Publishers' Assistant: Frequently Asked Questions

• Who Needs Publishers' Assistant?
• Order Entry
• Receipts
• Royalties and Commissions
• Inventory
• Billing Statements
• Mail-List Management
• Business Analysis and Promotion
• Publishers' Assistant History
• Support, User Help, and Upgrades
• Information on the Latest Releases of Publishers' Assistant
• How to Order Publishers' Assistant

Who Needs Publishers' Assistant

Most new publishers start out with a very short list; in some cases just one title; perhaps one they have written themselves. At that stage, you might be able to get by with over-the-counter software to invoice orders, build a mail list, and count the money to be deposited in the bank. You can track inventory by counting the boxes in the garage.

Over-the-counter programs are cheap because they sell millions of copies to people running all types of small businesses, from body shops to mail-order doll-clothes homeworkers. But as you grow, the need for industry-specific software such as Publishers' Assistant will become clear. Such a program anticipates the types of things that publishers do and keep track of.

Perhaps you pay royalties and commissions, or need to keep track of the books carried on consignment by your distributor. Or you're helping to distribute books published by others. Or you've sent out a large number of review copies and need a list of those who should receive follow-up calls. Or you have 400 backorders to process the day your new title comes back from the printer. Perhaps you have started a newsletter and need to process subscriptions, or you publish an annual directory for which you take standing orders. Meanwhile, you've got late-paying customers who need billing statements; bookstores need credit memos for returned titles; and market analysis is required to determine which promotions are (or aren't) succeeding.

Even if you use only a few of the features of Publishers' Assistant, you'll find that the tasks that used to take a day of shuffling papers can be accomplished with a few keystrokes. Your business will become more efficient, and you'll have more time to spend publishing and marketing books.

Until now, industry-specific programs have been far more expensive than over-the-counter software because only a few hundred copies are sold. Many such programs cost $20,000 or more, which may be prohibitive for a struggling small business. Now, the tables have turned. Now, you can enjoy all of the benefits of Publishers' Assistant free of charge! This is a new business model, employed by some of the largest software publishers for some of their products, but the first time, to our knowledge, that a major industry-specific program for publishers has been offered as freeware.

With Publishers' Assistant, you get the full advantage of an industry-specific program at no charge. Meanwhile, a few of the features of the program are discussed here.

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Order Entry

Order entry is a central focus of Publishers' Assistant. When you invoice an order, a lot of things happen behind the scenes.

For example, inventory is automatically adjusted. Royalties and commissions are computed. The bill or the amount received is figured into the financial tabulations. The customer is added to your mail list with proper coding for inclusion in specific mailings, and the sales information is remembered for marketing analysis. Even with all that extra work happening automatically, entering orders is quicker and easier than in just about any other software program.

Publishers' Assistant will automatically compute any state or county taxes. It will tally the weight so you'll know how much to charge for shipping. It will track backorders. If you have a $5-off coupon, Publishers' Assistant will let you handle that easily and adjust the royalty if needed. If the order is a subscription or a standing order, Publishers' Assistant will note that and keep track of it.

"Bill-to" and "ship-to" contacts are stored separately, so it is always clear who gets the books and who owes the money. This is particularly handy if, for example, you sell to a chain-store with one "bill-to" and many "ship-to" addresses. Or if one customer orders ten copies of a book, all sent to different addresses as gifts.

The invoices can contain long memo lines for personalized messages to your customers, and common memos can be stored as macros, entered with a single keystroke. "In-house" memos will remind you if the customer is a slow payer or deserves special treatment. If you want to check the customer's account history, or enter an ordered book into inventory, you can do so directly from the invoice screen.

When you print an invoice (or, more commonly, a batch of invoices), you can also print all related documents, such as packing slips, shipping labels, and pick lists. One person can enter hundreds of invoices in a day, and Publishers' Assistant will keep track of all of the relevant information.

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Receipts

Receipts can be applied either to each invoice or to the customer's account. The former is tidy bookkeeping; the latter is necessary with some chain-store and consignment accounts. Either way, Publishers' Assistant will keep track of what books are paid for (for royalties, marketing analysis, etc.)

This seems like a simple concept, but it required extremely complex programming. If your chain-store accounts return books ordered on one invoice and claim credit against another invoice, you'll appreciate the hundreds of hours our programmers devoted to this issue.

Receipts are all categorized by type, and reportable as such. This makes it easy to batch your credit card charges and to specifically account for the checks, cash, and money orders you are depositing into the bank.

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Royalties and Commissions

Publishers' Assistant accommodates complex royalty agreements. For example, the royalty can be a percentage of either the cover or net price. It can come due either when the book is ordered or when it is paid for. The rate can change after a certain number of copies are sold, or it can change if copies are sold at a particular discount. If the author has received an advance, or has ordered books, the amounts can be automatically deducted from the amount due to the author. Specific sales can be excluded from royalties at the time of invoicing. If you want to deduct sales rep commissions before calculating royalties, the program allows you to do that.

Publishers often have particular difficulty computing royalties if they have an exclusive trade distributor, who may pay for sales four months ago minus returns from last month. With most business software programs, even industry-specific programs, it's very difficult to determine how much of each check pays for how many copies of which books. As a result, they make their computations move complex, based on when the books are shipped rather than when they are paid for. With Publishers' Assistant, you know exactly what each check pays for, and you can have the software make its computations based on those receipts.

If more than one author contributed to a book, each will receive royalty reports computed with the specific provisions in his or her contract. Several alternative reports are offered. Some publishers prefer the short summary reports, similar to those used by most big houses. But if your author needs a precise accounting of every book sold, that option is available, too. At Upper Access, our authors greatly appreciate the detailed reports.

Sales-rep information is entered at the time of invoicing. The next time the customer orders, Publishers' Assistant will default to the same sales rep and same percentage. However, any change can be accomplished with a few keystrokes.

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Inventory

Publishers' Assistant keeps track of every book you have in stock. You may even code books by genre for additional possible categories in your reports. Want to do a mailing to everyone who has bought one of your children's books and another to cookbook buyers? Publishers' Assistant makes this easy.

Inventory is subtracted when you ship an order and added when you receive a return. You can tell the program how many scuffed copies you have, if you want to sell them at a discount. Publishers' Assistant knows the value of the inventory (for insurance and tax records, for example). The tracking is time-sensitive, so if you need to know what was in stock six months ago, Publishers' Assistant will tell you. (This is another issue that seems simple but involved complex programming. When you're filling out a tax form on April 14, you'll appreciate the scores of hours our programmer spent to be sure you'll know the value of your inventory as of December 31.)

Publishers' Assistant will provide purchase orders when it's time to restock. When inventory is low, Publishers' Assistant will remind you that it's time to reorder or reprint. If you distribute other publishers' books on consignment, Publishers' Assistant will report on what you owe, with detailed information for your suppliers.

But inventory issues in recent years have become more complex than in the past. Now, you must keep detailed computerized information about each of your titles, and have the ability to export it in various formats, including the book-industry standard ONIX. You can pay thousands of dollars for a system or service to do this, or you can use our Couplet program. Couplet can be purchased separately for just $99, or, if you use the Epic version of Publishers' Assistant (for which you would commit to $35 per month maintenance agreement for a year) you will receive Couplet as part of the larger program at no cost. Aside from the new requirements, Couplet can save a huge amount of work because you will have to assemble your title information just once, and export for your trading partners, re-sellers, Web merchants, and others rather than re-typing the information over and over.

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Billing Statements

One of the aggravations of the publishing business is the fact that many trade customers are slow payers.

With Publishers' Assistant, you can send detailed monthly statements to customers whose bills are over 30, 60, or 90 days old (your choice). Of course, you can exclude consignment wholesalers or distributors from the statements. At Upper Access, we send monthly statements to all customers whose bills are at least 60 days old. Our customers are honest people, so the checks roll in during the next week or two.

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Mail-List Management

Publishers' Assistant provides tremendous flexibility in handling your mail list. Every "contact" entered into the program is a potential mail-list label, regardless of whether the contact is a customer, a reviewer, an author, a supplier, a sales rep, or a prospect.

All contacts may be assigned as many "customer codes" as you want to enter. The invoices for the books they bought may contain as many "marketing codes" as you want to enter. The system can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it.

When you run off mailing labels, you can choose among the types of contacts and the codes. For example, you may want to do a big mailing to everybody who has bought books or requested your catalog within the last two years. Or a smaller mailing just to the book stores, libraries, distributors, or retail customers in a particular state. Or to the customers who responded to a particular promotion. Or just to your sales reps. Or to customers who have bought a particular title or a particular genre. When you prepare your mailing, it's simple to run off a finely tuned set of labels for the exact categories of people you want to reach.

The labels can be printed directly from Publishers' Assistant, in zip-code order, in virtually any label format. Or you may export the mail list to a delimited file, for use by another mail-list program or by your mail-list broker. Publishers' Assistant makes it easy to avoid duplicate mail-list entries. Every time you type in a new name, similar names appear on a pop-up screen, so you can select an existing customer even if you hadn't realized that he or she was already there. And if you do accidentally enter a duplicate contact, Publishers' Assistant can merge the duplicates, combining their sales history and all other information.

If you have the additional Couplet program (see above under inventory), you will also have additional contact-management functions. For example, you can easily import contacts from other lists, broadcast e-mails to carefully-selected lists of customers, and a number of other sophisticated functions that will make your business more effective with less effort.

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Business Analysis and Promotion

For virtually any question involving sales or marketing, Publishers' Assistant allows you to crunch the numbers with just a few keystrokes. For example, if you bought a magazine ad, and the salesperson for the magazine is on the phone urging you to renew, you can check how many sales resulted from the ad in a matter of seconds.

Publishers' Assistant provides detailed reports of what was paid for during any period, or what was ordered and shipped during any period, broken down by virtually any combination of factors.

Publishers' Assistant even tracks the review copies you sent out, so that you can send follow-up notes to the reviewers. In short, Publishers' Assistant provides you with the information needed to capitalize on what's working, and to correct what isn't.

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Publishers' Assistant History

The first version of the program, called PiiGS 1 (Publishers' Invoice and Information Generating System), was released in late 1989, and quickly became one of the most widely-used industry-specific software programs for publishers. It won praise throughout the publishing industry as the most affordable, and most user-friendly, software program of its type.

In 1996, PiiGS 2—a complete rewrite of the program—was introduced. The look and feel of the program were modernized and many features were added, to take full advantage of the huge improvements in technology and the larger capacity of today's computers. Next came PiiGS 3 for Windows, as Windows was becoming the standard platform used by most publishers.

In 1999, we released the network version, and, in the process, changed the look and feel of the program, adding new features and making the program work faster and more intuitively. At that time, we decided to change the name to Publishers' Assistant. It was a less-catchy but more-descriptive name. Some of our users hated the name change and others loved it. But they all loved the new program. We had begun as an alternative to the ridiculously-expensive competition. Now, we had a program that does all the same things as the programs that cost ten or twenty times as much.

In 2007, we introduced Couplet, companion software that works with Publishers' Assistant or as a separate, stand-alone program. The cost was just $99, and added very sophisticated new capabilities for title management and contact management. Importantly, with new requirements for title information in XML formats such as ONIX, the book-industry standard, Couplet provides a simple, low-cost means of meeting the requirements and also making life simpler for the publisher.

Then, in 2009, we took another huge step forward. We had been long established as the software business program for publishers offering the most features for the lowest price. Now, we decided to remove any cost barriers at all by offering the program as freeware. Now, there's no longer any reason for any publisher, large or small, to try to get along with Publishers' Assistant software.

You can, if you like, purchase additional goods and services. Publishers' Assistant offers, for example, a Web design and hosting service that interfaces with our business software. You can still purchase the newest edition of Couplet for just $99 (or, if you sign up for an affordable maintenance agreement for a year, you'll receive Couplet at no extra charge.)

Without question, Publishers' Assistant has always been ahead of the curve in creating the best and cheapest business software for publisher. Now, once again, we have led the field, this time by making it cost-free.

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Support, User Help, and Upgrades:

The free version of Publishers' Assistant does not include personal user help. It is, however, easy to use, and there are many ways to find the information you need. At www.pubassist.com you'll find some great video tutorials, as well as articles about various features and how to use them. We also have a Yahoo list serve group, where users can exchange tips and ask questions of each other. There's also a Wiki, and a number of other sources of information. In short, like most major freeware programs, Publishers' Assistant has a substantial knowledge base.

If you do want personal help, you can receive it for a very reasonable charge. Access to unlimited user help is available for just $35 per month. What's more, if you subscribe to this for at least a year, you will receive a free upgrade to the networking Epic edition, and a copy of Couplet software at no extra cost.

If you do not have a maintenance agreement, but for any reason need personal help from our programmer's office, you can obtain it at a cost of $125 per hour. This may seem high compared to the low cost of a support contract, but reasonable for this level of expert service, and at the very least a fallback if you were, for any reason, to run into a serious problem such as a computer crash.

As for upgrades, they are always available free of charge. Even when you obtain just the free software, you will go through simple registration in exchange for code numbers to open up your copy for permanent use. We do not share this information, but it allows us to notify users of any potential bugs, any upgrades, etc.

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How to Order Publishers' Assistant:

The program is a simple download at: www.PubAssist.com. If for any reason you prefer to receive the installation program on a CD, we can provide that for a $25 charge. Other goods and services with charges will be listed on the site, with a convenient shopping cart.

If you have sales questions about any goods and services, feel free to use the same toll-free line we use for our book sales,1-800-310-8320. Note that this is different from the phone number for software help and technical information, which is 1-800-310-8716.