Schilling

Small publishers with a limited backlist and only a few royalty-based titles per year

• Community discussions suggest paid royalty platforms may not be cost-effective for low-volume publishers; spreadsheets and lightweight reporting may remain more practical.

Organizations whose procurement requires strong, public security attestations

• If policy requires publicly documented SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 and the vendor cannot provide documentation in a timely manner, consider vendors with a publicly documented trust center.

Buyers that only need a single narrow capability (for example, royalties only)

• A focused royalty product may be cheaper and faster to implement than a broader publishing lifecycle suite.

Organizations that require transparent list pricing for early-stage budgeting

• Schilling’s demo-led approach may complicate early-stage evaluation compared with vendors that publish starting prices.

Publicly observed limitations (from this research run)

• Pricing not listed publicly.
• Security certifications and enterprise security features not clearly documented publicly.
• Limited discoverability on major review platforms (G2/TrustRadius/Gartner Peer Insights) for Schilling-specific reviews.

Roadmap visibility

• No detailed public product roadmap with dates was found.

Scale limits

• No public benchmarks (volume of transactions, titles, users) were located.

Publishing-specific scope (not generic ERP)

• Schilling is presented as developed specifically for book publishing.

Royalty automation depth (as positioned by the vendor)

• The royalty product page describes support for complex models (tiered royalties, advances, minimum guarantees, deductions, returns) and workflow automation for settlement tasks.

Author relationship/portal emphasis

• The author portal is described around transparency and author collaboration, with reference to EU transparency expectations in vendor materials.

Caveat: validation gap

• Most unique selling point evidence located during this research run is vendor-published; independent reviews were limited or not found.

• “Because royalty calculation is quite complex and at the same time one of the most important financial transactions for a publisher, we chose Schilling because Schilling has the most efficient royalty solution in the market as far as we know” — Heidi Antonsen, CFO, Cappelen Damm. This is a vendor-published testimonial and should be treated as a customer statement rather than independent validation.

• “What worked initially on a smaller scale became, as we grew in authors and publications, like endlessly pushing a stone uphill.” — attributed to Gerd Johnsen, Editor in Chief at Res Publica.

• Ingestion of multi-channel sales sources (Shopify, Amazon Seller Central)
• Price sensitivity for smaller publishers
• Preference for simpler tools vs full enterprise suites

• claims to calculate payments substantially faster than with Excel
• claims to issue payments markedly faster than via manual methods

• These claimed outcomes are not accompanied by a disclosed methodology (baseline assumptions, sample size, measurement period, or definition of “manual methods”). Procurement teams should request:
  • Customer references with before/after process metrics
  • A measurable implementation timeline
  • Clarification on whether the measured speed improvements depend on specific integrations or data cleanliness

• Royalty operations are complex (many contracts, multi-author ISBNs, tiered royalties, advances, deductions)
• Multiple imprints/departments require shared visibility
• Spreadsheet-driven royalty settlement has become a bottleneck

• Publishing Lifecycle Management (planning, budgeting, scheduling, cross-department workflows)
• Contracts / Rights / Royalty management (royalty calculation, statement generation, rights tracking)
• Author Portal / relationship tooling (transparency for authors and agents)
• A newer UX/workflow concept branded “Schilling Waves,” designed to simplify interactions and update workflow patterns