Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
The 6-8% is the author royalty, paid by the Swiss subsidiary. When licensing the ebooks, Harlequin interpreted the contracts to mean the subsidiary got paid half, so the authors got half their normal royalty rate (3-4%).
The plaintiffs and their attorneys are not trying to get 4-6%, or even 6-8%. They're trying to interpret the contracts to mean "authors get a 50% royalty on digital."
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You have it the wrong way around. The author's contracts (With HS)
do say that they get a 50% net royalty on digital! The 6-8% is the license that HS agreed with HE.
The authors signed a publishing agreement with the Harlequin Swizerland, as required by Harlequin Enterprises. That agreement said that Harlequin Switzerland would pay the author 50% of net receipts from "exercise, sale or license" of the digital rights to their work.
Harlequin Switzerland then licensed the digital rights to Harlequin Enterprises for 6 to 8% of the sale price of the ebooks.
Now, if the fiction is maintained that HS and HE are completely separate, then HS has clearly not acted in the best interests of their authors in agreeing to a license of the digital works on such very poor terms.
If HS and HE are considered as one entity, they are depriving the authors of their due royalties.
Either way, I think that Harlequin is in the wrong.