[AuthorX]

Create a 1 page report that details the royalties earned per book and provide that report to the other authors each month.

Create a spreadsheet that lists each payout and the date that you paid the other author royalties. This should match up exactly with the statement of your method of payment (credit card, bank statement). These will go on your Schedule C as an expense.

This is very simple and doesn't require an accountant. If you're not comfortable working with spreadsheets, you are either going to have to get a friend to help you or hire an accountant though. If you're operating as a sole proprietor you must report this stuff on your taxes.

Overall, it shouldn't take you anymore than 5-10 minutes per month to do this if you're organized. And as the others said, you should be publishing everything direct that you can. You probably want to invest in Vellum Unlimited rather than paying for file updates each time, and I personally would not work with a designer who did not provide me the PSD files for my book cover so you do not have to worry about paying for a text change.

 

[AuthorX]

I was wondering about this also with regards to multi-author box sets. I assume the person who organizes the box set is the one who administrates the sharing of royalties, but how does that work? Or what if someone wants their book removed from the set? Couldn't borrows with the book includied still be earning page reads?

Usually in a multi-author book set each author has committed to a contract for X amount of time before the book set is taken offline. So an author can't simply decide that they don't want to do be in the book set anymore.

The terms of the contract are usually pretty straightforward. When I've hosted paid booksets, I agreed to pay each author included in the bookset a certain amount for being included. I kept all the royalties for myself, and the other authors got their upfront payment and the exposure/free advertising for their book. Some other hosts split royalties and pay via paypal, but that's too much work. I wouldn't do that unless I was pushing a set for a bestseller list or something. If the bookset is a permafree, usually everyone will participate for free.