Were you one of the skeptics who faded me on my pinkie bet that e-book royalties would go up? Well, chum, you owe me a pinkie. Royalties are going up, at least at Macmillan. But even I’m stunned that it took only four days. I should have remembered that in the digital world, things that used to take two years now take two hours.

The revelation about a royalty boost was embedded in an update by CEO John Sargent on Macmillan’s negotiations with Amazon in which he assured us that Amazon is “working very, very hard and in good faith” to resolve the issues that have stalemated publisher and retailer ever since Apple introduced a retail model that restores control, and ultimately more money, to publishers. Here’s Sargent’s full statement.

But if there has been no big breakthrough in Macmillan’s relationship with its retailers, there’s been a huge one in its relationship with authors and agents. Sargent says:

“And now on to royalties. Three or four weeks ago, we began discussions with the Author’s Guild on their concerns about our new royalty terms. We indicated then that we would be flexible and that we were prepared to move to a higher rate for digital books. In ongoing discussions with our major agents at the beginning of this week, we began informing them of our new terms. The change to an agency model will bring about yet another round of discussion on royalties, and we look forward to solving this next step in the puzzle with you.”

We’ll review the sweetened royalty and report to you.

Richard Curtis