An EU VAT update – and a call for action.

Juliet January 2, 2015 1 Comment

As the holiday break draws to a close, Cheryl over at Wizard’s Tower Press spends yet more of her valuable time sorting out the complicated mess which these new EU VAT regulations have made of our pricing – as well as forcing all of our sales through third parties who all take their hefty cut. So readers will be paying more while all of us involved in making these books available earn less for them.

Meantime, I’m working with the EU VAT Action team to do all we can to create pressure for the changes we need, to get this legislation reviewed and revised from the ground up.

The more voices speaking up, the better the chances of meaningful action. So there are a couple of recent posts over at Digital Microbusiness Action Group on new targets for your letters.

Author: Juliet

Juliet E McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds, UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written fifteen epic fantasy novels so far. Her debut, The Thief’s Gamble, began The Tales of Einarinn in 1999, followed by The Aldabreshin Compass sequence, The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, and The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. The Green Man’s Heir was her first modern fantasy inspired by British folklore in 2018. The Green Man’s Quarry in 2023, the sixth title to follow, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. The Green Man’s War continues this ongoing series. Her 2023 novel The Cleaving is a female-centred retelling of the story of King Arthur, while her shorter stories include forays into dark fantasy, steampunk and science fiction. She promotes SF&Fantasy by reviewing, by blogging on book trade issues, attending conventions and teaching creative writing. She has served as a judge for the James White Award, the Aeon Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award and the World Fantasy Awards. In 2015 she received the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award. As J M Alvey, she has written historical murder mysteries set in ancient Greece.

1 thought on “An EU VAT update – and a call for action.”

Caroline says:

January 2, 2015 at 3:27 pm

Hello Juliet.

A possible new wrinkle.

You are aware that we have a microbusiness trading as Porcupine Books, and sell physical books around the world via Abebooks. This morning Brian got his usual monthly statement of charges from Abebooks, based in Germany, charging both UK and German VAT approximately proportional to UK vs rest-of-the-world (both EU and non-EU) sales. Previously there had only been German VAT charges. We have queried the basis for this change, which was undocumented and not advised beforehand. We haven’t seen any information or discussion that led us to expect anything like this.

At this stage and in this case the amount of money involved is small (being the difference between UK VAT at 20% and German VAT at 19%). Nevertheless it is an unwelcome and unexpected addition to our costs of doing business, and I thought to bring it to your attention.

The letter we have written to our MEPs is posted to my LiveJournal account, to which you have access. Please feel free to quote or adapt from this or that as you feel useful.

Kind regards
Caroline Mullan

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