Today marks the beginning of the new European Union VAT requirements. As an EU resident, I’m required to verify that any online vendors I work with are VAT compliant. Amazon is. Audible is. Smashwords… isn’t, and the only public announcement they’ve made on the topic is that they are not currently planning any changes to their web site.
Until that changes, my self-published fiction is no longer available for sale on Smashwords. Because Smashwords will not distribute to Kobo, iTunes or Barnes & Noble unless my work is available in their store, my work will soon be disappearing from those venues, too. Much as I’d like to, I do not have the time or capacity to work with each of those markets independently.
For reasons utterly unrelated to VAT, some of my lower-volume fiction will also be vanishing from Amazon. (It has to do with author rankings and weird algorithm stuff like that.)
The long and short of it: don’t be surprised if you can’t find a story that used to be there. You didn’t imagine it, and I’m not slowly vanishing due to weird Back-to-the-Future time travel effects. It’s just big business doing what big business does, with little authors worming their way through the cracks.
Happy New Year to those whose calendars just rolled over!
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cross-posted from
nancyfulda.com
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