Rights, Royalties & Author Contracts

Most modern trade contracts do — the grant of rights typically covers sale of electronic editions "through any channel" or "by any means" — but you should verify before launch rather than after, and three clause families deserve attention. Grant of rights: confirm electronic/verbatim rights are granted to you without channel restriction; older contracts occasionally name specific retailers or "third-party retail channels" in ways a cautious reading might not stretch to direct sales. Royalty basis: direct sales pay on net receipts in most contracts — confirm the definition of net receipts doesn't produce anomalies when the receipt is 100% of cover price (see 2.4). Approval and consultation clauses: some contracts require consultation on "new forms of exploitation." The practical approach taken by publishers launching direct channels: audit a sample of contract vintages, fix forward (new contracts explicitly cover direct and subscription), and communicate openly with agents for the backlist (see 2.5). We provide a checklist of the clauses to review — but your own lawyers make the call.

This is the one to check hardest, because subscription is the newest form of exploitation and the least likely to be explicit in older contracts. Newer contracts increasingly include subscription/streaming language with a defined revenue-allocation basis; older ones may be silent, which is not the same as permissive. Before enrolling backlist titles in any subscription tier: confirm the grant covers it, agree the allocation basis (see 1.7), and consider an opt-in approach for older contracts — agents respond far better to being asked than being notified. The platform lets you include or exclude titles from subscription tiers individually, precisely so rights caution never has to block the whole programme.

Per title, by buyer territory. Your rights metadata governs where each title can be sold: a reader whose store territory (and payment/billing country on your checkout) falls outside a title's rights territories doesn't see it offered for sale. This mirrors how retailers enforce territoriality, with one advantage: the ledger of where each sale happened is yours, so a rights query from a co-publisher or agent can be answered with data rather than assurances. Note the usual boundary: territorial enforcement governs sale; a reader who legitimately bought a title while resident in-territory doesn't lose their library when they travel.

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.

Title by title. Content where you don't control direct-sale rights simply stays out of the direct channel (or out of specific territories or tiers) — inclusion is a per-title, per-channel decision, not all-or-nothing. For anthologies and multi-rights-holder works, the same consumption and sales ledger that supports author royalties (see 1.7) supports multi-party allocation. The practical rule: your direct channel should launch with the catalogue you're sure about and expand as rights are confirmed — the platform doesn't force you to solve your hardest rights questions before selling your simplest ones.

They're different legal animals. Public-library lending runs through library suppliers under licence terms you set, and (in the UK and some other territories) triggers PLR payments from the state — none of which changes with your direct channel. An in-app "library-style" subscription (e.g., any three titles at a time) is simply a commercial subscription with a borrowing mechanic: it's a sale under your subscription terms, allocated to authors like any subscription revenue (see 1.7), with no PLR involvement. The naming similarity confuses; the accounting shouldn't. If you sell to actual libraries or institutions, access codes and bulk licences are handled separately (see 5.6).