Typically, when we're starting a publishing house and publishing books for several authors and illustrators, we end up using spreadsheets like Excel to calculate how much we should pay authors and illustrators in royalties for their book sales. This becomes a tedious process and takes time away from our work as editors! I speak from experience.

Each author or illustrator may have a different contract, which makes things even more complicated. We want to make sure we're paying the correct amount, so we probably double-check. If we underpay, we can create distrust, and if we overpay, we incur financial losses for our publishing company.

Royalty calculation software is expensive and complex. It takes a lot of time to learn how to use it, and it probably has many features we don't need for the size of our publishing company. Paying a programmer to design the software the way we want it is much more expensive.

We must then find the clearest possible way to notify each author and illustrator of the number of books sold and the amount of royalties they are entitled to from those sales. The more books we publish, the more the amount of work grows.

After much searching, comparing, and verifying our budget, we decided to create our own web application that would calculate the exact amount of royalties for our authors. So we created FastRoyalties, an application that makes our work easier, saves us time, and contains exactly what we need. Not only that, we added the feature of creating a portal for each author; this way, our authors can securely log in with their credentials and see how many of their books were sold, where, and how much they earned in royalties. The portal also tells them how much their royalty payment is.

Since FastRoyalties has been a great tool for us, we want to share it with other editors who want to make their jobs easier so they have more time for their editing tasks.