When reviewing the Consonance features list, keep in mind that a licence for Consonance is a licence for every feature it offers.
There are no siloed pay-to-play areas for you to be upsold on, no restrictions on what you use, and no search for which module contains which functionality. We spend zero time wondering whether different modules deserve different functionalities and cost – we deliver a complete, coherent, fully featured, truly seamless publishing system, to everyone.
So if you want to store page trim sizes, you do not have to upgrade anyone's licence for a full production module, and if you want to write a report you do not need a separate licence for a report-writing module. You do not have to log out of a marketing module to log in to an editorial module to check some details there, then log back into the marketing module to add copy.
If you want to define which users will adopt which roles for each work, or if they want to keep a few reminders in the system to do something two weeks before a book's publication date, you are not committed to licensing and implementing a separate programme management module for them. But if the whole editorial team is going to manage their to-do lists, they do not need licence upgrades.
Consonance is not going to tell you where the boundaries on all of your job roles are.
Of course, you do not have to use everything (options can be hidden), and it still saves you money if your production team prefer to keep their work in spreadsheets so they do not need Consonance licences. Perhaps export a spreadsheet of forthcoming product details for their use every week? It's up to you.
Insights
The most powerful reporting capability – baked in
Search across Consonance, choose the type of records you want to display, then act on the results.
Not a module. Reporting is baked into the heart of Consonance, removing the need for integration projects, technical complexity, and additional cost. APIs are great: not needing APIs is greater.
Reports are nameable, saveable and duplicatable.
A very wide range of data within Consonance can be searched, including works, products, contributors, series, prices, marketing texts, dates and more.
Reports can display various lists of metadata, rights deals, to-dos and so on (which can be copied to clipboard and pasted elsewhere), download CSV data in bulk, download data in columns defined by your custom reports, or show summaries of data. Plus you can perform batch actions on the results to update / export / otherwise manage them: no additional bulk-edit app required, unlike in other systems.
Intuitive interface means anyone can build reports: no training required.
1) This report searches for children's works, without an interest age, and displays a list of products.
2) This is the same search, now drilling through to display a list of to-dos for the products that match.
3) This is the same search, but now I am choosing a batch action to perform on the results.
Feel your way through the system: from various pages, use Explore buttons to set up a report and explore further into your data.
Insights
Discover the patterns in your data
Pulling data from across the whole of Consonance reveals patterns that help you understand your business, better.
Sales analyses at company / series / work / product / channel / format levels; royalties at work level; top tens by series, author and overall.
Season-level insights: In-house work classifications, workflow, bibliographic, contributors, ONIX and
failed and blocked check results.
Metadata and royalty checks.
Extract data just the way you need it, in custom reports.
Sales analysis.
More sales analysis.
Series-level sales analysis.
Insights into data at the season level.
Drill down into metadata check results.
Build your own reports from hundreds of pieces of data.
Metadata
Consonance improves your metadata, then sends it widely and completely.
Left: a marketing text that only applies to audio. Right top: the default way to enter prices – one price per product per currency. Right bottom: when pricing needs to be more complex, drilldown into advanced edit where you add dates, tax overrides, supplier configurations etc for a single price.
Simplicity by default; powerful overrides when you need them.
Consonance's valid data architecture mean you add data once – you don't create "mirror" fields, or copy data from one level to another, or any of the other oddities we've seen in other systems. Example: you add a review text at the work level, and by default it applies to all products on that work – audio download, paperback, epub, large print, the lot. If the review only applies to audio, however, you uncheck the links to the other products. Same with prices: by default, enter one price per product per currency, but when you need to set dates or supplier specific overrides, the ability to override the details is a click away. (Not to mention our automatic Apple price rounding, or automatic versioned customer currency price creation... there is endless possible complexity in publishing, but Consonance makes it manageable.)
Industry-leading guidance.
We provide a personal service: through the Consonance app, and also through direct advice and configuration. Expert, dedicated support, including tailored development, is always a click away for every person on your team. For example, Consonance presents industry advice on Thema, BIC and BISAC codes at the right time, in the right place, so you get the sales boost of well-classified books. Benefit from the wisdom acquired through years of working with the world's best publishers; no need to reinvent the wheel.
Keep the whole team informed about metadata updates and changes.
Consonance is a comprehensive publishing management system, with workflow tools closely integrated with metadata, rights, royalties and production capabilities. We appreciate that Consonance is one player in your overall systems landscape, so, for example, discussions integrate with email and to-dos integrate with your calendaring system.
One version of the truth, everywhere:
No departmental silos: assets uploaded by the production team seamlessly appear on the metadata page.
Discussions, head contract, permissions, rights, production, tracked copies for peer review and PR, POD and reprint set ups – they all sit under their respective work.
Your data in one place, up-to-date and accessible, wherever you are.
Consonance's usability means any authorised member of your team can update data as soon as it changes. And by empowering the publishing team to enter and export data to ever increasing standards of timeliness, completion, effectiveness and accuracy, your books are more discoverable and appealing, and sell more at higher prices.
Baked in support for all formats, from audio and digital to articles, multi-part products and non-book products.
Work derivations and original works supported and properly included in ONIX.
A myriad of identifiers supported, including ISBN-10 and ISBN-13s, ISSNs, DOIs, ISNIs, standard retail SKUs, GTINs, Ringgold, D&B, ORCiD, ISNIs, DOIs and multiple in-house or legacy IDs.
Contact data sits alongside product data: professional affiliations, qualifications, bios and highly structured address and other information tightly integrated in pages and exports.
Comprehensive coverage of ONIX capability, including prizes, ancillary contents, Bible definitions, various classification schemes such as NUR, Thema and BISAC: everything you'd expect, and more.
Complex ONIX data, without the complexity.
We send over seventy flavours of ONIX file to book trade recipients who have all interpreted the standard slightly differently. It's our problem, not yours: we liase all the time with recipients to accommodate their requirements, such as Ingram CoreSource, Findaway, Longleaf, EBSCO, Faber, JSTOR, Nielsen, Bowker, ProQuest, and Amazon. We calculate and add agency pricing on the fly, send images and content files to different directories, limit feeds by imprint, series, and ad-hoc requirements, and send incremental or full 2.1 or 3 feeds on whatever schedule you need. Because our code is modern and malleable, and our approach is pragmatic and can-do, we bend and flex where others snap.
Read more about variations in ONIX.
Project management
Run an efficient and timely publishing programme.
There are many project management tools available – but only Consonance integrates your to-do's with your publishing-specific data.
Set to-do deadlines relative to pub dates and contract data.
Define your own workflow, in your own words, to whatever level of detail fits your business, through a clean and modern interface.
Let your workflow evolve by incorporating lessons learned into future plans.
Keep track of key dates and deadlines across multiple schedules and a growing list.
Estimate and measure your schedules, so you address bottlenecks, eliminate waste and publish faster and more accurately, over time.
“Consonance is instrumental in keeping our data organised and getting it out to our trading partners. They have (time and again) been able to facilitate our changing needs and work with us to bring the highest quality data to our website and beyond. With regular updates on new and improved features, and a highly responsive team, Consonance is always a pleasure to work with and we highly recommend them to anyone wishing to streamline workloads and improve their business.”
– Heather Gallagher, Liverpool University Press
Project management
The right tool for the job – from KanBan to email
Get the utmost out of your one source of truth: choose from Consonance's wealth of project management tools, which draw on your live contract and metadata dates for the ultimate integrated experience. No modules; no buggy integrations: when you see a pub date, that's the pub date.
A variety of tools available to suit your data and preferences: Pipelines for a KanBan, Trello-like workflow; Issues for a formal approach to issue management; To-dos for a malleable scheduling tool with due dates that key off your production and metadata dates.
Set up Roles to bring clarity to who is responsible for what, across the board.
See your data in a variety of formats, including bespoke Grids that emulate the huge in-house spreadsheets of yore.
Acquisition forecasts and analysis in Plans: produce multi-work, multi-product, multi-currency, multi-channel P&Ls for control over acquisitions
Communicate clearly to freelancers and in-house teams with Briefings – like AIs, but for internal use.
Keep everything out of email and close to your data, with Discussions. (But still send emails, from within the app!)
Pipelines are good for stage-based workflows such as acquisition.
Issue management for when you want to manage issues arising to resolution.
Role-based to-do assignments: manage and replicate dream teams across multiple projects.
Plan for success! Produce one or more P&Ls across multiple works.
Communicate requirements to freelancers and in-house teams with beautiful briefing documents, automatically populated with up-to-date metadata.
No more digging through the emails of a departed colleague for last year's print costs...
Use the generic Grid that Consonance ships with, or ask us to build your very own – just like the one you have on Excel, but magically updated with metadata dates, roles and live to-dos. What will you do with the time your team saves from updating that every week?
Track everything from peer review to review copies, so you can see where best to invest your energies and proofs.
Production
Print, reprints, digital assets, POD...
Consonance's production features nestle automatically amongst the bibliographic, costing and schedules needed for a smooth, efficient, profitable workflow. They're not 'integrated' (which can be a code word for 'pricey tech project') – they are part of the same software application.
Audio, print and content files managed and distributed in ONIX and APIs
Secure expiring URLs for file sharing with trusted third parties
Intelligently extract metadata from digital files to further enrich your metadata and ensure accuracy
Multiple print production runs and print on demand arrangements on the same work.
The file uploader matches filenames to metadata records automatically.
Batch your products together for user-defined collections – to export PDFs or to populate catalogues and zip files of assets.
A short video showing how Consonance extacts the TOC from an uploaded file, for use in the metadata. The same can be done for accessibility metadata.
Contracts & royalties
How you manage royalties reflects directly on your brand.
A key part of the smooth running of any publisher, Consonance provides full-fledged publishing royalties management, so you can honour promises made to authors without drowning in admin.
Multi-channel rights and royalties channels, tiered and matched to your real world distributors and customers
Self-serve reporting and data integrity checks to ensure accuracy over the long time period from contract to royalty
Powerful royalty management features – combined with the most usable interface on the market. Read the detailed docs.
Store your contract data in Consonance, so that advances, manuscript delivery dates, rights information and gratis copy obligations are at your team’s fingertips, forever – not buried in scanned PDFs or a filing cabinet.
Generate beautiful, automated contracts for every work – and equip yourselves to automate your royalties, down the line.
Joint or single accounting, multi-currency, multi-part advances and payments, fees and deductions, reserves and more.
Multi payee / alternative payees, with separate contracts as required
Use templates for contracts, or use as a starting point to make a bespoke contract per work.
Intuitive statement generation for all or a set of contacts, with the ability to generate and re-generate runs and statements before committing to the audit trail.
Rights & permissions
Keep rights right next to your head contracts, metadata and production schedules
Halve your efforts by not having to maintain editorial and production lists as well as your own: spend that time maximising the value of your IP.
Track submissions, options and expressions of interest
Licence at any level including chapter and product
CRM
Co-editions flagging
Include rights on royalty statements alongside your other sales channels
Record receipts and payments
Manage licensed rights, as well as permissions granted and acquired
Multi currency
Included in Consonance's powerful reporting tool: drill down into your data to discover trends and issues
Use discussions to keep correspondence close to other data
Use to-dos to manage tasks alongside other workflows
Import in bulk including batch upload of rights sales income
Draw on all the tools available to all departments: advance information sheets, catalogues, flyers, batch zip files, reporting, discussions, to-dos etc
See your upcoming to-dos in calendars for an integrated alert system
Upload files just like any other digital asset
Data exchange: onix
ONIX excellence from automated configurations hand-crafted to your needs
Getting your ONIX feeds out to your trading partners is a key task of any publishing management system. But not all ONIX feeds are created equally. Consonance is renowned for its quality feeds, which go beyond mere validity (though you'd be amazed at how many supply chain members don't reach even that modest baseline) to being timely, flexible, pin-point accurate, rich and consistent – over millions upon millions of product fragments:
ONIX 2.1, 3.0 and 3.1 feeds
ONIX, in every flavour imaginable. Open Access unpriced items? Omit certain series? Zip the files in a specific format? Order BISACs? We adapt and deliver whatever the next bespoke thing is that the trade needs.
Data exchange: non-ONIX formats
Data in and out: a good citizen of your overall systems landscape.
From publishing schedules and advance information sheets to distributor spreadsheets, JSON feeds, JATS journals data, and flexible two-way GraphQL endpoints, Consonance saves you time and ensures data accuracy across the supply chain by exchanging data with other systems and people, in a range of formats.
Consonance makes your data work harder, by repurposing it in a multitude of formats.
Download instant bulk exports of all your products, prices, stock history and more.
Build your own custom spreadsheets using Consonance’s flexible custom report templates.
Consonance turns data into action through issue tracking, briefing notes, and key date management.
Visualise data in the right place -- such as dates in your usual calendar app.
Feed your website from Consonance. Leuven University Press is a good example of a website that takes a nightly feed from Consonance.
"Hugely impressed with the interface and user design elements of Consonance, and the modern approach to system architecture which we feel is well placed to grow with us as our programme grows."
Institute of Physics Publishing
When presentation matters, Consonance makes data beautiful.
No more copying-and-pasting into InDesign (unless you want to, and if you do, our data feeds can help!) With Consonance, automatically generate beautiful information sheets, catalogues, press releases and flyers for all your products, and then download them in bulk whenever you need. Your AIs are accurate, up-to-date, and compelling to retailers.
Reuse your metadata on automatically generated, elegant internal and third-party briefing documents, so you never have to copy and paste ISBNs and blurbs in emails to designers, again.
Customisable – so you can build as many templates as you like, and run them for any set of filtered products, at work or product level, in single and multi-page layouts.
Address book
CRM, but make it publishing
Contact data in Consonance is organised the way you need it for publishing.
Contributors, such as authors, editors, illustrators, translators
Non-contributors, such as agents, printers, data aggregators, automatically categorised based on which records they are linked to. If a contact is linked as the author of a work, the contact is tagged as a contributor; if they have an FTP template, they are tagged as a data aggregator, etc.
Address details optimised for contributors with institutional addresses: department name, building, sub-building etc.
Import, export, and add from anywhere in the rest of Consonance – no slowing up to have to go over to the Contacts area, then back again.
Associated data right in the contact record: royalty statements, tracked copies, works, payments and so on.
Multiple person or organisation identifiers, as appropriate: VAT IDs, ORCiD, ISNI, Ringgold, D&B, and in-house codes, etc.
Pronunciation guides and marketing texts, images, professional affiliations and relationships.
Full ONIX integration.
Customisation
Everything everywhere all at once
Other systems have modules: 'title management' here, 'royalties and rights' there. But Consonance is a single "magnificent monolith" app. All your related data is a click – not a new sign-in – away. And because its design adheres to the normal conventions of the modern internet, with accessibility in mind, finding and editing data is already baked into your users' muscle memory.
One way to manage custom user abilities in Consonance.A settings page in Consonance.
Everything available – but on your terms
No "title" limit
No ONIX feed limit
No additional cost for additional modules (the promise of "one version of the truth" becomes less compelling if you have to pay extra to achieve it)
Choose from public or private cloud
No additional cost for asset storage e.g. multi-terabyte audio files
No feature restrictions by default. Refinable with bespoke user ability management.
More than 20 pages of refineable settings, dropdowns, names, mappings and templates – maintained and designed just as beautifully as all the other pages in the app – to make Consonance your own.
Schedule a call to see Consonance in action and discuss your own situation. If you have your data in the ONIX format, send it over and we'll import it, to make the call particularly interesting.
