Some interesting things have been happening with the AMP situation this week. Multiple authors served third party sites DMCA notices, which resulted in AMP books being booted from (I believe) all of AMP's online retailers. One author also served a DMCA notice to the AMP website's host, which resulted in the website being taken down.
Interestingly, however, the AMP website was back up and in operation within a few hours. After sending a notice to the authors about the "illegal takedown of the website," and about "some notices going out in email" the AMP website was updated, removing out of date banners, and also the book of the author who'd gotten the website taken down. AMP appears to be attempting to address some of the more patently obvious contract breaches.
However, AMP staff and employees have now gone two and one half months without being paid. For me, personally, that unpaid royalty amount (which includes quarterly payments from third party sites) runs well past a thousand dollars--not counting my percentages as head editor of the AR imprint (which sold under the AMP banner until September) or the managing editor of AMP. Only a few authors have received royalty payments--two that I'm aware of. I have only heard of one author having communication in the past few days. I personally have sent emails, texts and left voice mails--to no avail.
As best I can tell, AMP has the ability to get the website back online and to continue to sell books despite the multiple breaches of every author's contract at this point, but does not have the ability to answer correspondence, even to answer the phone, to remove out of contract books from the website and retailers, to distribute royalty statements, to pay their authors and staff, to publish the already edited and completed books waiting to be released, to edit and prepare their contracted books for publication, to respond to third party sites asking for confirmations, to keep their authors reasonably informed...in short, to do anything other than to put that website back up after an author had it removed for violation of copyright and breached contracts.
For me, this is personally devastating on multiple levels. I relied upon the royalties I earned at AMP for my personal finances. I also have a very real and personal connection with most AMP authors, and in particular with the scores of books I edited there. And in the process of all this mess, I have lost a very good friend and publishing mentor. Aside from B&BC and commenting on what's happening now, I haven't spoken out publicly about what happened at AMP. Unless I see some serious movement on the company's part to stand up and address the grievous injustices currently ongoing between AMP and their authors and staff, I might have to end my silence.
*shrug* Musa may fail spectacularly in the future. Who knows? My business model may just bankrupt us.
But a quick, clean death is infinitely preferable to holding over 400 books and 100 authors and staff hostage. I have now reached the point where I can no longer justify my continued silence about the situation or what led to this situation. I hope that AMP finds a way to right the ship. But at the moment, AMP has no staff--and with the old staff not getting paid no prospects for getting a new one--no third party retailers, no submissions, no releases, and, apparently, no desire to do the right thing.
It's a damn shame.