Last week I wrote about what happens when a distributor changes their report format — the quiet disruption that breaks your spreadsheet without warning. This week I want to talk about something much bigger and much harder: the moment you become responsible for someone else's entire publishing business.
Maybe a family member passed away and you're the one who ended up with the catalog. Maybe a business partner left and the titles are yours now. Maybe you bought a small press because you saw potential in the backlist and figured you'd sort out the details later. Whatever the path, you're here now — sitting in front of a laptop, looking at a set of titles that are actively earning royalties across distributors you've never logged into, with royalty holders who are owed money you haven't calculated, and a "system" that consists of a spreadsheet you can't fully decipher, a folder of downloaded CSVs with names like report_final_v3_ACTUAL.xlsx, and a login list that may or may not be current.
I want to say something before we get into the practical stuff, because I think it matters: if you're in this situation because someone died, I'm sorry. The last thing you need right now is a complicated financial puzzle. And if you're in this situation for any other reason — a partnership that ended, a business you acquired, a favor you agreed to — the overwhelm is just as real, even if the circumstances are different. You didn't choose this complexity. But here it is, and you deserve a clear place to start.
So let's find one.
Why this is different from starting fresh
Most of what you'll find online about publishing finances assumes you're building from scratch — setting up your first spreadsheet, pulling your first reports, learning how each distributor works at your own pace. That's not where you are. You're inheriting a system mid-stream. Money is already flowing. People may already be waiting for payments. Reports have been accumulating in an inbox or a downloads folder, and you don't know which ones matter.
The urgency is different. You can't take six months to learn the ropes, because royalty holders are owed money now — or soon — and the silence from your end is already becoming a question in their minds. This isn't about building a perfect system. It's about triage: figuring out what you've actually inherited, in order of urgency, so the most important things get handled first.
Here are the five steps, in the order that matters.
Step 1: Find the distributor accounts
Before anything else, you need to know where the money comes from. Which distributors was the previous owner using? KDP? IngramSpark? ACX? Findaway? Draft2Digital? Others?
Look for logins — a password manager, a saved document, a notebook. Check bank statements for deposit descriptions that match distributor names. Look through email for account confirmations, payment notifications, or report-ready alerts. Check browser bookmarks and saved passwords. If the previous owner had a virtual assistant or accountant, they may know.
You need the complete list. If you miss a distributor, money accumulates somewhere you can't see — and eventually, the distributor may close the account or hold the funds. This step isn't glamorous, but it's the foundation for everything else.
Step 2: Identify who's owed money
This is the most urgent question, because real people are waiting.
Are there royalty holders? Co-authors, narrators, editors on profit share, agents, translators? Look for contracts, written agreements, email threads — anything that establishes who gets what percentage on which titles. Check the previous owner's email for payment confirmations or statements they sent. Look in the spreadsheet for tabs or columns that reference names or percentages.
You may not find clean documentation. That's common and it's not your fault. If agreements were informal, reach out to the people involved directly. Most royalty holders will be patient and helpful if you're honest about the situation — "I've taken over this catalog, I'm getting organized, and I want to make sure you're paid correctly." That conversation is far better than silence.
Once you know who's owed, the co-author split post and the royalty statement post I wrote earlier in this series will help you structure the ongoing relationship. But right now, your job is just the list: who, what percentage, on which titles.
Step 3: Establish the current state
For each distributor you identified in step 1, log in and download the most recent available reports. Don't reconcile anything yet. Don't try to match numbers across distributors or figure out what the previous owner already accounted for. Just get the data.
You're answering one question: what's earning and what isn't? Some titles may be producing meaningful income. Others may have gone dormant. You need the snapshot before you can make any decisions about what to prioritize.
If you're not sure how to pull reports from a particular distributor, the rhythm I described in the very first post in this series — one day, all the reports, everything in one folder — is a good model. You're doing a version of that, just for the first time and with someone else's accounts.
Step 4: Look for outstanding obligations
This is the step most people skip because it's uncomfortable, and it's the one that can cost you the most.
Did the previous owner pay advances against future royalties? Are there agreements with specific payment schedules — quarterly statements due on certain dates, for example? Did they make commitments to royalty holders that you now need to honor?
Check for advance agreements especially. If a narrator was paid $2,000 upfront against future royalties and the advance hasn't earned out yet, that affects what you owe and when. The advance tracking post from a few weeks ago walks through the earn-out math in detail — you'll want that once you know whether any open advances exist.
Also look for the basics: when were royalty holders last paid? Is anyone overdue? If the previous owner's system went quiet during the transition, there may be a period where royalties accumulated but nobody received a statement or a payment. Addressing that proactively — even if the numbers aren't perfect yet — goes a long way toward preserving trust.
Step 5: Set up your own system
Once you've completed steps 1 through 4, you know what you're working with: the distributors, the royalty holders, the current earnings, and the obligations. Now you need a system — your system, not the previous owner's.
This is important: don't try to continue the old spreadsheet. You'll inherit errors you can't see, formulas you don't understand, and assumptions that may not have been correct in the first place. Start clean. Whether you build a new spreadsheet using the techniques from earlier posts in this series, or use something else entirely, the foundation should be yours. You need to understand every number in it, because you're the one who'll be answering questions from royalty holders when they arrive.
Take the reports you downloaded in step 3, the royalty holder list from step 2, and the obligations from step 4, and build forward from there. It will feel slow. It's still faster than trying to reverse-engineer someone else's logic.
How Royaltally handles this part
I built Royaltally because I know what it's like to stare at a pile of reports and not know where the money is. The system is particularly useful in this kind of situation: you upload the historical reports you gathered in step 3, and Royaltally reads them, parses the formats — even when every distributor structures theirs differently — matches earnings to titles, converts currencies, and gives you a clean picture of what's been earned, what's owed, and where things stand. No reconstructing someone else's spreadsheet logic. No guessing which column maps to what.
Royaltally is in open beta right now. You can start with up to 3 titles for free at royaltally.com. If you're in the middle of inheriting a catalog and want a clean starting point, it might save you a few very long afternoons.
You didn't choose this, but you can handle it
The person dealing with an inherited publishing catalog is almost never the person who chose to be in publishing. They're doing this because circumstances put it in front of them — and the financial complexity of a multi-distributor, multi-format, multi-royalty-holder catalog is genuinely one of the hardest things in indie publishing to untangle from the outside.
The five steps above won't solve everything. But they'll replace "I have no idea where to start" with a clear first week of work. Find the accounts. Find the people. Get the snapshot. Check for obligations. Build your own system. That's the order. Everything else can wait until those five things are done.
Give yourself patience. The people around you — the royalty holders, the collaborators, the family members — deserve patience too. And if you need to come back to this post next week and work through the steps one at a time, that's exactly what it's here for.
Next week: it's the end of the quarter and statement week is looming. If you're already dreading it, that post is for you.