As some of you may or may not know, there’s been a change with how the European Union handles tax on digital products. They have what’s known as VAT, or value added tax. Before the start of the new year, VAT was usually determined based on the seller’s country. However, at the start of the year, VAT is now being handled by the customer’s country.
What does that mean? That means that in order for us to comply by the laws set by the EU, we would be required to register and pay for any and all purchases that came from a customer who lives in one of the EU VAT-compliant countries. For example, let’s say a customer from the United Kingdom wanted to purchase an ebook directly from us because they know that buying directly would put more money in the author’s pocket. That would mean we’d be forced to charge 20% extra to cover the cost of tax.
As a micro/small press, it’s just not financially smart for us to keep tabs on all the extra tax expenses, let alone file in every single EU country just to pay a small tax fee. So we’ve disabled sales from the following countries:
- Austria
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Croatia
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Isle of Man
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Netherlands
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- United Kingdom
We realize that disabling direct sales from those countries also means we’re also preventing them from ordering paperbacks directly from us. In some countries, that means we’re taking away their only way to get a paperback copy of our books. We plan on figuring out a work around for this, but it might take some time.
Thank you for your continued support in our books!