My New Approach to Story Telling - eBooks

I have decided to put my scriptwriting on a temporary hiatus. This is not due to the resounding lack of success thus far with scripts, but I just want to dabble elsewhere. And thus, through my undying love of all things Raymond Chandler and a desire to return to a more flowing form of prose, I am back writing novels (or novellas or short stories or whatever).

I love scripts because of my life long passion for film and the fact that I have an exceedingly visual imagination. It takes a fair amount of training and practice to become completely comfortable with this form of writing. The pressure is always on to be in a completely visual mode all of the time, nothing can be said to explain a character’s feelings, it all has to be shown through the action.

But the advantage of a novel is that you can bury yourself deep within the psyche of a character. When we read, we become the character, rather than just view them. And thus, the more poetic and emotive embellishments are required to allow us to feel what the protagonist is feeling on a deeper level.

And on top of all this, it just felt right for this set of stories.

The world today is truly “e”, everything is preceded by an “e-“. First it was e-mail and e-commerce, soon we’ll be digitally drinking e-spresso’s, e-travelling and virtual intimacy will end with an e-gasm. So the e-book market seems to be a pretty good way to go…

Everyone knows the popular shopping site, turned e-book masters and they have their own system for submitting independent e-books, as do a host of other services.

However, these all seem to be based in America, and consequently a significant amount of paperwork needs to be filed to prevent over-taxation of e-book revenue. On top of this, I am assuming I would have to declare my earnings to my own country’s (UK) tax system. Are there no independent e-book publishers and distributors in the UK willing to offer a hassle-free commission based service?

Having looked into this process in a lot more detail it seems that for any US sales, there is a default 30% withhold tax applied to the distributor of your ebook, which gets taken out of the royalty.

Because any self-employed profit (like the royalties) is taxed within the UK, there is a treaty set up to prevent being taxed twice by the two countries. Therefore, you need to apply for an Identification Number to prove that you are a financial occupant of a country with whom the US has a tax treaty. 

This is either an EIN (Employee Identification Number) which is apparently a lot easier to do, but requires registration of self-employment with HMRC. The other option is the ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number), which is a lot harder, longer and involves ID (usually a passport) visiting Texas and being out of your reach for up to two months.

Once either of these is available a W-8BEN needs to be filled out and sent to the distributor of your ebook so that they are no longer subject to full withhold tax and can give you more of your royalty.

One of the best blogs I have come across on this can be found here:

http://fessingauthor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/conf-660-ebook-uk-royalties-amazon.html

Hope this helps, the whole process is a pain in the tax!