Llewellyn Selects Elan Rights & Royalties Software

"Llewellyn Worldwide, a leading publisher of New Age books and related products, has signed a contract with The Media Services Group to implement the Élan Rights and Royalties software application. Details of the agreement will see the new system implemented alongside the company’s current Oracle financials and fulfillment software."

Read the Media Services Press Release

Publishers Group UK installs Vista Hosted Solution

"January 30, 2008 —VISTA, market leader in applications to support the publishing supply chain, is proud to announce that Publishers Group UK (PGUK), a market leader in book sales and distribution representing publishers from the UK, Europe and the USA, has selected VISTA’s fulfillment and financial applications in a hosted (AHS) environment. The hosted applications require minimal maintenance from PGUK’s perspective allowing their mainly non-technical staff to focus on their business of marketing, selling and distributing books."

Read the Vista Press Release

Software Selection Options

What are your options?

Any company looking for software should look at all of their options;

1. Integrated software
2. Best of breed solutions
3. Custom designed software

and

1. Standalone vs.
2. Hosted solutions

That said, there is no one best solution. You must select the software that best meets the requirements of your organization.

Dyanamics GP (Great Plains) Royalty Module

The Eclipse Rights & Royalty Management System (ERRMS) is the only software solution that is totally integrated with the mid market Microsoft Dynamics™ GP ERP package.

It is designed for Publishing, Music, Entertainment, and Merchandising companies who find it costly or disruptive to manually manage low value transactions, or to deal with intrusive SOX or trademark-initiated audits by “bounty-hunting” external auditors.

For more information visit: Eclipse Business Dynamics

SAP IPM Implemented in 4 Months

Medium sized publishers rarely look at SAP. They think that its too expensive and/or that it takes too long to implement.

That is not always true. The Nomos Publishing House implemented SAP IPM (Intellectual Property Management) and SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in four months with the assistance if IDS Scheer.

"After the initial identification of the specialist requirements, a small team began work on the project in mid-September 2006. The finished fee settlement for the publisher for the year 2006 was hot off the press at the end of January 2007. This enabled Nomos to start making automatic postings for financial accounting and payment runs to the authors — in record time and the result of an excellent partnership."

Read the press release about this implementation of SAP IPM.

If your publishing company has growing sales of $50M USD and needs a customizable intellectual property management solution I would include SAP IPM among the solutions that I would evaluate.

knk Publishing Software Comes to America

knk Business Software (http://www.knk.com/ ) is a European vendor of book publishing software modules certified for the Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision) product line.

Their first implementations in the United States are due to start soon and both sites are expected to go live by the end of the year. One publisher is in the Midwest and this solution is being implement by Solution Dynamics (http://www.solutiondynamics.net ) - a Microsoft Dynamics NAV VAR) and the other is on the East coast. We will let you know who they are as soon as knk Business Software AG releases a press release.

What sets knk Publishing apart from competitive book publishing solutions is that their book publishing software modules are 100% integrated into the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP product.

Users work from one user interface - the Dynamics NAV user interface. This means that users don't have to switch between programs and the IT staff doesn't have to export information from one system and import into another.

Seminar Software

Some non-fiction publishers earn revenue by hosting conferences and seminars.

A number of years ago a publisher I know started a conference program. The first conference was hosted at the New School; a college, in New York City and broke even. Over the following years conferences grew to account for about half a million in net income a year for this publisher.
Conferences provide immediate revenue from prepaid registrations and qualified names for a publisher's direct marketing campaigns.

A conference needs;

1. Speakers - for whom the host is expected to pay airfare, hotel, meals and transportation and
2. Attendees - which are usually gained via a direct mail and internet advertising campaign and
3. A location - which can be a hotel conference room or a university lecture hall
4. Handouts for the attendees

Revenue from a conference usually includes;

Registration fees

1. Sponsorship Fees
2. Exhibit Income
3. Book sales
4. Tape sales

If you are planning to begin a semianr program the appropiate software can make your life a lot easier. Conference software will track participants, generate conference badges, take credit card payments, provide a financial summary of conference revenue, and send automatic conference registration and reminder emails.

The following three vendors market seminar management software;

These include;

The Media Services Group

Media Services solution is part of a hosted solution that can also handle royalties, book sales, inventory management subscriptions and production management. A total ERP solution for book and periodical publishers.

SolutionDymanics.net - the Midwest USA VAR for Knk's Microsoft Navision's Publishing Software

KnkPublishing Event's management module is tightly integrated with Microsoft's Dynamics Navision ERP software. For more information on the Knk offering visit http://www.knk.com/

Regonline.com

Regonline is a online hosted solution, that charges a fee based on the number of seminar attendees. For small events the price is $4.75 per attendee.