8. Managing Your Editorial Costs

As your project moves throughout the Editorial process, you will likely be making decisions that will affect the project's cost and potential revenue. The Editorial module has three tabs that can help you with this process - the Costs tab, the Sales Forecast tab, and the Profit & Loss tab. By building out information in the Costs and Sales Forecasts tab, you will be able to generate a comprehensive Profit & Loss report that will help you determine the financial viability of your projects and adjust your workflow where needed. 

The Costs Tab 

This tab allows you to create an overview of the various costs that you expect to be involved with your project. When opening the tab for the first time, you will notice that is has been automatically populated with the default Costs schedule that you configured earlier. Remember that this schedule sits within the Production module, but can be used across both Editorial and Production. 

From here, you can start filling out the details of what you expect your project to cost. This information will automatically populate the Profit & Loss tab. 

The Cost Calculator is a function that allows you to determine either the overall cost of your manuscript, or the cost per page, depending on which information you choose to input first. 

There are also fields available for you to fill in your Fixed Costs, Marketing Costs, Number of Words and Avg. Words per Page. Note that these fields are not mandatory for the Costs tab to function. 

You will also notice that there are two further sub-tabs on this page:

• Advances and Royalties: this is where you can fill out information regarding the advances and royalties you expect for your project. This is intended for rough P&L estimation; your royalties can be recorded in much more detail with Stison's Royalties Manager.
• Free Copies and Wastage: allows you to fill in the number of free copies you are planning to give away and the anticipated wastage.

The Sales Forecasts Tab

In order to determine the viability of your project, and build a P&L, you will need to predict the expected sales. The Sales Forecast tab is where you can start building out information regarding potential sales for your project, and it will all feed into the Profit and Loss report in the next tab. 

When you open this tab, you will notice that there are three sub-tabs for you to navigate: 

The first is the Sales Forecasts sub-tab. Here, you can fill out information surrounding your predicted sales. You have the option to enter this information at the retailer, region or sales type level. You may include all 3 categories, or none. Note that your retailers are configured in Organisation Admin. 

You can use the further two sub-tabs to fill out information regarding any Grants you may have funding the project, and your prospective RRPs. For the latter, we recommend starting with the base line retail price of your home market.

The Profit & Loss Tab 

The information that you have filled in the previous two tabs will be used to populate the Profit & Loss tab, as shown below: 

This report is intended to be a clear and comprehensive overview of the financial viability of your project, and will be updated as you update information in both the Costs and the Sales Forecasts tabs. The report can be printed by clicking the button in the red circle in the image above. 

The time symbol, also contained in the red circle, will show you a history of your Profit & Loss information so that you can keep a record of how the costs and revenue information related to your project have changed over time.