RoyaltyShare, whose Digital Advantage service allows publishers to track and manage sales of e-books and other digital products, has added a new service that will allow publishers to monitor the price of e-books being offered by different e-book retailers. Called Sales Feed Price Validation, the new service provides book publishers with a tool for identifying and managing transactions in which the actual sale price reported by retail agents is not in accordance with the price set by the publisher.
According to RoyaltyShare CEO Bob Kohn, SFPV automatically matches the prices paid in transactions against the price set by publishers. “If retailers are undercharging, publishers get underpaid,” Kohn said. While the pricing module was developed in response to problems stemming from the agency model price, the new service can also be used track whether retailers are using the correct discount on e-books sold under the retail model. “There are a variety of reasons why mistakes can be made,” Kohn said. “For a bestseller that can add up quickly.
The first client for the service is Hachette, which also uses RS’s Digital Advantage service. “It was a top prioirty for them," Kohn said. “The ability to identify pricing anomalies on a transaction-by-transaction basis in sales reporting is a must-have operational need of the agency model,” said Kenneth Michaels, Chief Operating Officer of Hachette Book Group. “This newest evolution from our key partner helps us to optimize the management of the digital sales channel and meet the new requirements of the digital age for our authors while delivering specialized, automated solutions that are too cost ineffective to do manually.”
The RS platform currently supports the revenue data feeds from over 30 digital retailers and distributors worldwide, supporting both the agency and retail model, including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Lightning Source, and Overdrive. Price for DigitalAdvantage and SFPV are based on publisher size and number of transactions. Kohn said RoyaltyShare is in various stages of discussions with other publishers about using Digital Advantage, and he hopes to sign agreements soon.
