Methods of calculating royalties changed during the 1980s, due to the rise of retail chain booksellers, which demanded increasing discounts from publishers.
The overseas subsidiaries bind up the sheets into book form and sell at full price for a nice profit to the Group as a whole.
They asserted "that Harper Collins has improperly engaged in selling quantities of its books on a non-returnable basis to its foreign affiliates, at below-market prices.
The publisher settled the action by making lump sum payments to all those authors who had received royalties paid on sales to foreign affiliates at these very high discounts.
[5][6] In 2003, following the HarperCollins case, Nicola Solomon, a leading British literary lawyer, said that the fairness of sheet dealing was mixed, depending in part upon the language of the agreement and its effect on royalty distribution.