Authors, production, royalties — one title record.

The before — a title scattered across the house.

Publishing a book is a long project with a long financial tail, and Vellum split both across tools. “The author relationship was in a CRM, production in a project tool, royalties in a spreadsheet only one person understood, and direct sales in a separate store,” says Iris Donnelly, Publisher. “A title’s life was scattered across four systems and one very nervous spreadsheet.”

Royalty statements were the annual nightmare: reconciling sales across channels against contract terms by hand, for every author, on a deadline.

The switch — one record per title.

Vellum unified authors, production, sales, and royalty terms on one title record and moved its direct store onto the platform. Royalty statements now compute from the same sales the store records.

“The spreadsheet that only one person understood is gone,” Donnelly says. “That alone removed a single point of failure that kept me up at night.”

What got replaced

The unlock — the title remembers everything.

With authors, production, sales, and royalties unified, the house runs cleaner:

• Royalty statements compute from recorded sales and contract terms
• Direct store sales keep margin and feed the same ledger
• Production milestones live on the title with the author relationship
• No single-person spreadsheet holding the business hostage

The new normal — publishing, not bookkeeping.

“We acquire more titles now because the operational tax per book went down,” Donnelly says. “The team spends its time on books instead of on reconciliation. That’s what a small press is supposed to do.”