contact or through the agent, and the answers kept with the statement.
- All statements and platform reports stored together with the contract.
- A calendar reminder for each future statement date.
Ask your publisher
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Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified