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.

Few publishers will need to use all of the features of Publishers' Assistant. But because the program is designed specifically for publishers, it has the features that you are likely to want. 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.

Industry-specific programs are inherently 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. By comparison, you can buy a Publishers' Assistant program for between $495 and $2,245, including free user help and all upgrades for a year. After the year, all upgrades and user support are available for a modest fee, which varies depending on the version of the program. Despite the extraordinarily low cost, we believe the features of Publishers' Assistant are second to none.

With Publishers' Assistant, you get the full advantage of an industry-specific program at a small fraction of the traditional price. If you have a hard time believing that, please try the demo version and see for yourself. 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.

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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.

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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. Since that time, there has been no reason to pay tens of thousands of dollars for industry-specific business software. Everything you need is contained in Publishers' Assistant, at a fraction of the price of the competition.

Publishers' Assistant will grow with your business. If the program is used by only one person at a time, the price is $495 for the Sonnet (suitable for most smaller publishers) or $1,495 for the full-featured, industrial-strength Lyric. If you grow to the point where you need networking, you can upgrade to that at any time for an additional $750. The price includes user help and all upgrades for a year. After the year, you can decide whether you want to continue a modest-priced maintenance agreement, to continue to receive all upgrades and user help with no additional cost.

The producers of the expensive programs make their biggest money by customizing the programs to meet the specific needs of users. Publishers' Assistant anticipates the needs of most users, making customization unnecessary in most cases. However, Publishers' Assistant is also the easiest program in its class to customize, if you want features or reports specifically designed for your business. You don't even have to hire our programmers to do it. We put enough of the coding in an accessible form so that you can hire a local computer whiz—anybody with a working knowledge of FoxPro or other dBase-type programs. Or, if you prefer, you can hire our programmer to customize for you, at a cost of $120 per hour.

We've come a long way since introducing the program in 1989. But the guiding principles have stayed the same. (1) The program has to meet the wide-ranging needs of small-to-intermediate size (or larger) book publishers. (2) It has to be easy to use. (3) It has to be affordable. Those principles will continue to guide every new release and upgrade.

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Support, User Help, and Upgrades:

When you purchase the live program, you automatically qualify for our maintenance agreement for a full year. This means that you qualify for free user help, either on our toll-free help line or by e-mail, and that you may receive any upgrade issued during the year at no extra cost.

After the year, you can renew your maintenance agreement at any time. The cost of renewal, if you choose the Sonnet or Lyric edition, is $200 per year. For the Epic edition, the cost is $350 per year. If you prefer to pay monthly, you may do so by authorizing us to automatically deduct the fee from your credit card. The fee is $18 per month for Sonnet or Lyric, $30 per month for Epic. If you choose the monthly payment, the deductions will continue until or unless you decide to cancel. If you have let the maintenance agreement lapse, then renew to receive an upgrade or user help for a specific problem, we will expect you to keep it active for at least a year.

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How to Order Publishers' Assistant:

You should start with the demo, which is the full program plus manual, but limited to 24 uses. You can download the demo (including manual) free of charge by going to our other site: www.PubAssist.com and clicking on the "Downloads" tab. Or, if you prefer, you can obtain a CD Rom installation disk for $25. Once you've tried the demo, you can turn it into a live program at any time by entering code number that we supply upon payment. Again, if you prefer to avoid spending $25 on a CD, you may download the program and the manual at www.PubAssist.com.

Feel free to use our toll-free 800 number at any time to call in an order. Note that toll-free order number is different from the toll-free "help" number. For orders, call 1-800-310-8320, but for help in using the software, you should call 1-800-310-8716. If you order by sending a check in the mail, use the same address as for book orders: Upper Access, Inc., 87 Upper Access Road, Hinesburg, VT 05461. Or to order on line, click here to go to our order page.