There was a flaw in my previous article: I actually understated exactly how much of a cut selling through a third party would take.
You see, many of these third parties are US-based, and unless you hold a US tax number, they automatically pay 30% of your earnings to the IRS. So my table from the last page should have looked like this:
| Book Price | Sold on | Fees | Gross | US Tax | Income |
| 0.99 | Amazon | 65% | 0.29 | 30% | 0.203 |
| 0.99 | Paypal | 5%+5p | 0.89 | 0.89 | |
| 1.99 | Amazon | 65% | 0.58 | 30% | 0.406 |
| 1.99 | Paypal | 5%+5p | 1.84 | 1.84 |
(Paypal fees for other amounts are here: http://pressbin.com/tools/paypal_micropayments/)
Switching to a third party platform lowers my income to 22% of what it was – so less than one third. And then I have to pay income tax on this…
After protesting that 50% tax rate on people earning over £50,000 was unfair it seems very odd that the UK government wants me to pay 20% VAT (yes, Amazon charge the author not the customer) 30% to the US gov and then another 10% or 30% income tax.
The other problem with third party platforms? Since I switched the titles to Amazon and off the site, any sales have stopped dead. Quite literally, not a single book sold or free book downloaded. So, on the bright side, at least the income tax won’t be a problem.
Apparently the EU Parliament are very concerned – so concerned that they will do nothing about this until 2016, by which point it really will be a little late. My apologies to my readers.
EUVATACTION are working on it, and you can get the latest updates here: http://www.euvataction.org
