Are you starting a small press or are you a small press with revenue under $1M USD? If so, here are five software tools that you will need to run your business;
1. QuickBooks
First, you need software to track your sales and expenses. For this we recommend QuickBooks. Why?
- QuickBooks has a 95%+ marketing share.
- Most CPA’s know QuickBooks.
- Books and training classes on how to use QuickBooks are readily available.
- You can easily process credit card book sales at conferences using your smart phone and QuickBook’s credit card add-on.
2. Microsoft Office with Word, Excel and Outlook
Second, you need Microsoft Office. Sure, some people will say that the free available Open Office software will meet all of your needs; however, its not quite so simple.
- First, Office has a 95%+ market share. Most authors and vendors that you work with will send you Microsoft word and Excel files. Printers will ask for files in Microsoft format. In our experience, unless you are using the Microsoft product you may not be able to read all the data correctly or your data may be incorrectly formatted.
- Second, you can easily find a wide assortment of books and training classes on using the Microsoft Office products.
- Outlook allows you to store your contacts and your emails on your PC. If you are using cloud based email and your cloud server goes down, you can’t access your email history. With Outlook you can have your emails in two places; on the cloud and on your local PC.
3. Title Information Database (ONIX)
If you want to sell books, your vendors have to know about them. Not only do they need to know the title, the author and price, they also need to know its description, reviews, table of contents and any additional information that you can provide. A title information databasel; such as OnixEdit ONIX Software, gives you the tools to store this information in one location and transmit it to your retailers (such as Amazon and Barnes & Nobles) and wholesalers (such as Ingram and Baker & Taylor). You can use this stored information to create title sell sheets and catalogs.
4. Royalty Software
If your press has fewer than 20 titles and simple royalty rules; a simple percentage of net sales, you can easily generate royalty statements in Excel or Word. You don’t need royalty software.
Once you have 30, 50, or 100+ titles you will need royalty software. Currently, we recommend that small presses look at two solutions; DashBook and Easy Royalties. You can download a trial version of each solution to try them out.
How do they compare?
- Dashbook costs less than Easy Royalties ($249 vs $500 for the entry level versions of both solutions).
- Dashbook has an SQL version.
- Easy Royalties can handle more complex royalty rules and offers optional modules for rights marketing and permissions tracking.
- Dashbooks appears to be favored by publishers with fewer titles (i.e. <50) and Easy Royalties is favored by publishers with more titles (i.e. 50 to 1200+)
- Easy Royalties is used by publishers that use QuickBooks, MAS90, Microsoft Dynamics, PeopleSoft and SAP for their financial accounting.
In general, DashBooks costs less and Easy Royalties royalty software is more powerful. Both are good products. Try both and choose the one that will best meet your requirements.
5. Online Backup Software
Hard drives fail. In year one about 3% of all hard drives will fail. By year three the failure rate increases to 6%. To protect your information against loss of data we recommend that you use an online backup service (or two) to protect your data. The online services that we recommend to small presses are;
- Carbonite
- Mozy
- iDrive
- SOS Backup