What with having signed up to Poem a Day as well, it's going to be a busy month!
So, I appear to have signed up for the A-Z Blogging Challenge in April. I last did it in 2013 and blogged about British Folklore, so I'm thinking about continuing with the esoteric theme and doing kinds of divination this time. I might as well put my weird-book collection to use! As usual, Q, X, and Y could be a problem...
What with having signed up to Poem a Day as well, it's going to be a busy month! Meduspod episode eight has just gone up, which contains "This is the Way the World Begins" with awesome narration by Rock Manor. Podcasts are a great was to submit reprints, although I tend not to send unpublished work as you can lose first print rights that way. It depends on the podcast. "This is the Way the World Begins" originally appeared over at Daily Science Fiction.
I can't believe it's March already. So far this year I've written four stories, with three of them out on submission and another due some serious editing. I'm also planning on making some changes to my writing routine, more on that when I've got a clearer picture.
In other news, my POD collection is now available. I'm aware there are still some loose ends to tie up with regards to my POD posts, but I thought it was probably about time I posted about the actual book. It's a print collection containing all of my short works that were available when I put together the project, and it's called Conversations with Dragons. It's currently only available on Lulu, although a Createspace version is in the works. I could simply tell Lulu to distribute it through Amazon on my behalf, but then I'd have two retailers taking a cut and it frankly wouldn't be worth it as I'd be making $0.40 per sale. So I'll put another edition up on Createspace, once I've made the necessary tweaks. And here's the cover. I meant to post an end of year update ages ago, except there didn't seem to be anything worth updating beyond "2014 sucked". This seems to have been the case for a lot of people. In fact I haven't seen a lot of people at all saying they had a good year. Here's hoping 2015 is better for all of us. There's actually not a lot to update. I've got two stories sold last year due to come out this year. One is a podcast of "This is the Way the World Begins" at Meduspod. The other is the website release of "The Silver Spoon" in The Colored Lens Winter 2015 edition. That's already available as an ebook, but I think will be available on the site at a later date. No idea on when either of these stories will appear, but will mention it when they do. So far this year I've written two flash stories which very much want to be longer, and another that I'm now sure I can do much with. My plan is to move away from flash and work on longer stories, but that's been the plan for a while now. I also started a novella in November, but the plan to finish that in December was scuppered by two weeks of flu right before Christmas. It's still on the to-do list, but will now have to fit in with all the other things on the list that are time-dependent. These include either the Month of Blogging Challenge or Poem a Day, in April. I also need to finish my series of POD blog post, since I'm very much aware I've left those off in the middle. Unfortunately there's been a lot of life getting in the way over the last few months, not least of which was a change of role and working hours at the day job. I know there are those who think that writing should be Most Important of All or you're just a hobbyist. I personally think a lot of those people are operating from the position of privilege of either already being established, or have someone who can financially support them while they write. The rest of us have to eat and pay rent, and don't have the luxury of treating the day job as anything less that the source of our livelihood. That's a whole other blog post though. The other thing I did recently was change some of my ebook covers. A World in Clockwork and Dark Ghosts and Flamingos are mostly the same, although I played around with the positioning of the text. I haven't been happy with the covers of The Reflection of Memory or A Primary Function for a while though, so here are the new ones. And that's it for now.
I've received two more responses about VATMOSS and the EU VAT changes today. Neither these nor yesterday's other response had the same wealth of information at the one from Clare Moody, so I'll try to summarise them here.
Lord William Dartmouth of UKIP responded to say that the party is aware of the affects the changes will have on small businesses, and is lobbying for an above-zero Vat threshold for small businesses. Although he did say that the VAT threshold in the UK will disappear as part of the changes, which is at odds with the reply from Labour's Clare Moody I blogged about yesterday. He has also written to George Osborne and Vince Cable about the problems the changes will bring. Consertative MEP Ashley Fox replied to say he is also concerned about the changes. Both he and Lord Dartmouth agree that the new rules will disuncentivise companies from trading with the EU. He has written to David Lidington (Minister of State for Europe) Matthew Hancock (Minister of State for Business and Enterprise) and Andrus Ansip (European Commissioner for the Digital Single Market), asking them to look into it as a matter of urgency. I didn't know there was a European Commisioner for the Digital Single Market. Maybe I'll write to him next. My local MP also wrote to me (by letter!) to say he's taken the issue up with George Osborne. I'm seeing a lot of people on Twitter saying they're not getting replies from their MEPs. Have I got a particularly good bunch? If you'll be affected by the changes to the EU VAT rules and you haven't written to your representitives, please consider doing so. For the record, I emailed all of mine on Sunday and have four replies already. I found their details here. The site appears to be down at the moment - maybe from all the people looking up their MEPs? It's particularly important for people to get in touch with MEPs from all over Europe, because it needs to be flagged that this is causing an issue for businesses across the whole of the EU. We don't want anyone to be able to say they didn't know there was an issue to solve. Instead of relaxing, I spent a chunk of my Sunday writing letters (well, emails) to David Gauke in the Treasury, my local MP, and my six local MEPs about the changes in EU VAT coming in on 1st January. No one else I've seen posting on Twitter has mentioned receiving a reply, so I was really surprised to get not one, but two, today.
The first response came from Labour MEP Clare Moody. I won't cut and paste the full text here, just the points on what's been confirmed about VATMOSS, She said that Labour have spoken to the UK government, HMRC, the European Commission, the Federation of Small Businesses, and consumer organisations, among others, to try and get to the bottom of the issues and address concerns. The following points have been clarified about VATMOSS. Some of these I already knew about, but it can't hurt to put them out there again. (This part is a direct cut and paste, in the interests of fairness and transparency): • You will not need to become familiar with the individual tax regimes of all 28 EU Member States. The whole purpose of HMRC's 'one stop shop' is to make life as easy as possible for small businesses and individual traders. If you continue to trade as you do now, then you can submit your sales figures to the one stop shop and it will calculate your VAT and present you with a single figure, in pounds sterling. • You will not need a VAT number in order to use the one stop shop. I know that a number of businesses and traders have been concerned that they will need to register for a UK VAT number in order to use the one stop shop. I have spoken to HMRC and can confirm that this is not the case. Instead, you will simply be given a one stop shop registration number in order to use that service. • You will not have to pay VAT on your UK sales. If you are below the existing UK threshold of £81,000 of sales in a year, then you are currently exempt from registering for and paying VAT in the UK. That exemption will remain for UK sales, even if you sell in other Member States. So while you will have to use the one stop shop and pay VAT on your European sales, your protection from VAT registration and payment in the UK remains. • You will have until 20 April 2015 to make your first returns. Although the new EU law comes into effect on 1 January 2015, you have the first quarter of the year in order to make your returns to HMRC via the one stop shop. The one stop shop has been open for registrations since October, and you can continue to register into the new year. • If you trade through an online platform, like the App Store, then you will not need to register. If you do trade through such a platform, it is worth checking whether or not you need to register. A significant number of them will calculate the VAT for you, and you won't need to do anything. • HMRC will be on hand to answer your questions. HMRC has put a significant amount of information on its website here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-supplying-digital-services-and-the-vat-mini-one-stop-shop/vat-supplying-digital-services-and-the-vat-mini-one-stop-shop. You can also contact them via their Twitter account @HMRCcustomers, where they recently held a Twitter surgery to help with people's questions and concerns. She went on to assure me that Labour will continue to put pressure on the government and HMRC to not downplay the seriousness of the concerns of microbusinesses, and to provide clearer guidelines and help. Some points that have not yet been answered are how small traders are expected to comply with data protection, how they are supposed to determine the origin of the purchaser, and if some traders might need to upgrade software - and how expensive this will be for them to do. She said she'd let me know when she hears back, although this might not be for a while. She also attached a briefing from the UK Permanent Representation, I haven't got around to reading this yet though and will update again when I do. Thanks, Clare Moody, for such a swift response! If you've been following EU writers and other sellers of "digital services" on Twitter lately, you might be aware of something called VATMOSS. The thing is, you might not. It's about to become law on 1st January, but HMRC and other tax authorities seem to have been particularly lax on actually telling anyone about it.
There are a vast number of links flying around about it (and I'll collect some together when I get the chance) but here's the short version: instead of using the seller's rate of VAT, purchases will use the buyer's. This is not a particularly big deal by itself, but here's the kicker. The VAT registration threshold from 1st January will be nil. Yes, that's right. If you run a hobby business selling digital copies of knitting patterns from your kitchen table, you will be required to sort out VAT as soon as you sell anything for one unit of the currency of your choice. There are three ways to approach this: 1) become VAT registered in any country in which you trade in the EU (there are 27 to chose from); 2) if you're in the UK become VAT registered in that country only and use their VAT Mini-One-Stop-Shop (VATMOSS - I don't know if other countries in the EU have their own version); 3) use third parties (eg Amazon) who do all this for you. Actually, there's a fourth approach: stop trading. I'm hearing a lot of people on Twitter saying the burden of VATMOSS is pushing them down this route. Here are the problems with the first three options: 1) Becoming VAT registered in 27 countries requires a lot more time and admin than most micro-businesses have the capacity for, or the cash for if it comes to hiring an accountant. 2) Becoming VAT registered in only the UK still requires the burden of quarterly VAT returns, something which most owners of micro-businesses don't have the time or cash for. In additional, both of these options come with the additional burden of having to prove the location of the buyer. Traders will need to collect 2 different non-contradictory pieces of information about where the buyer lives. Not only is there a logistical problem with this - particularly as Paypal has stated that it would be in breach of data protection to provide this information at all - but also sellers may be required to register for data protection in any of the EU countries they sell in. This is not something that sole traders can support. I'm not sure consumers will be happy with their personal details sitting on someone's laptop on the kitchen table for a decade, either. 3) As far as I can tell - and there hasn't been confirmation of this, along with a lot of other things in this clusterfuck - sellers using a third party are expected to check that it is compliant with the new VAT rules. Amazon sent an email earlier this week to confirm it will be. I've contacted both Smashwords and Draft2Digital on Twitter to find out if they'll be compliant come January 1st. Neither has answered, which I assume is a no. Oh, haven't I mentioned? The EU somehow expects this to be enforceable worldwide. I honestly don't see how the EU expects to police this, or indeed to force third parties outside the EU to be compliant with the new rules. For a lot of these third party sellers, the easiest option will be simply to stop trading into the EU at all. I expect this to be the route most of them take. America, China, and India are big enough markets that they can live without the digital backwater the EU is about to become. The fifth option (and apologies for this becoming a bit like the Spanish Inquisition sketch) is to stop trading in the EU. I'm guessing a lot of the smaller marketplaces will just do this. It may or may not be illegal for EU businesses to go down this route - and then we're back on ceasing trading. I saw something on Twitter yesterday (apologies I didn't keep the link) that Google has changed the Terms and Conditions of its Helpmeets that you can no longer charge customers in the EU. If Google aren't prepared to deal with the VAT changes what the hell chance do the rest of us have? What's making this whole situation worse is that November was the first most UK micro-businesses heard of it. I've been filling in tax returns as a sole trader for the last seven or eight years, and I've yet to hear anything from HMRC about the new rules I have to follow. I found out about it on Twitter. I don't know how traders who aren't on social media are going to find out, since the mainstream media isn't bothered by it and no one in HMRC or the government seems to want to do it. There is a petition on Change.org to ask for the VAT threshold to be maintained so that micro-businesses aren't affected. It needs another three and a half thousand or so signatures (it already has in excess of 11k) so please consider signing it if you know anyone who'll be affected by this and haven't already. Vince Cable has already responded, but he clearly hasn't looked at the issues involved. His response boils down to "very few businesses will be affected and this was communicated ages ago". An independent survey (link when I find it - this was a couple of weeks and a cold ago) suggested that actually 250,000 business will be affected in the UK alone. And HMRC has admitted it only consulted businesses that were already VAT registered, which is a bit like banning sausages and only telling vegetarians. At this point it's becoming impossible to tell if this is honest and damaging incompetence, or a deliberate attempt to put the uppity proles back in their place working for other people instead of themselves. There's also a survey aimed at the EU as a whole, to collect data about the businesses that will be affected. Again, please consider signing if this is you. This is going to affect pretty much everyone, even if they're not direct sellers. I only sell via third parties, but will need to take my books from Smashwords by the end of the year. I also need to review if it's viable to keep them on Amazon at all. Although they'll be compliant, the differing VAT rates - up to 27% in some cases - will mean either having to hike up the price of books to compensate, or lose the difference from already tiny profits. I'm not honestly sure it's worth it, and I'm super glad I didn't give into the urge to redo my ebook covers earlier in the year. It doesn't end there. The plans are to roll this out to physical products in the next year or two, at which point you can say goodbye to POD via anyone but Createspace, and to craft sites like Etsy or Folksy. So if you're a direct seller of craft items, or sell through third parties who don't already deal with the VAT for you, you might want to make your voice heard now, before your business is destroyed as well. Things have been a little quiet around here for the last couple of months. Part of that was a change of role at the day job - new hours, new processes, new colleagues, all of which took some getting used to. Most of my writing energy in October went into admin tasks: finishing some edits, getting my submissions up to date, and submitting my tax return.
November is, of course, National Novel Writing Month. I wasn't sure at first if I was going to take part, and in the end decided that 50,000 words was too much to take on on top of everything else. Fortunately my online writers' group runs a novella contest for six weeks starting on November 1st, so I'm taking part in that. The wordcount is 17.5k to 40k, and I'm aiming for the lower end. I'm two thirds of the way through the time, and a bit behind on the words, but I'm happy with the story so far. Which is to say, if I go silent for another two weeks, this is why! When you upload your manuscript, you'll also have to upload your cover, or design one using the site's templates (both Lulu and Createspace have these). There are various ways to approach this.
If you're designing the cover yourself, or paying for one to be designed, you'll need to find the dimensions of the book from your site of choice. You'll need to include the front and back covers, and the spine, all as a single piece. Then, when it gives the option, you simply upload your ready-prepared cover. If you're not using a ready-made cover you'll still need an image to go on the front of your book. Lulu allows for abstract shapes to be used instead of uploading a picture, but that's not recommended as it can turn out very generic. It's also not recommended, unless you're a professional photographer or artist, to use your own photos or art as they can look amateurish. Of course this depends on what you want from your book. If it's for personal or family use then a meaningful photo might be just what you need. There are plenty of stock image sites that you can choose an image from, and download for a small fee. Don't be tempted to just pick one from the internet, as this is copyright infringement and exactly the same as if someone decided to use your work in their book without credit or permission. The stock image sites have licence agreements for their images, and you need to choose the licence that best suits your purpose. This isn't as difficult as it sounds as these are usually laid out fairly clearly and sites often have a FAQ explaining which rights you're buying. There's usually a limit on the number of copies of the book you can sell, but if you ever sell that many you'll be able to afford to hire someone to create a cover for your exclusive use so it's not really an issue. There's a great deal of debate about covers in self-publishing circles. It's true that bought covers look more professional, and with a stock image you run the risk of someone else using the image, or it being a little generic for your work. I have anecdotal evidence from a friend in self-publishing that her books with bought covers sell more than those without. In this instance cash may well beget cash. Some of us simply can't afford to shell out for someone else to design a cover for a book that may never earn it back. There's no shame in that. There's also nothing to stop you going back and reissuing books with a new cover if you suddenly come into money. Whatever you choose, all that matters is that you're happpy with your cover before you print the book. Once you've got all your text in place, it's time to go back to the beginning. The table of contents is something you do only when the rest of the manuscript is finalised, because otherwise the page numbers could be inaccurate.
Firstly, put your cursor wherever you want the table to go. Then go to the Insert menu of Word and select Index and Tables. On the box that pops up there should be a tab for the Table of Contents. Select this. It will give you several options. Insert page numbers? Well obviously. It will also give you the option to right-align them, which will make the table easier to read. The Tab Leader option will let you decide if you want a line of dots, or a line, or nothing at all, between the end of the title and the number. I opted for nothing as this is what you often see in traditionally published books. The format option lets you change the look of it. Show Levels is only useful if you have different levels of headings - say a title and then different sections within your chapter, as this will let you pull out the different subheadings as well. For a standard book of short stories you only need one heading. In Word 2000 there's an options button, which may be lurking somewhere else in more modern versions, but this is where you tell it which information to pull out. Check the box for building the table of contents from styles. Then go down the list. Remember the style of the table of contents we set up earlier? Select that as 1 (and any subheading styles as 2, 3, etc). Click OK, and you have a table of contents. Next, you'll need a cover. |
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