Crealo bets on smarter royalty management as the industry evolves

A Royalty Management Software Built with publishers, not just for them

Crealo was built in close collaboration with the people who actually use it: editorial and rights teams at working publishing houses, who manage contracts, run royalty calculations, and field calls from authors asking where their statements are.

Built to handle the complexity of real publishing contracts

It is the reason Crealo handles the granular complexity of publishing contracts natively: 

• Escalating royalty rates
• Multi-currency advances
• Deductions and reserves against returns
• Distinct royalty rates per format (print, ebook, audiobook) 
• Split contracts (co-authors & agents)
• Joint accounting across a catalogue
• Subsidiary rights & third-party licences

Connects with the tools publishers already use

This royalty software for publishers integrates directly with the accounting and operational tools already in use across most publishing houses: SAP, NetSuite, Sage, QuickBooks, Amazon KDP,  DocuSign, among others.

Data synchronises across systems automatically, removing the manual re-entry that is one of the most persistent sources of errors and wasted time in royalty workflows.

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The full royalty cycle, automated

Crealo’s architecture covers the entire royalty lifecycle from the moment a sales file lands to the moment an author logs in to read their statement.

The Royalty Accounting Manager ingests sales data automatically, applies contractual terms, and generates accurate royalty reports in PDF that can be sent in bulk to authors. Publishers using Crealo report time spent on royalty reporting has been cut by 10. Accurate royalty statements are produced in minutes instead of weeks, with minimal effort.

The Contract Lifecycle Manager gives editorial and rights teams a single workspace to create, store, track and sign publishing contracts electronically from initial draft through to approval workflows and final signature. No more hunting through shared drives or email threads for the latest version of an agreement.

For houses active in foreign rights, the Rights Transfers Manager provides a consolidated view of all licensed foreign rights, with deadline tracking, incoming payment monitoring, and invoicing built in.

The Author Portal of Crealo gives authors a secure, self-service space to access royalty statements, contracts, and payment history independently. For publishers, it eliminates the back-and-forth of document chasing while projecting exactly the kind of modern, transparent image that authors increasingly expect.

Finally, The Analytics part of the platform allows teams to interrogate their revenues across multiple dimensions by country, format, author, channel or title, turning royalty data into a tool for informed decision-making.

Smooth Implementation 

Crealo has structured its team around a dedicated onboarding function, ensuring implementation is smooth and guided.

One of the most common objections to adopting new software in publishing is the implementation effort. Migrations drag on, data gets lost, and teams spend weeks trying to adapt to new workflows.

Crealo’s onboarding model is designed to eliminate that friction entirely. Publishers are fully operational in two months on average.

The process is straightforward: Crealo provides a structured data template, manages the import, and trains teams at go-live to ensure their full autonomy.

200 publishers already use Crealo

Crealo is already in active use at more than 200 publishing houses, among them some of the most operationally demanding houses in Europe.

Groupe Bayard publishes across eight countries, from Europe to North America and Asia. The group relies on Crealo to manage royalties across a broad and varied catalogue.

Groupe Auzou, a leading European children’s publisher, uses Crealo to manage the multi-currency, multi-territory complexity of co-edition at scale. Distributing its titles across 20 countries, the group handles dual revenue streams, combining author royalties with licensing royalties from partners.

Rosie & Wolfe, the independent house founded by bestselling author Joël Dicker (The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair), is built around an extensive portfolio of licensed foreign rights. Crealo automates the monthly collection of sales data without manual intervention, giving the team a clear, detailed picture of how each title performs: by channel, by country, at scale.

Those publishers manage hundreds of thousands of titles and complex contract hierarchies. Crealo is built to meet that scale.

But scalability works in both directions. Crealo’s tiered offering is designed to adapt to the size and needs of each house from independent publishers with growing catalogues to large publishers with complex operational requirements. The platform grows with its clients, and the plans reflect that.

A natural fit for the international market

Crealo was first developed in France, built in close collaboration with editorial and rights teams who shaped the platform around the real operational complexity of publishing contracts.

From that foundation, it has expanded steadily: the platform is now active in dozens of countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Switzerland and India.

Crealo’s multi-currency architecture, foreign-rights management capabilities and bilingual interface were designed for publishers who routinely work across territories tracking subsidiary rights, managing advances in multiple currencies, and issuing statements to rights holders around the world. 

Beyond the spreadsheet

The publishing industry has been slow to modernise its back-office operations. Royalty management has long been treated as an administrative burden rather than a strategic function.

That framing is shifting. As author relationships are a central priority for publishers, and as the commercial complexity of multi-format, multi-territory publishing continues to grow, the quality of royalty management matters more than it once did. Errors in statements damage trust. Delays create friction.

Crealo’s proposition is straightforward: a platform built specifically for publishing, capable of handling genuine complexity and fast to implement. For publishers still running royalties on systems that were never quite built for the job, the case for a smarter, fully integrated system has rarely been stronger.

To learn more or to arrange a conversation with the team, visit crealo.app/en or contact denise@crealo.app