Royalties Committee

The mission of the AALA Royalties Committee is to discuss industry trends impacting as well as issues stemming from publisher royalty reporting; to share timely alerts and tools to educate our members on key aspects of royalty reporting and payment; and to make recommendations to publishers to improve royalty statements and payment processes for the agent and author community.

The Committee regularly reaches out to publishers offering input based on years of working with publishers on royalty issues. We provide constructive suggestions to aid in development and improvements to their royalty statements, portals, and payment processes such as ACH.

Most recently, projects and initiatives have included:

• ACH payments / Digital reporting: reaching out to the publishers who still report and pay on paper to request ACH and digital statement conversion. We applied heavy pressure in the 2020 pandemic and received a very positive response.
• Meeting again with Macmillan USA concerning improving their royalty statements, forthcoming portal, and suggestions regarding subsidiary rights accounting.
• Ongoing meetings with HarperCollins to make suggestions for future statement improvements and address portal concerns.
• Offering input over multiple meetings with Scholastic prior to their royalty statement overhaul.
• Inviting a constellation of key players in the audio and digital audio ecosystem to illuminate digital audio royalty reporting, including Overdrive which interfaces with publishers and libraries.
• Starting a Visiting Member initiative where highly interested fellow AALA members visit our monthly meetings for a quarter to address questions and enrich dialog.

If you have a passion for royalty statements and are interested in visiting the Royalties Committee, please send a letter expressing your interest to royalties@aalitagents.org