Sarah Holland has been repeatedly pestered over a number of years via e-mail, snail mail and hand delivery, to sign a Harlequin e-book contract at a shockingly low percentage.
Sarah Holland has repeatedly refused to sign.
This contract was at one stage allegedly hand-delivered to her in 2011, at her desk, by the man who was then her boss, Chairman of UK celebrity magazine empire EMP Media, Joe Cuby.
Sarah Holland was also offered, in August 2003, an undisclosed sum of money to sign a document agreeing to forfeiture of all rights to the Charlotte Lamb Literary Estate.
It was when Sarah refused to sign that she was denounced as insane all over the world.
In December 2003, she was disinherited in the presence of lawyers and the Charlotte Lamb Literary Estate was willed to 1 person - 1 person with everything to gain from doing a shady deal behind the scenes.
Since then, Sarah Holland has been pursued by the international conspirators in UK, Canada and the USA in a relentless series of attempts to destroy her life, her relationships, her career, her finances, her home stability and even have her committed or forced into suicide.
Her mother must be rolling in her grave because - clearly - the Charlotte Lamb Literary Estate is at the bottom of it.
Worth a minimum of $1.25 billion, the Charlotte Lamb Literary Estate holds the rights to approx 300 novels including 250 Harlequin romances, each guaranteed to sell at least 1 million copies in the first instance - with projected earnings virtually exponential, both in gross profit and sales figures.
Each was part of a series of multi-book contracts signed by Charlotte Lamb and Alan Boon (of Mills & Boon/Harlequin) back in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Because Charlotte Lamb was then Queen of Mills & Boon/Harlequin and because Alan Boon was an honourable man who believed in credit where credit was due, her royalty percentage on all those contracts was huge.
As we all know, Harlequin's record since 1994 in terms of honourable contracts, just and fair royalty percentages for authors, creative sales figures, creative historic amendments, claiming to have "lost access" to all sales figures before 1994 and enforced futuristic e-book amendments is somewhat less than edifying.
I think we can therefore eliminate the possibility that they might have tried to play fair regarding an e-book back catalogue of the size and $$$ of Charlotte Lamb's.
We can also agree that Sarah Holland, often described by Robert Kirby as "my most conscientious author" would never have allowed her late mother's royalty % to be altered - let alone slashed - by a firm like post-1994 Harlequin who couldn't even be bothered to attend her late mother's funeral.
Perhaps post-1994 Harlequin should be altered to post-1984 to echo the Orwellian prophecy that the future would be a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
For those of you who haven't seen the blog that broke this e-% story, here's the link: - http://shadypublishingdeals.blogspot.co.uk/
More soon - I'll keep you posted.
by our Editor, Juliet Warsaw
