"I'm an author or agent…" — your 6 questions, answered.

Royalties on direct sales are governed by your author contracts, not by us — but the platform is built so that the accounting is never the obstacle. Every direct sale is recorded with title, price paid, buyer territory and date, and exports cleanly to your royalty system. Two things are worth knowing. First, most standard contracts pay royalties on net receipts — and your net receipts on a direct sale are far higher than on the same sale through a retailer, so authors typically earn more per copy from your direct channel even at unchanged royalty rates. Second, many publishers choose to share the direct-channel margin further — some agents now expect it — and a higher direct royalty rate is one of the strongest cards you hold in the next contract negotiation: it aligns your authors with the channel's success. We'd encourage you to decide your direct-royalty policy before launch and communicate it to authors and agents proactively; see 2.5 for what to tell agents.

By actual reading. The platform records which titles each subscriber opened and how much of each they consumed, so subscription revenue can be allocated per title on a consumption basis — the same principle streaming services use, but with the ledger in your hands rather than a black box. That gives your royalty team an auditable basis for paying authors on subscription income, and gives agents a straight answer instead of a shrug. Before launching any subscription tier, check your contracts permit subscription exploitation (see 2.2) and decide the allocation basis in writing; we'll give you the data to operate whichever basis you choose.

Your contracts set the floor; the market is setting expectations above it. At standard net-receipts rates, authors already earn more per direct sale than per retail sale, because your receipts are higher — that's the mechanical answer, and for many lists it's sufficient. But agents increasingly argue that if the publisher keeps 85–100% of a direct sale instead of 35–70%, the author should share the uplift — and several publishers with successful direct channels have made a higher direct royalty part of the pitch to authors, treating it as an acquisition and retention tool rather than a cost. Our guidance: decide a policy deliberately (standard rate, uplifted rate, or uplift above a volume threshold), document it, and lead with it in agent conversations. A direct channel with author buy-in markets itself; one that looks like margin hoarding invites contract friction. The platform's reporting supports whichever policy you set.

Lead with the three things agents actually care about: more money per copy (higher net receipts flow through to royalties — bring the per-unit arithmetic), better data (real reading and sales figures per title, visible on demand, instead of opaque retailer aggregates), and a publisher investing in the author's long-term audience (a reader relationship that follows the author's next book, instead of being re-rented from a retailer every launch). Be ready for two questions: the royalty-rate question (see 2.4 — have a policy) and the subscription-allocation question (see 1.7 — have a basis). Publishers who bring agents a one-page direct-channel policy before being asked report the conversation becomes an asset — it signals professionalism in a market where most publishers still can't answer.

That's your choice, at the granularity you choose. The platform's dashboards show sales, revenue and reading engagement per title in real time; you decide what to expose to whom. Some publishers give authors live read-only access to their own titles' figures (launch-day sales visible hour by hour is, in our experience, the single most-loved feature among authors); others fold direct-channel lines into their existing royalty statements. Either way, the underlying ledger exports to your royalty system, and every number an agent might challenge is auditable back to individual transactions.

Yes, if you enable it. Author-visible dashboards — scoped to their own titles, read-only — turn the direct channel into a relationship tool: authors watch launch day unfold in real numbers, see completion rates on their books, and stop asking marketing for screenshots. Several publishers report this is the feature that turns authors into active promoters of the app, because for the first time promoting the publisher's channel visibly promotes their own royalties. You control access per author and can withhold it where a contract or relationship makes that wiser.