I’m revising the stories: the online ones are going to Royal Road on my new Profile here:
https://www.royalroad.com/profile/362315
Where you can tip, and you can find me on Kofi under Killgrace if you want to suppport by monthly memberships or requiest story updates.
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).
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.
The problem with second hand devices is that they are elderly and sometimes have physical issues resulting from this.
The Blackberry has been having a sticky trackball issue, and when this morning it refused to scroll left or down, I did wonder if I would be taking it apart. (And whether I could get my files off – I don’t want to lose “Scarlet Fever” a second time.)
Fortunately I went online and there is an easy fix. I’ll include the demonstration video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6oz_FHz0O8So it goes like this.
You can use any colour paper, but white shows up any dirt that comes off best. My paper didn’t have any visible dirt, but the mouse now works, so I’d say its a good trick.
And it also lets me get on with writing Scarlet Fever, a webshort that occurs before In Depression and fills in some backstory.
Well, today I decided to join the hand-held revolution; or truthfully to rejoin it after the death of my dearly beloved Psion Revo a few years ago. Being a classic early adopter I went for not an iPhone, nor a tablet…but a Blackberry 8900. (I thought they’d had a few years to get the bugs out).
Lovely bit of kit: palm sized, real keyboard, easy access through USB, previous user’s data all over it… No, the last one wasn’t expected or wanted.
I’d bought it at CEX for 20 pounds, so I disconnected it from the computer and dived back down to town. CEX weren’t happy, and to their credit immediately performed another factory reset and told me I could take it home while it completed. I hung around in-store just in case, checking messages as it reset. One did make me raise an eyebrow. Sure enough, after the reset I rebooted. All the old data reappeared.
I took it back up to the counter and showed them. The assistant looked a bit baffled, and paged through again so I asked:
“Could there be a storage card in this?”
Yep, when it rebooted, the screen had flashed up ‘storage media detected’. They cracked the case, fiddled with the insides and sure enough, there was a very old, green, and wonky looking micro-SD hidden in it. Every time they reset it, the Blackberry was restoring the data from back-up.
So, to make a long story short, SD out, contacts cleaned, factory reset again and this time it worked perfectly. How perfectly? I’ve written two short stories and this blog post on it.
I’ve even fixed the camera.
Next: A Challenge! How to get data off Memopad and onto a PC without Blackberry desktop.
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
I have three books ready to come out. I can’t currently release them because of the recent actions of our government, specifically the mess that is called EUVAT – a new set of tax laws created in 2015 with little notification that are hammering small businesses and sole traders.
If you’re not familiar with these, for many the VAT system limped along, expanding organically to cover the web as it developed – VAT had to be calculated and paid in the seller’s country. This was sometimes abused by larger companies to base themselves in a country with a low VAT rate. Then the EU changed it. From Jan 2015 VAT has to be paid in the buyer’s country to the buyer’s government, but still calculated and paid by the seller. The customers details have to be stored for ten years, and there is no threshold. From the first cent of a sale, VAT must be calculated.
You will hear a lot of misinformation
These are nice ideas, but unfortunately they are untrue and stem from utter denial. In the vein of a teenager trying to pretend that if they do it standing up or if she wears a blue wristband she won’t get pregnant, many businessmen are clinging desperately to the idea that somehow they won’t have to deal with the consequences and it will be alright. Regrettably this blue blankie won’t stop them being hit with a VAT audit.
To be fair there is an element of “Jesus Christ, they can’t do that!” which is the single most common reaction when I mention this, followed by a protest that I must be mistaken. Unfortunately they are, they have, and we can either do something about it or stick heads back in the sand and grab onto a comforting myth.
The facts remain. If you sell a digital product to an EU customer (or a physical product from 2016)
If you get any of it wrong, you are liable for fines. Even if it is because the customer put in the wrong data, or because the VAT rates issued for use on the EU site are incorrect (which they currently are). The tax authorities are even trying to make sellers based outside the EU collect and remit this tax to them, something which US sellers are not taking very well.
This law is badly broken: –
The costs of trying to comply are outside the range of small businesses and micro-businesses. In fact even the EU Commissioners responsible admit that the law is having a devastating effect on small business and are trying to get it changed. More concerningly, the businesses getting hit are disproportionately owned by those who cannot take a conventional job. Women and the disabled are being slammed.
Concerning Killgrace
, this affects me quite badly because I use Paypal and so cannot confirm my customers’ location. I could sell through Amazon but the loss of income is huge.
If I sell my books through Amazon my income is cut to a third – 30% – of what get if I sell directly.
| Book Price | Sold on | Fees | Income |
| 0.99 | Amazon | 65% | 0.29 |
| 0.99 | Paypal | 5%+5p | 0.89 |
| 1.99 | Amazon | 65% | 0.58 |
| 1.99 | Paypal | 5%+5p | 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 32% for 0.99 books and 31% for 1.99 – so less than one third.
At a time when I’m recovering from illness, I’m not really up to dealing with this and I know there are other people in a similar situation. It is a shame that a class action suit against the EU Commission for loss of earnings through bureaucratic negligence is not practical. (see next page)
