To get started, PubGizmo needs to be populated with your data: your authors, titles, editions, and contracts.

While you can manually enter this data, importing is much quicker, plus more accurate.

PubGizmo accepts data in Excel. You may have your data in Excel already, or can export it – most software will export Excel, or at least tab- or comma-delimited format, which are easily converted by opening them in Excel and using Save As…

You will prepare four Excel sheets:

  1. Contacts (people)
  2. Titles
  3. Editions
  4. Contracts

The sheets must be formatted correctly for a successful import. Click here to download pre-formated Excel sheets to use as a model or template for organizing your data. You can paste your data into these sheets, or you can reorganize existing sheets so they match this format.

Rules

  1. do not change the column order
  2. data used to match must exactly match; for example, the Title column on the Editions sheet must perfectly match the Title as it appears on the Titles sheet; computers are dumb and unwaveringly literal. To match correctly, the following column data must be consistent:
    • Author Name
    • Title
    • Organization Name
  3. use date format YYYY-DD-YY

While the sheets are generally self-explanatory, here are a few notes:

Contacts

  • Organization: enter only if this is relevant to the Contact’s data; for example, if this Contact is a literary agent, the name of their affiliated Literary Agency should go here; PubGizmo will create both the Contact record and the the Organization record, plus will tie them together
  • Deceased: enter “1” if this contact is deceased; also, fill in one or both of the following, if applicable:
    • Estate Contact: the name of the Contact (person) who manages the estate, or acts as executor or beneficiary
    • Estate Organization: if the estate is managed by an organization, enter it here.

Editions

  • ISBN: with or without dashes is fine
  • Edition Type: must be one of the following, and match exactly:
    • Hardcover
    • Paperback
    • ePub
    • PDF
    • MOBI
    • Audiobook
  • If you have books in other formats, you can input these in the Edition Type column, but please also include a note with a list of these, which indicates the name of the Edition Type and the Royalty Group it belongs to. Royalty Groups include:
    • Print
    • Electronic
    • Audio
  • Units Sold to Last Statement: royalty is based on number of books sold, so any quantities that do not come from sales sheet data must be entered/imported manually; fill this in only if both of the following are true:
    1. applicable contract includes an escalation clause
    2. you are not going to import previous sales data.

Contracts

  • for rows C, D, E, and F (Literary Agency, Literary Agent, Contract Date, Advance), you need not enter repeating data, i.e., if the Advance applies to all subsequent editions, you need only enter it in the first row for that particular contract
  • Region: can be World, Canada, United States; let us know if you have clauses that cover other regions
  • Escalation: enter 0 or leave blank for no escalation clause; enter 1 (one) if this clause is determined by escalation
  • follow the model to enter each tier of the escalation clause, if applicable

When you are done, submit the sheets by email. We will import them and provide a report if problems prevented something from importing.

You will have to perform a bit of work on your data after import. Excel cannot represent everything the way the database in PubGizmo can (otherwise you wouldn’t need PubGizmo).

For post-processing, let us know if there’s an “apply to everything” update your data needs. We can do this much quicker than you can, through manual methods.

Sales Data

PubGizmo is designed to allow you to easily import sales data, either individual sales, or aggregated. You can find more info on importing sales data here.

You can import sales sheets for previous years, if you have them. So for example if you have all your Ingram sheets from 2021, you will be able to import these – PubGizmo uses the Invoice Date (or equivalent) column on the sheet to determine what year to apply the sales to, and compute that royalty.