A British on-line e-pub site anyone?

I wonder whether there are any peeps out there who have published through Amazon's Kindle facility only to discover that because they are British citizens, they have become subject to a 30% withholding of royalties because of American tax laws - the bastards!

Yes you can be reimbursed, but not before you jump through hoops and pay some exorbitant amount to legal notaries in order to prove that you're not some tax-dodging Yank out to save the few measly bucks you've made from selling your e-book on-line.

I have been waiting for ages to make enough in sales to actually receive some money for the book I published and whilst I'm extremely grateful to all of you people out there that bought my book, I still haven't received a penny from sales, as because of the withholding of that 30%, the money I should have received in royalties still isn't enough.

In short Amazon is required by law to remove 30% of your royalties and send it directly to the US government - whether you like it or not, which is one third of your already meagre 35%. This means you're actually only getting 24.5% in royalties unless you can prove you're not American and that your country has a tax treaty with the USA.

All this is in the extremely small print, but is not made plain in the payment of royalties section of the Kindle pitfall and pratfalls section.

It's made me think about removing my book from Kindle's virtual shelves and start my own publishing site where British authors can add their e-books and get their payments without all that shit. Obviously, it would mean by-passing Amazon and all the other American-based sites for self-publication, but at the same time, it would mean that the royalty percentages could be substantially greater (probably up to 80%) and there'd be none of those flaming hoops to jump through, especially if like me, you don't sell that many copies of your book to make it worthwhile spending your hard-earned to stop those thieving IRS bastards getting their hands on money they have no right to.

Any thoughts?

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