Last week I said to pick a conversion source and write it down. That was item two on the five-item agreement — one line, easy to skim past. This week I want to show you why that line matters more than most of the others.
Here's a scenario most wide publishers have never sat down and calculated. You earned £2,400 in UK sales last year, spread across a couple of distributors. That's what the dashboards said, in aggregate, across twelve months of reports. But when you add up what actually arrived in your USD bank account for those same earnings, the number is smaller. Not dramatically — maybe two or three hundred dollars over the year. Not enough to notice in any single month. Not enough to trigger a support ticket. But enough, when you finally look, to make you wonder how long it's been happening.
It's been happening the whole time. And it's not a mistake. It's three systems quietly disagreeing about what a pound is worth in dollars — and you paying the cost of that disagreement without ever seeing the invoice.
Three rates, none of them the same
Every international earning you receive passes through at least three currency conversions, and none of them use the same rate.
The distributor's rate. When IngramSpark or Findaway converts your UK earnings into the USD figure on your report, they use an exchange rate. Which rate? Good question. It might be the rate on the day the sale happened, the rate at the end of the reporting period, or an internal batch rate the distributor applies when they process payments. Most distributors don't tell you which rate they used, and you won't find it on the report. The number you see is the number after conversion, with the conversion itself invisible.
Your bank's rate. When the deposit arrives — whether the distributor sent it in GBP and your bank converted it, or the distributor converted it and your bank added its own margin on the incoming international transfer — your bank applies its own exchange rate. That rate includes a spread, which is the bank's quiet way of taking a cut without listing a fee. It might be half a percent. It might be two percent. It varies by bank, by day, and by transfer size. You'll never see a line item for it.
Your spreadsheet's rate. When you sit down to reconcile, you need a number to put in the "USD equivalent" column. So you open xe.com, or Google "GBP to USD," and you use whatever rate comes up that day. Maybe it's Tuesday. Maybe it's three weeks after the earnings period closed. It's probably not the same rate the distributor used, and it's definitely not the same rate your bank used.
Here's what that looks like on a single month. Say your distributor reports £200 in UK earnings. Their internal rate converts it to $251.40. Your bank, processing the deposit a week later at a slightly different rate with its spread, credits you $248.80. And you, opening xe.com the following Tuesday, record it in your spreadsheet as $252.10. Three numbers, three sources, same £200.
On one month, the difference is a few dollars. Across twelve months, across multiple distributors, across GBP and EUR and AUD — the compounding drift is real. For a publisher doing meaningful international sales, it can be three hundred, five hundred, even eight hundred dollars a year. Not stolen. Not miscalculated. Just lost in the space between three systems that were never designed to agree.
Why you've never noticed
The drift is almost perfectly designed to be invisible. In any single month, the discrepancy is small enough to look like rounding. Distributor dashboards show the post-conversion number without the rate, so there's nothing to compare against. Banks bury the FX margin inside the exchange rate rather than listing it as a separate fee, which means your bank statement looks clean even when it's costing you. And your spreadsheet — the one place where all these numbers come together — has no way to compare what you recorded against what was deposited, because those are two different numbers that never sit side by side.
You'd have to go looking for this. And until now, you probably haven't had a reason to.
Find your annual conversion cost
Here's the manual fix, and I want to be clear: this is genuinely worth doing even if you never change anything about how you handle currency. Knowing the number changes how you think about it.
Step 1: Pick one currency pair. GBP to USD is the most common for wide publishers, but use whichever pair represents your largest non-home-currency earnings. One pair at a time.
Step 2: Pull last year's distributor reports for any distributor that paid you in that currency. If IngramSpark and Findaway both report UK earnings, pull both. You want the full year.
Step 3: Total the foreign-currency earnings as the distributor reported them. Add up every GBP figure across the year. This is what your distributors said you earned in pounds.
Step 4: Total what actually hit your bank account for those same deposits. You need your bank statements, and you need to match the deposits to the distributor payments. It doesn't have to be exact to the penny. Get as close as you can.
Step 5: Subtract. The difference is your annual conversion cost for that currency pair. Not a rounding error — a real, recurring cost you're paying for the convenience of not thinking about it.
If the gap is twenty dollars, close the spreadsheet and move on with your life. But if it's two hundred, or three hundred, or more — and for many wide publishers it is — you have a decision to make.
The simplest change that recovers the most money: open a multi-currency account with a service like Wise. Receive your GBP earnings in GBP. Hold them. Convert when the rate is favorable, on your terms, at Wise's transparent rate instead of your bank's hidden spread. For many wide publishers, this single change — one account, one afternoon to set up — recovers enough over a year to pay for a nice dinner every quarter. Not life-changing money. But it's your money, and you should know it's leaving.
How Royaltally handles this part
I built Royaltally's currency handling because I got tired of being the third rate — the guy on xe.com on a Tuesday, guessing.
The system converts using daily rates from a consistent source and records the rate and date against every line. When you look at a statement in Royaltally, you can see exactly what conversion was applied, when, and to what amount. It won't eliminate your bank's spread on incoming deposits — that's between you and your bank — but it eliminates the spreadsheet layer entirely, and it makes the distributor's conversion visible so you can measure the gap.
Royaltally is in open beta right now. If you want to see what your international earnings look like with consistent, transparent conversion applied to every line, you can try it free with up to 3 titles at royaltally.com.
Your money, visible
The money you're losing to conversion drift isn't anyone's fault. It's a structural cost of publishing internationally, built into the way distributors report, banks process, and spreadsheets approximate. You can't fix what you can't see.
Whether you run the audit above and open a Wise account, or just start recording the actual rate you used each month so you have something to compare against next year — you now know where to look. That's the part that matters. The invisible cost only stays invisible until someone shows you where it hides.
Next week I'm writing about royalty statements — the document that turns your numbers into something your co-author, narrator, or royalty holder can actually trust. Because getting the numbers right is only half the job. The other half is proving it.