What author royalty trackers do with your sales data

Because the connection is the part that can break, and it is the part that carries your sales and tax data. A tool that pulls from your store accounts has to stay connected to keep working, and your numbers end up wherever it processes them. A tool that reads a file you have already downloaded has nothing to reconnect and no account to keep signed in. Neither is automatically better. They fail in different places, and the difference is worth knowing before you pick one.

No. These are established products. All three of the tools that use a browser extension say plainly that they never take your store passwords: Book Report says it never asks for them, ScribeCount says it never sees or stores one, and Publisher Champ says it does not collect or store them. It is a trade rather than a flaw. The upside is real, though it varies by tool: ScribeCount says it collects new data every 15 minutes, including when your computer is off, and it processes that data on its own servers rather than on your machine. A file reader only knows what you have already downloaded. What you give up is that something has to stay connected to your store accounts for it to keep working.

Three of the five say it goes to them. Book Report’s own docs say the data is "processed and sent to our servers". ScribeCount says its data infrastructure is "hosted on Microsoft Azure", and it answers the question of why it cannot work locally on your own computer. Publisher Champ says that when an account is deleted, the associated data is "deleted from our database". Authorbase is the one that does not answer it: the vendor says where your passwords stay, but nothing on its site says where the imported sales data itself is kept. RoyaltyDesk goes the other way, because its maker ZK Publishing says its applications work fully offline and that your data never leaves your device. That is not a ranking and none of it is a flaw. It is the thing worth knowing before you hand a tool your numbers.

Authorbase is a native app for Windows and macOS. RoyaltyDesk is Windows, from the Microsoft Store, and you type each royalty in yourself rather than connecting anything. The other three are browser or web tools: Book Report is a Chrome, Firefox, or Safari extension, plus a web app; ScribeCount is a browser extension, plus a web dashboard; and Publisher Champ is a web app with iOS and Android access, a Chrome or Firefox extension, and a Mac menu bar app that reads your account over its API. That last one is worth reading twice, because running on your machine and keeping your data on your machine are not the same thing. Publisher Champ’s menu bar app reads your account over the internet, and Authorbase is a desktop app that still does not say where your imported sales data is kept.

If you track less than $1,000 a month in earnings, Book Report stays free after its 14 day trial, with no time limit, and that is hard to argue with. If you want many stores updated automatically, the connected tools do that today and a file reader does not. If you would rather nothing at all connected to your store accounts, that is the gap we are building for, and it is not finished yet.

Every quote was read from the vendor’s own page on September 23, 2026, and each row links to the page it came from. Two prices are missing on purpose: ScribeCount and RoyaltyDesk each publish more than one figure on their own pages, so rather than pick one we link you to the source. Vendors change pricing and mechanics, so check the source before you rely on anything here. If something has gone out of date, tell us through our support page and we will correct it.