Sticking Place Books
Turning Publishing Data Into Business Intelligence
Murmur Systems' inaugural project
Sticking Place Books is a New York-based boutique publisher specializing in cinema scholarship—bringing critical film writing and filmmaker voices to readers worldwide. Like most publishers using print-on-demand services, they faced a critical operational challenge: IngramSpark provides sales data only through CSV exports with minimal analytics, making it nearly impossible to track business performance, calculate author royalties, or make data-driven decisions without hours of manual spreadsheet work.
We built a data ingestion pipeline that transforms IngramSpark's raw CSV files into actionable intelligence. The system processes sales data across multiple formats, currencies, and channels, then provides real-time analytics dashboards showing revenue distribution, sales trends, and book performance. Most importantly, it automates the complex calculation of author royalties—including advances tracking, revenue sharing across multiple payment periods, and generating detailed payment reports.
The result: what once took hours of manual calculation each month now happens automatically, letting a small team focus on what matters most—publishing essential works on cinema.
"Murmur Systems built us a complete publishing operations platform. Through an intuitive custom CMS, I can add new books, manage author profiles, and update content—no technical knowledge needed. The public bookstore handles multi-format listings across Amazon and Ingram with intelligent region detection. But what really transformed how we operate is the business intelligence: visualized sales data from IngramSpark showing revenue distribution, sales trends by channel, and book performance—plus web traffic analytics to run experiments and understand what's working. And yes, it automated our royalty calculations too. It went from scattered spreadsheets and manual processes to running our entire business through one elegant system in three months."— Paul Cronin, CEO, Sticking Place Books