If you publish wide, you've almost certainly had this moment. You download a report — from a smaller store, a regional distributor, an aggregator you only use for one series, or one of the big names that quietly changed its export last month — you feed it into whatever you use to make sense of your money, and it just… stops. "Unrecognised format." A column that used to be there isn't. And you're back to the exact thing you were trying to escape: retyping numbers by hand, praying you don't fat-finger a decimal.
I want to say the thing I always say, because it's true: you're not doing anything wrong. There are dozens of ways to sell a book and at least as many ways to report the money that comes back. No tool on earth ships a built-in reader for every distributor, in every country, in every format they'll use this year and change next year. The long tail of publishing income is genuinely, structurally messy. It is not you.
Let's talk about how to handle it anyway.
Why this keeps happening
The handful of distributors most of us lean on — KDP, ACX, Findaway, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital — are reasonably stable. A good importer can learn their formats and keep up. The trouble is everything else, and "everything else" is where wide publishers increasingly live.
You pick up a new audiobook aggregator for one title. A foreign publisher pays you in a spreadsheet that looks nothing like the others. A subscription platform sends a CSV with the columns in a slightly different order every quarter. Or one of the big ones reorganises its export — moves a column, renames a header, drops a blank row at the top — and overnight the file you've imported cleanly for two years throws an error. (If you read last week's post about distributors changing their formats, consider this the sequel.)
Each of these is small. Together, they're the reason a lot of publishers still keep one ugly, fragile spreadsheet that nothing else is allowed to touch.
The shape of the manual fix
Here's a way to handle unknown and changing formats by hand that's far more durable than rebuilding your spreadsheet every time something moves. The trick is to separate the distributor's format from your format, and keep a tiny translation between the two.
Decide on your own standard columns, once. These are the only things you actually need to know about any earning: the title, the ISBN or product ID, the units, the amount, the currency, the period it covers, and the sales channel. Seven columns. Write them across the top of a clean tab and call it "Standard."
For each distributor, keep a one-line mapping. On a separate "Map" tab, write down, for that distributor, which of their headers feeds each of your standard columns. "Their 'Net Royalty' is my Amount. Their 'Sale Month' is my Period. Their 'Marketplace' is my Channel." That mapping is the whole asset, and it's five minutes to write the first time.
When a report arrives, paste it in and apply the mapping. Pull each of your standard columns from the distributor columns named in the map. Now the messy report is in your clean shape, and you can total it, convert it, and file it like everything else.
When a format changes, you fix the map — not the spreadsheet. This is the entire point. A distributor renames "Net Royalty" to "Publisher Earnings"? You change one cell on the Map tab. Everything downstream keeps working. You've turned a panic into a thirty-second edit.
This genuinely works, and some publishers will run it happily for years. Use it. Get your rhythm.
Where it still costs you
I'll be honest about the limits, because they're the same limits as every manual system. You're still pasting a report every month and eyeballing the mapping. You're still converting currencies yourself. You're still matching each line to the right title in your catalog — and if you pay anyone a royalty share, you're still working out their cut by hand. The mapping idea saves you from re-breaking your spreadsheet; it doesn't save you from the monthly grind.
Which brings me to the part I'm genuinely excited to tell you about.
What I built (and a small birthday confession)
I'm writing this on my 55th birthday, and I gave myself the present I've wanted since I started doing this work: Royaltally can now read a report from any distributor — including ones it has never seen, and ones that change their format after you've started using them.
It works exactly like the mapping idea above, except Royaltally does the tedious parts. You upload any CSV or spreadsheet. It shows you the file's columns and asks you to point each one at the right field — which column is the title, which is the money, which is the date. As you do, it shows a live preview with a running total, so you can check it against your report's own summary before anything is imported. When it looks right, you save that mapping as a template and give it a name — "Kobo," say, or "StreetLib."
Then the good part: next month, when you upload that distributor's file again, Royaltally recognises the columns and applies your template automatically. No mapping, no error, one click — even though we never wrote a single line of code for that distributor.
It quietly handles the things that usually break a spreadsheet, too: a title row sitting above the real headers, dollar signs and commas inside the amounts, a refund in parentheses, a date in some format only that distributor uses, columns you don't care about. And because the whole thing is just a saved mapping, it works for a distributor that doesn't exist yet, and it absorbs a format change the same way the manual version does — you adjust the mapping once and carry on. From there, every earning flows into the same place as the rest: matched to your titles, converted, ready for statements.
I built it because I'm a working indie publisher and narrator, and I was tired of one distributor's odd little CSV being the reason I couldn't fully trust my own totals. It's on every plan, including the free one — mapping your own reports isn't something I was ever going to put behind a paywall.
Either way, you're covered
If you'd rather keep the normalizer spreadsheet, do — it's a real solution and it'll serve you well. And if you'd like a file you've never seen before to simply import, come try it; you can map your first three titles' worth of distributors for free.
Here's the thing I most want you to take from this, though: a format you don't recognise is no longer a reason to stop. You can always map it. You've got this — and next month, that weird little report is just one more line in your total.