Author royalties: from contract to payout, a setup that works

Royalties are at once the most sensitive and the most postponed subject in the publisher-author relationship. Sensitive, because they are the direct price of labor; postponed, because everyone finds the conversation a little uncomfortable. The result: contracts signed in haste, accounts done by hand at year’s end, and question marks accumulating on both sides.

A properly built royalty arrangement stands on three legs: a legally sound contract, a clearly defined calculation base, and transparent payout tracking. Let’s take them in order.

This post is for information only; always prepare your contracts together with a lawyer.

Leg 1: The contract — the explicit requirements of FSEK

The legal ground of the royalty relationship in Türkiye is FSEK (the Turkish copyright act, Law No. 5846), and two of its requirements are not even up for negotiation:

Written form, with the rights listed one by one. Under Article 52 of FSEK, contracts concerning economic rights must be in writing, and the rights transferred must be itemized individually. Case law is strict on this: blanket phrases like “I transfer all my rights” are not deemed sufficient; rights such as reproduction, distribution, adaptation, performance, and communication to the public must each be named in the contract. Failure to observe this form can render the contract invalid — meaning a sloppy contract does not protect the publisher.

Moral rights cannot be transferred. Moral rights — the author’s right to attribution, the right to forbid alterations to the work — can be neither sold nor waived; a contract can only concern economic rights.

Also needing clarity in the contract: the limits of term and territory, the formats covered (print, ebook, audio — each named separately), reprint terms, the accounting period and payment schedule, and the fate of the rights when the contract ends.

Leg 2: Rate and base — the real argument is what it’s a percentage of

The question “what should the royalty rate be?” has no official answer; this is entirely the domain of freedom of contract. In industry practice, a range of 5–12% of the cover price is widely accepted for book royalties; around 8% is the commonly quoted average. The rate varies with the author’s profile, the type of work, and expected sales.

But the secret is not in the rate — it is in the base. Two contracts at 10% can produce entirely different incomes:

• On gross (cover/list price): on a 100 TL book, 10 TL per sale. Simple, predictable, transparent in the author’s favor.
• On net receipts: a percentage of what remains after distribution discounts, returns, and certain costs are deducted. It balances the publisher’s risk — but if the definition of “net” is not spelled out in the contract word for word, a dispute is guaranteed.

Whichever base is chosen, one rule: the definition should sit in the contract together with a worked example. “Net sales receipts consist of these items, these are deducted, returns are offset in this period” — every contract lacking that paragraph is the draft of a future formal notice.

One special case in academic publishing deserves mention: some university presses give printed copies instead of (or alongside) royalties, or provide for no royalty on open-access publications. These are legitimate models — as long as the contract says so explicitly.

Leg 3: The payout — continuous visibility, not a year-end surprise

The contract is sound, the base is clear; now to how the accounting runs. The traditional routine is familiar: the year ends, sales reports are gathered, returns are deducted, the math is done in Excel, a summary goes to the author. This routine has two structural flaws: delay (the author learns their income months later) and opacity (only the publisher sees the sales data the account rests on; trust is built by compulsion, not by choice).

The modern construction is different: the moment a sale happens, the royalty finds its way into the account. In Nasirus the royalty record comes into being with the sale, of its own accord; returns are reflected in the account with the same care. At period’s end there is no job called “doing the accounts”; what remains is pulling the report of the records that built up through the period. And the summary presented to the author is record-based, not estimated.

There is a further payoff on the contract side: when the contract and the account live under the same roof, the rate and terms are never carried into the calculation by hand; if the terms change, the account follows.

Special cases: multiple authors, translations, digital

Three situations that break the standard construction deserve separate thought at the contract stage.

Multi-author works and edited volumes. In a two-author book, the split must be written plainly into the contract — the assumption of “half and half” protects nobody in a dispute over contribution. In an edited volume the model differs from the outset: do chapter authors get royalties, a one-time fee, or (as is common in academic collections) copies? How is the volume editor’s share structured? In a twenty-chapter book, if these questions are not settled before contracting, they come back after publication as twenty separate email threads.

Translated works. There are three parties at the table: the source rights-holder (usually wanting an advance plus a rate), the translator (who holds rights of their own under FSEK as the author of a derivative work), and the publisher. Remember that the translator’s contract is subject to the same requirements of written form and individually itemized rights.

Digital sales. For ebooks, the components of “net receipts” differ from print — there is no printing cost, but there may be platform commissions. Defining a separate rate or a separate base for digital in the contract protects both sides’ expectations. For bundle sales (print + digital), which amount enters the royalty base must be written down as well.

The common denominator, again: the earlier the exception is written, the later the account is disputed.

Three questions for your own setup

1. Do your contracts satisfy FSEK Article 52’s “rights itemized individually” requirement? (If you have old-style blanket contracts, set a renewal schedule with your lawyer.)
2. Is the definition of your royalty base written into the contract, worked example included?
3. If an author called today, in how many minutes could you tell them their current payout balance?

If the answer to the third is “it will have to wait for year-end,” your setup may be legal, but it is not modern. To see the payout screen of the accounting and royalties module, book a demo — if you like, bring the contract terms of one of your books, and we’ll look together at how the account takes shape.