PubAssist Features
Since these pages are intended to encourage our user base to participate, it makes sense to talk here about the future of Publishers' Assistant, and how it fits into your overall IT strategy.
Overview
If you are here, you probably aleady know that Publishers' Assistant, at its heart, is an accounting system. Our claim to fame is that our accounting system has been developed with an intimate understanding of the publishing industry. We understand things like royalties, selling on consignment, and working with distributors. This understanding allows us to bundle accounting transactions in ways that make you more productive! For example, royalties are posted automatically with every sale and/or customer payment you enter. You can move inventory to your distributors location with the ease of entering an invoice. Then you can sell inventory out of that distributor's location. But PubAssist is more than just accounting.
Your job as a publisher is to get the word out about your books. In doing so, you probably have a web site, and you have a need to communicate information about your books to several major trading partners, like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor, Ingram, etc. Increasingly, these major buyers are looking for ways to talk to their suppliers electronically. When you look at the volume of books that these folks deal with, it's no wonder that they have to automate the process of offering books as much as possible. That's why we developed Couplet.
Couplet is your one-stop solution for maintaining all relevant marketing information about your titles. It works with the Publishers' Assistant database, so you don't have to start from scratch. Couplet supports the ONIX standard, which is the format for title information that many of these major buyers can understand. Support for EDI transactions is also underway, so you can receive and acknowledge order information with large buyers electronically.
The same features that allow you to communicate with your trading partners, allow you to keep your web site up to date. With a few clicks of your mouse, Couplet can send your title information directly to PubAssist Web Services. PubAssist Web Services is an e-commerce solution that will also feed your web orders back to Publishers' Assistant, so you don't have to manually, reenter those orders.
These are all very powerful features that are offered at a price that is within reach for most independent publishers. Supporting independent publishers is not just a market for us. It's a mission. These pages are intended to allow you to participate in shaping future development.
List of pages in this category:
Below, you will find more detailed pages concerning the features of Publishers' Assistant. Please feel free to add to this list and help to create a vision that will make you more productive.