In a deal that reflects the growing need publishers have to process more complicated digital sales data, Hachette Book Group has hired the digital revenue management company RoyaltyShare to process its digital sales. RoyaltyShare, a five-year-old company based in San Diego with an office in New York, is one of the leading companies providing data on digital sales to music companies; now the software provider is looking to expand into the book publishing space. While Hachette is the first major publisher to sign with RoyaltyShare, the company's Steve Grady said it is currently in talks with other houses and will be attending BEA.
Grady said publishers' burgeoning e-book business will soon present them with myriad complications about how to effectively process sales that are quite different than the brick and mortar ones they're accustomed to. Grady said that when you're dealing with digital sales one complication is that retailers report this data in different formats. And, as books begin to be downloaded in different ways--in snippets and other potential ways--the nature ot the sales transactions will change, as will royalties and revenue streams. "Think of what we do as a funnel," Grady explained, saying that his company "normalizes" this complicated sales data and delivers it to publishers "so they can use it in their existing systems." Despite its name, RoyaltyShare does not handle the actual royalties.
"One of the challenges for publishers in the digital age is gathering accurate, auditable sales data for e-books and other digital content," David Young, CEO of Hachette said. "RoyaltyShare is an important investment for HBG because it will give us a tool to effectively manage and validate a vast amount of complex digital sales information, providing for accuracy in sales reporting and royalty payments."
