EUVAT Part 2

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

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