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European Union VAT and my bookstore

For the last couple years I’ve been fairly successful selling my self-published books from my own store at tiltedwindmillpress.com. Recent legislation in the European Union changes this.

The EU has this thing called VAT, or “value-added tax.” It’s a tax that requires all sorts of paperwork. It requires charging tax based on the buyer’s location. And it applies to ebooks as of 2015.

Legally, if I’m doing business in the EU, I’ll need to collect VAT and remit it to each country in the European Union.

I don’t make enough on EU sales to cover the paperwork and time.

I have little choice but to stop doing direct business in the EU.

I want readers in the EU to be able to buy my books, but I won’t be able to sell to them directly. I’ll need to go through retailers that handle VAT for me.

I have the following requirements for a retailer.

  1. Must let me sell multiple formats (pdf, epub, mobi) in a single purchase.
  2. Must handle VAT
  3. Must support DRM-free
  4. Must not hold onto payments for “very long” (whatever that means)
  5. Must handle highly formatted documents
  6. Must add VAT to the retail price

Many people have suggested Smashwords, but they fail #4 and #5. Smashwords pays quarterly. They also only accept epub and Microsoft Word files, and they produce PDF, Kindle, RTF, and all the other formats from those. I want buyers to get a PDF that matches the print edition, so that they get interesting things like indexes. Also, Smashwords does not support tables. (I don’t blame them. Tables are evil.)

So far, it looks like Gumroad is the winner. Gumroad will let me sell any file format I want, exactly as I upload it. They will handle VAT for me, by adding the VAT to the price. And they pay every other week, by direct deposit. Annoyingly, you must have a Gumroad account to browse the catalog. I have Tarsnap Mastery on Gumroad now. Other titles will follow.

As far as other retailers go: retailers like Amazon and iBooks are handling VAT by making ebook prices inclusive of VAT. This means I’ll need to raise my EU prices to compensate.

Once I have everything in place, I’ll implement an IP-based block against sales to EU countries.

I really, really dislike this, but EU law leaves me no choice. I’m not comfortable blatantly ignoring tax law. I don’t think the EU could really do anything to me, but I wouldn’t be shocked if a future EU-US treaty were to suddenly make me responsible for years of back VAT. And I would like the option of visiting the EU in the future, rather than risk trouble because I’m evading taxes.

Of all the book buyers in the world, my readers are the most likely to be able to evade IP-based blocks. I’ve written one of many books on how to do that. An IP-based block is reasonable due diligence on my part, and I can stand up in court and say that. If you choose to evade that block, that’s an action on your part and, legally, not my responsibility. I have no other technological means to block you, anyway.

“But you’re small!” Yes, I am. But I don’t intend to stay small. I’m working very hard at getting bigger.

If you’re in the EU, and you’ve been waiting to buy some of my Mastery books, I suggest you stop waiting now.

If you’re in the EU and want to buy books directly from me, I suggest fixing your tax laws so that doing business there is worthwhile.

Rest assured, I really dislike taking these steps. Spend some time reading about microbusinesses and the EU VAT. Many people like me who happen to be based in the EU are being completely forced out of business. If I lived in the EU, I’d probably have to leave.

I’m also pondering some sort of sponsorship plan, where people could send me money to support my work. Every so often, I’d send them an ebook as thanks. This wouldn’t be a sale–sponsorships would be a little more expensive than just buying a book, otherwise it would be a thinly disguised sale and breach the law. I’m still debating this, though, as I’m not sure there’s enough interest.

(UPDATE 12:30 PM)

I should say, I have no objection to paying taxes. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and while you might argue that there’s better ways to do it, taxes are how we do it today.

I don’t even object to paying a European tax on European customers. I’d just pass it through to my customers, after all.

But to comply with US taxes, I keep spreadsheets of sales and expenses. At the end of the year, I bundle them up with a few 1099s and related docs and ship them to my accountant. She sends me a nice letter saying “write these checks and mail these forms.”

If I could do this and comply with the EU VAT, I would do so.

But I can’t. VAT compliance requirements are a nightmare for a microbusiness. VAT compliance requires multiple sources of information from multiple providers. I don’t even take credit cards, because the compliance requirements are too high. There’s zero chance I’m going to be capable of VAT compliance!

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Free novella at Amazon

My SF novella Forever Falls is free on Kindle through 11 May 2015 (next Monday).

This book is only available on Kindle right now — I’m trying their Kindle Select program, which supposedly gives additional visibility and promotion. It doesn’t seem to have helped so far. Come 3 June, when the Select enrollment runs out, I’ll have this piece on iBooks and Kobo and all the other ebook platforms.

But until 11 May 2015 the book is free, from all of the usual Amazon outlets.

  • Amazon US
  • Amazon UK
  • Amazon DE
  • Amazon CA
    • Posted on

    WordPress versus FreeBSD

    I recently migrated my web site to a new FreeBSD install, configured so I could use ZFS boot environments. This upgrade crossed FreeBSD versions (10.0->10.1), filesystems (UFS -> ZFS), and PHP versions (5.5 -> 5.6).

    And my WordPress pointy-clicky upgrades stopped working. Every time I ran an upgrade, the web gui hung with:

    Updating Plugin Honketyblatt (1/1)

    The web site would site there, forever. Enabling WP debugging gave me no error messages.

    If I had the job of running WordPress sites, I would have an automatic tool that processed the upgrades for me. It’s not, so I don’t.

    I use the FreeBSD WordPress package to get all of the dependencies, but manage my actual WordPress sites in a separate directory. It turns out that the FreeBSD WordPress package doesn’t list all of the modules that you need for a self-maintaining WordPress install. My old server had a few packages that the new one didn’t.

    If you want to use WordPress’ self-updating features, be sure to install the following packages in addition to the FreeBSD-recommended defaults.

    php56-tokenizer
    php56-zlib
    php56-zip

    I installed these packages, and everything started working.

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    Web site rearrangement

    In case you’re reading this in reverse order in your RSS feeder: ignore the last couple of posts. It’s content I’m moving from my web page to the blog.

    I’ve redesigned and rearranged the fiction section of my web site, so that it more easily answers hard questions like “What have you written?” and “Do you write anything I might like?”

    The nonfiction section is OK, given how many tech books I’ve written. Hopefully the fiction section will now scale as well.

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    Ignore the next couple of posts

    I’m in the midst of rearranging my web site. The nonfiction stuff is pretty well organized, but the fiction really is not.

    Most of the fiction can easily be reordered, except for a couple of pages that just won’t fit well anywhere. So I’m putting those pages up as blog posts.

    Unfortunately, I can’t cancel those out of the RSS feeds. And most of my blog readers are already aware of these pages. I’m using the bang-more markup to keep most of the pages out of your feed, though.

    I think I can cancel those pages from spreading to the third-party sites, like Facebook and Twitter and such. If not, I’ll log into those sites and cancel them manually.

    My apologies for the extra traffic.

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    FreeBSD and beadm

    One of Solaris’ ZFS features is boot environments, where you can install multiple versions of the core operating systems and choose which one to boot into. Boot environments take a lot of the risk out of upgrades; if an upgrade goes bad, you can easily roll back to the previous version.

    Boot environments are built on top of ZFS. Recent FreeBSD installers create fine-grained datasets rather than a single large dataset, which means you can leverage boot environments on FreeBSD.

    Boot environments will go into FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS. But the first book needs to be boot-environment compatible–especially the chapter on manual ZFS installations. So here are my rough notes on boot environments, both from my own researches and from poking Allan Jude on Twitter.

    If you’re going to play with boot environments, it’s best to start with a new system. You can migrate an existing system to a boot environment friendly one, but as Dan Langille discovered, it’s a right pain.

    I started by installing a new 10.1/amd64 host. Your initial datasets look like this.

    # zfs list
    NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
    zroot 465M 188G 128K none
    zroot/ROOT 463M 188G 128K none
    zroot/ROOT/default 462M 188G 462M /
    zroot/tmp 149K 188G 149K /tmp
    zroot/usr 570K 188G 128K /usr
    zroot/usr/home 186K 188G 186K /usr/home
    zroot/usr/ports 128K 188G 128K /usr/ports
    zroot/usr/src 128K 188G 128K /usr/src
    zroot/var 703K 188G 128K /var
    zroot/var/crash 128K 188G 128K /var/crash
    zroot/var/log 192K 188G 192K /var/log
    zroot/var/mail 128K 188G 128K /var/mail
    zroot/var/tmp 128K 188G 128K /var/tmp
    1
    This list is deceptive. The dataset zroot/usr exists, but it isn’t mounted. Go ahead, run mount(8) or zfs mount and check. I’ll wait. The dataset must exist for you to have child datasets like /usr/ports, but it doesn’t actually contain any data. The files in /usr that aren’t in specific child datasets like /usr/ports or /usr/src are all in the root dataset.

    Run pkg install once to install the package management system, and then install beadm from packages.

    # pkg install
    # pkg install -y beadm

    Now see which boot environments you have.

    # beadm list
    BE Active Mountpoint Space Created
    default NR / 494.0M 2015-04-08 07:18

    The only boot environment is named default. Under active, N means the environment is active now. An R means the environment will be active on reboot.

    I need to upgrade this host to the latest version of FreeBSD 10.1, p9. This is where we need a new boot environment. I’ll name it after the release.

    # beadm create 10.1-p9
    Created successfully
    # beadm list
    BE Active Mountpoint Space Created
    default NR / 646.0M 2015-04-08 07:18
    10.1-p9 - - 10.7K 2015-04-08 11:43

    Activate the new boot environment.

    # beadm activate 10.1-p9
    Activated successfully
    # beadm list
    BE Active Mountpoint Space Created
    default N / 186.0K 2015-04-08 07:18
    10.1-p9 R - 646.2M 2015-04-08 11:43

    While the default environment has an N, indicating it’s active now, the 10.1-p9 environment has an R, so it will be active after a reboot.

    Reboot. After the reboot, you’ll see the new environment is running.

    # beadm list
    BE Active Mountpoint Space Created
    default - - 538.0K 2015-04-08 07:18
    10.1-p9 NR / 646.3M 2015-04-08 11:43

    Now I can install the latest FreeBSD patches without damaging my default system. If it fails, I can fall back by activating the default boot environment.

    Remember how the zroot/usr partition isn’t mounted, so that files on /usr fall through to the root dataset. Your files in /usr and /usr/local are in the boot environment, so you can create new boot environments for package upgrades as well as base system updates. The /var partition works similarly.

    Using boot environments opens another whole crate of weasels, though. Of course you want the core system databases in /var/db to be part of the boot environment–but what about /var/db/mysql? Similarly, postgres stashes data in /usr/local/postgres. You don’t want reverting the core operating system to give you an old version of the system database!

    When using boot environments, create a new dataset for your database data. This also lets you tune ZFS for that application.

    (PS: While you’re here, take a moment to admire how the header image changes every 10 seconds. I am immensely proud of myself for finding the button that made that happen. That’s, like, real web design! And for changing the density of the bookshelf photo so it looked okay in the header. That makes me a graphic designer too, right? Sweet!)