As I said in the follow up blog post to the big one yesterday, most of the authors just want their rights back. To be honest, the majority of the trapped authors either had small by steady royalties OR were the authors I contracted after the senior staff took over to fill gaps in the release schedule and to launch the speculative fiction imprint. That last set of authors isn't owed a PENNY by AMP so it makes absolutely no sense to me why the owner isn't releasing them at least. She hasn't released a book since the week after we resigned from AMP.
So for those authors, small claims court would do no good.
Interestingly enough, the authors who were making big or good royalties at AMP were usually the ones that she paid on time and sent a royalty statement to. That was something we noticed in her habits; she kept the big names happy and let the less known ones slide.
The authors and books that are trapped at AMP are, to my way of thinking, a far worse situation than the royalties owed until the last three months. Once we left, and the owner didn't pay the third party quarterly royalties in addition to the AMP website royalties and the monthly-paid Amazon royalties is when the financial duress really kicked in company-wide.
But those royalty breaches are on the 90 day countdown. The authors with problems with royalties BEFORE then have been victimized by the owner's deliberate lack of knowledge of her own contract. It's like she thinks if she ignores them, everything is just going to go away.
And then if the money is really gone, spent for personal expenses, and she declares bankruptcy for herself and the business, then those authors are really screwed. Not only will their royalties then be tied up with the bankruptcy trust, but their book rights will be too.
