Remember the shooting war a year ago January when Amazon dimmed the Buy Buttons on Macmillan books over the issue of the agency etail business model? To refresh your memory read Publishing’s Weekend War: 48 Hours That Changed an Industry

A lot of authors were caught in the crossfire.  But the CEO’s of both companies have presented them with a gift to make it up to them.  In his letter accompanying Macmillan’s semi-annual royalty statements CEO John Sargent informs authors and agents that Macmillan and Amazon have jointly created an “Amazon Kindle Outage Adjustment” compensating them for royalties they would have received had the trade war not suspended business.  Sargent explains how the adjustment was calculated:

“…You may also see an item toward the bottom of your statement called Amazon Kindle Outage Adjustment. Most of these adjustments were processed last royalty period but some are being finalized now. We believe it was not fair that authors should suffer from the Amazon buy button takedown imposed on us for a week last year when we switched over to the agency model. So we estimated as best we could what Kindle sales would have been for that week and processed the royalties on those sales as if they had happened. Amazon felt the same way and graciously split the cost with us. Interestingly, from what we could discover, almost all non-Kindle Amazon sales migrated to other outlets.”

We agree that it is a gracious gesture on the part of both industry leaders and though there may still be some bruised feelings and lost revenue, we wanted to give credit where it is due for the good will.

There was another gift from Sargent in his covering letter which you may read in its entirety here.

Richard Curtis