fastroyalties.com

What It Is

FastRoyalties is a royalty calculator and author portal web app for book publishers, designed to replace manual royalty calculations in Excel and the manual sending of royalty reports. It is suited to publishers with multiple authors and illustrators, especially where contract rules vary. By entering author, book, sales, and payment data, the system automatically generates royalty information and lets authors log in to a portal to view the results.

Core Features and Collaboration

Its core modules include automated royalty calculation, an author portal, sales and royalty payment records, automated email notifications, publisher Logo customization, data export and backups, and more. After sales or payments are entered, the system sends personalized emails to authors. Authors can log in to the portal with their credentials to view book sales, where sales occurred, and royalties owed or already paid. In terms of collaboration permissions, the available text only clearly mentions author-side login and access to their own data; it does not mention internal multi-user access for publishers, approval workflows, or fine-grained permission controls.

Pricing, Deployment, and Security

The official website emphasizes that the application is customized to each publisher’s needs, costs less than hiring a programmer, and offers a limited-time introductory price and demo requests. However, it does not publicly list plans, specific pricing, billing cycles, or payment methods. The deployment model appears to be a web app, accessible from computers, tablets, and phones, and compatible with Windows and Mac; whether self-hosting is supported is not disclosed. On security, it only states that data is stored on protected servers and that authors log in with credentials. Details such as encryption, audit logs, backup frequency, and compliance certifications are missing.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its strengths are a focused use case and simple workflow, especially in reducing repetitive work around royalty calculation and report communication. Its customization also makes it suitable for small publishers that do not need a large, complex royalty management system. The main drawback is limited transparency: pricing, third-party integrations, APIs, support services, and compliance details are all missing. Sales data also appears to require manual entry, and there is no visible capability to automatically sync with distribution, ecommerce, or accounting systems. It is best suited to small and midsize publishers, independent publishing teams, and editorial organizations that want to provide authors with a transparent portal.

Access from China and Alternatives

The page does not provide information about access from China, payment methods, or localized services, so its accessibility status should be considered unknown. If using it in China, you should first verify website connectivity, language support, payment options, and data cross-border compliance requirements. Alternatives could include building a royalty workflow with domestic low-code platforms such as Jiandaoyun, Mingdao Cloud, or Feishu Base, or combining custom reports with financial systems such as Kingdee or Yonyou.