Imprint Case Study: Horrific Tales Publishing
How a small horror press reduced their monthly royalty run from three hours to three minutes.
I've run Horrific Tales Publishing since 2011. It started off as a way to legitimise my own self published novels at a time when self publishing really was a dirty word. However over time the business grew and I began publishing other authors. Our books have made it to the preliminary ballot of the Bram Stoker awards and have been nominated for British Fantasy Awards and Aurealis Award Awards over the years, and we publish authors in the UK, US, Europe, Canada and Australia.
However, with all of these additional authors, and all of the various distribution channels that we use (we publish through KDP, ACX, Ingram and Draft2Digital), our monthly royalty runs became increasingly difficult.
The Challenge: Wrestling With Microsoft Excel
I used to use an application called Trackerbox to load all of the various royalty sources into a single "source of truth" spreadsheet and run reports from that. However that stopped being updated in 2019.
Because as well as being a publisher and author, I am an IT Professional with decades of experience, I created a monster spreadsheet complete with complex Power Query imports, and ran my royalty reports from pivot tables. That took my monthly run time down from six hours to around 3, but it was fragile and high maintenance. Every time KDP or Audible changed their reporting format, I'd need to relearn Power Query to update the system. And that caused delays in paying my authors while I sorted out the IT.
And while there were products that did help, they were all SaaS products with hefty subscription fees and required my data to be uploaded to someone else's cloud servers.
The Solution: An Integrated Tool that Automated my Entire Workflow
I started designing Imprint in 2023 after a particularly gruelling power query refactoring session. The aim was to create an ETL and Analytics Engine that simplified my monthly royalty runs and reduced my maintenance overhead.
The Imprint Ingestion Engine is the heart of the system. It's been designed from the ground up to be easily maintainable and expandable. So if KDP change their reporting format (again) I simply need to update a mapping file. And if I decide I want to use a different vendor, I can easily add the business logic to support them.
The Results: Rapid, Predictable and Transparent Data Ingest from 11 different vendors.
How This Translates into Real World Use.
2. Payments in Seconds, Not Hours
With my old royalty system, even after I'd managed to get the data into my spreadsheet, I then needed to go through each author in turn, selecting their data in a pivot table, copy and pasting that information into a word document, manually calculate outstanding advance payments, then email that document to the author and make the payment via Paypal. In reality, it still used to take hours.
With Imprint, once you set up the author and title metadata, and populate the email settings, you literally set your statement time period, and any filters you need (if you are doing it for just one author for example), click one button to generate the statements. Then you can view the statement to check the figures and if you are happy, its just a couple of mouse clicks to email all of your statements to all of your authors. No manual intervention needed.
And if you have Paypal Mass Pay set up, you can even automatically create a Paypal Mass Pay CSV file for upload. Even if you don't have mass pay enabled, its certainly useful to have account details and payment amounts in one place.
Key Takeaways for Independent Publishers
Imprint takes the pain away from the monthly royalty run. You can literally do the entire process in less than a minute - check out the 60 second speedrun video I recorded on our Youtube channel if you want to see it in action.
Your Vault, Your Data: No Subscriptions to access your data. No Cloud Uploads. Your financial records stay exactly where they belong—on your local hard drive. Encrypted, Safe and Private.
Actionable Analytics: Don't just track royalties to pay authors; use your data to see exactly which platforms are driving your business forward.
1. Almost Instant Data Import
I had 15 years of historical data for Horrific Tales Publishing, stored in a variety of formats. I was able to bring that data into Imprint in a couple of minutes. Not only that, but because, while a lot of vendors don't show exchange rates in their remittances, the Amazon KDP payment file shows EXACTLY what exchange rates were being used for that month. Importing that file, alongside the royalty statement meant that I no longer had to spend time looking at currency conversion sites for the correct rates. Multi currency payments had become a non-event.
💡 The Developer's Note:
I designed this tool to solve a very particular pain point with my own business. The monthly royalty run.
What it grew into is a fully integrated royalty and analytics engine that not only lets me pay my authors in minutes, but lets me track the analytics.
You can be assured that Imprint will continue to grow and offer more functionality over time - because I am not some tech-bro trying to sell the latest AI gimmick. I'm a small press publisher who created this tool to solve real business problems.