This article was extracted from the author newsletter we sent in June 2024

We have basically always paid royalties on the first day of the month, regardless of whether that fell on a weekend, a statutory holiday, or both. Not only did this mean that we would be sending royalties on the weekend, it also meant that if anything went wrong, there would basically be none of our developers around until the following Monday to help us resolve it.

This was brittle, and overly reliant on automation. Since we were both running the code to determine what was payable and actually sending the payments on the first day of the month, if there were any minor issues, we’d feel very rushed when resolving them. It also meant that if any more complex issue happened, then we would have added stress resolving it, since we’d be getting a bunch of inbound “where are the royalties” emails from authors who had grown to expect the royalties on the first of the month, rain or shine.

So, the way we’ve handled royalties over the years is not a house I want to live in anymore.

The solution is simple:

Going forward, all royalties will be paid on the 7th day of every month, unless that day is on a weekend or statutory holiday. In that case, the royalties will be paid on the closest date beforehand (typically the 5th or 6th).

The timing of this change is no accident; it’s because of the issue we had at the beginning of June.

We had an issue with reconciling some of the May 2024 royalty payments, which led to an incorrect automated email being sent out to some of our authors on June 1, and which led to our delaying the June royalty payments until June 6. You can find a detailed description of what happened in this help center article, and a discussion in this author forum post.

This is all fully resolved. However, if we had previously changed the royalty payment date to the 7th of the month, it would have been a lot less stressful.

By the way, from a Terms of Service perspective, nothing has changed. In terms of when we actually need to pay royalties, section 11.2.5 of our Terms of Service says that we’ll get it done in the first 25 days (!) of the month. However, hardly anyone reads the Terms of Service on Leanpub or anywhere else; instead, they look at your behaviour. And our behaviour was to always pay royalties on the first day of the month. So, now it will be on the 7th, unless on a weekend or holiday, in which case it will be sooner. This will probably cause some confusion for the first couple of months, but then pretty soon everyone will expect their royalties on the 7th, and things will be fine again.

So, here are the payment dates for the rest of 2024: