After two years, in which I stopped bothering to put stories out because EU laws (Digital VAT) meant I couldn’t sell them for enough to cover the cost of cover art, there’s a ray of sunshine. At the start of the year they finally passed a VAT threshold, which means I can put a Paypal tip jar on the site and put the ebooks back up for download here.
Brexit actually helps me a great deal, as I can trust there will be one less level of bureaucrats to make ill-formed decisions in future. (They thought very few smaller firms and individuals would be affected, forgetting any who uses PAYPAL. The actual figure was 95%. And they passed it because one person didn’t want to pay more for cable in his country…)
For those wondering why I stopped putting stories up: using Amazon as EU VAT forced me to stopped sales dead, adding a Paypal tip jar required filling out monthly VAT returns for every country tippers came from for even a 1 eurocent tip (something I am too ill to manage and too poor to pay someone else to do) , and what little I did make was less than one fifth what it had been (due to for each £1 HMRC taking 20% VAT, Amazon taking 70% costs, the US IRS taking 30%, and HMRC then trying to claim income tax on the remaining 7.2p – joke’s on them: as if I earn enough) and then conflicts between tax returns and prescription charges, it was just too much stress.
I wasn’t the only one that had this issue: the company that did my ebooks kindly formatted them for free, being a small firm that had also been hit by the same ruling. Sadly, artists like to be paid, and there are hosting costs to manage.
Now I plan to put the tip jar up, add all the books to the site as text and have Digital Download links in the sidebar for those that want to buy the ebooks. They’ll still be on Amazon, but please don’t go there for them if you want to support the site.
I have been asked about the free Downloads and I am considering adding Monero mining to give people with little money a chance to get the books simply by leaving their PC to run it in the background. The Captcha system using it might also be the solution to the bot commenters who have been a problem. If I can’t stop them, earning from them to cover the time it takes to delete their comments seems fair.
Several of the stories only exist in text form now, due to a complete crash that wiped three layers of backups (and had me swearing off dropbox and Google docs for life).
- Terminus/Change of Life,
- Wandering Star,
- Mortality Endemic,
- Living Legend,
are all in this situation. OCR might recover them, and I have had a volunteer to try it.
I plan to merge the stories and ebooks, redirecting the existing links, and put them up in chronological order. It just makes sense. The does mean incomplete stories may go up, and I’ll be working on several at a time. Hopefully the full arc will start to be visible as these fill in some gaps.
So yeah, that’s it really.
