Judith Appelbaum, the author of the 1978 book "How to Get Happily Published," says she never really understood her royalty statements; not many authors do. But it was only when her publisher, HarperCollins, started sending two apparently conflicting statements every six months that she could tell that something was actually, quantifiably wrong.
"I was getting two sets of statements and two checks, and I had no way of knowing what I was actually owed," Appelbaum said of the statements, which lay out how much money authors are supposed to get when copies of their books are sold in stores and when rights to the books are bought by book clubs, foreign publishers and magazines.Supported by such groups as the Authors Guild and the Association of Authors' Representatives, Appelbaum hired a high-powered auditor and a high-powered law firm and sought to find out exactly what was going on. What the investigators concluded, they said, was that HarperCollins, like most big publishers, has such a confusing system of calculating and paying royalties that it could not provide a straight answer.
"The people at HarperCollins kept saying, `Please have sympathy for us; we can't get the information together,' " said Lawrence B. Friedman, the partner at the New York firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton who represented Appelbaum. "The publishing industry is very much in the Stone Age."
After years of haggling, after which she sued, Appelbaum has now settled with HarperCollins, with the publisher agreeing to pay her $7,000 in back royalties, along with her legal and audit fees. But she says she feels that the money is beside the point. "It isn't just Harper," she said, "it's all the major houses. And I've made some noise, but until they all change, authors are going to keep getting shortchanged." - Sarah Lyall