The challenge
A maritime publisher sells e-books online through Stripe, PayPal and Razorpay, in more than one currency. It needed royalty management software for publishers that could turn each of those sales into exact payouts. A single order can involve several authors, a co-publisher or a bundle of titles.
Every sale also carries deductions before anyone is paid. The gateway takes its fee, and GST applies. The platform keeps its royalty, and partner publishers take their share.
The publisher's rules called for tax deducted at source (TDS) on Indian authors' royalties before payout, with foreign authors handled under separate rules.
Working all of that out by hand each month was slow, and one wrong percentage could ripple through every statement that followed. The more titles, authors and gateways the catalog gained, the more room there was for a mistake.
What we built
We built a royalty and payout engine that reads every sale and applies the publisher's own rules to it.
Sales import. Sales arrive from the online store's sales API (Easy Digital Downloads). Custom parsing works out which title or bundle sold, in which format, through which gateway and in which currency.
Rules the publisher controls. The calculations come from masters that staff maintain, not from code:
Authors, with their tax settings
Publishers, with their revenue shares
E-books, with royalty percentages
Bundles, with set percentage splits across titles
Currencies, with exchange rates
Gateways, with fee percentages
The split. For each sale, the engine starts from gross revenue and deducts the gateway fee, GST, the platform royalty, the publisher share and TDS.
What remains is the net author payout. Co-authors split equally by default. TDS follows the publisher's rules: deducted for Indian authors, set separately for foreign authors, with a manual override and a full TDS history.
How it works day to day
Consider the person who runs payouts at the publisher. A new month begins, and the sales are already in the system, each one split and posted to the right ledgers. They filter by date, author, publisher, gateway or format to check anything that looks unusual, then export ledgers to PDF or Excel for the accounts team.
When payments go out, each author and partner publisher gets an email automatically. They log in to dashboards that show only their own earnings and download their monthly statements. The admin dashboard, meanwhile, shows sales, payouts and platform revenue across the whole catalog.
The result
Each sale is now split automatically into gateway fee, GST, platform royalty, publisher share, TDS and net author payout. Authors and publishers log in to see their own sales, download monthly statements and get an email when they are paid.
The month-end work that used to depend on careful spreadsheet arithmetic now follows written rules that staff can read and change. This engine sits alongside the same publisher's maritime news and e-book reader app and its crew hiring platform for seafarers.
What the research says
Spreadsheets carry hidden errors. A 2024 review led by Pak-Lok Poon in Frontiers of Computer Science found that 94% of spreadsheets used in business decisions contain errors (Phys.org, 2024). Payouts that pass through fees, GST, shares and TDS on every sale are exactly the kind of chain a formula slip breaks. That is why the engine applies the same rules to every sale.
Indian buyers pay digitally. The IAMAI and Kantar Internet in India 2024 report counted 405 million people making digital payments, out of 886 million active internet users (IAMAI and Kantar, 2024). With Razorpay alongside Stripe and PayPal, gateway and currency masters let each gateway's fee be deducted correctly.
E-books hold a steady audience. A Pew Research Center survey in October 2025 found 31% of US adults had read an e-book in the past 12 months, up from 17% in 2011 (Pew Research Center, 2026). Readers abroad pay through different gateways and currencies, which the engine identifies on every sale before it splits the revenue.
Where AI fits next
The engine does not do any of this today; these are possibilities. A check could flag sales the parser cannot match cleanly and suggest a likely title for staff to confirm. A model could draft plain-language notes on each author's monthly statement, and payout forecasts could help with cash planning.
Planning royalty management software for publishers?
Before you automate royalty payouts, it helps to answer four questions:
In what order are deductions applied, and does that order ever change by gateway or country?
How should co-authors and bundles be split when no special rule exists?
Who can override a tax deduction, and how is that change recorded?
What should authors see on their own dashboards, and what stays internal?
See how we approach custom software development, read our guide to month-end close automation, or explore our media and publishing software work.
