I'm a full-time working non-fiction author. I've worked with major publishers on past projects with excellent results, have received multiple major offers from major publishers for my upcoming projects, and have firm plans to self-publish new projects in the near future.
Early in my career, I also spent time negotiating with retailers like Walmart at a large consumer goods manufacturer.
I've been following this situation closely. I'm not personally affected (yet), but it's an opportunity to collect information in the interest of making better decisions about how to publish future projects.
In most ways, this is a pretty standard supplier/retailer negotiation. Most of these disputes don't go public, and don't last this long, but they happen all the time. Both sides are trying to use whatever leverage they have to negotiate the best possible deal. That's normal.
What's atypical about this particular negotiation is that authors are the counterparty that have the most at stake, but have no seat at the negotiating table. They're directly affected by the dispute, but have zero leverage, zero input, and zero recourse for losses incurred in the dispute.
The affected authors are, quite simply, the only real leverage Hachette has in this dispute, and Hachette is using them for all they're worth.
Here's the part of the NYT story that stuck out to me. It's buried close to the bottom:
"About half [of Preston's] book sales used to come from Amazon. But since the retailer started discouraging orders, his paperback sales are down 61 percent and his e-book sales are down 62 percent."
Hachette failed to come to mutually agreeable terms with their largest retail partner by dollar and unit volume. That's their most important job as a publisher, and they blew it, to the tune of permanently costing their authors 50-60%+ of sales they'll never recover.
Shipping books into retail distribution in a timely manner to minimize out-of-stocks is a publisher's second most important job. Production and distribution of physical finished goods inventory into retail is a hard problem, and most publishers are reasonably well equipped to handle it at scale.
When Hachette's contract with Amazon expired, Amazon (rightfully) stopped ordering advance inventory for stocking, but continued taking orders for available titles and transmitted those orders to Hachette as they arrived. From there, it's Hachette's responsibility to deliver the orders to an Amazon distribution center. Once the books arrive, Amazon packs & ships them to purchasing customers as normal.
That's why, when Hachette's contract expired, all of their books were listed as "Out of stock: ships in 1 to 6 weeks" - that's how long it takes Hachette to deliver stock. That's slow as hell.
Amazon didn't "boycott" or "drop" or "betray" authors or "discourage" readers from buying their books - it ceased offering retail inventory management services to a supplier whose contract had expired, and made a rational and defensible business decision when it became clear that the supplier was not negotiating in good faith to establish a new agreement.
Preston has a right to be pissed off, but not at Amazon.