Mastodawn

Elyse M Grasso Apr 18

@dilmandila What sales tax/VAT jurisdiction do you sell in? I did some retail at science fiction conventions years ago and found that dealing with sales taxes made was almost more trouble than it was worth.(This was before E-Bay and other online sales platforms so there was no support in those days...)

@ElyseMGrasso I mostly don't bother with that, since I have not registered for VAT and I doubt if I'll ever make enough sales to reach their threshold, which is 150m (about $40,000) in a year. So now at the end I will simply pay tax off any profit that remains.

Elyse M Grasso Apr 19

@dilmandila That's fortunate. There are ways of handling the hundreds? thousands? of US sales tax jurisdictions online which had not yet been created during my retail days, but it is not practical to try to run an online shop without going through some kind of aggregator who can manage the sales tax insanity. Aside from the need to track changes in the tax rates that need to be collected, there are fees for being allowed to collect sales tax in many of the taxing jurisdictions.

@dilmandila Thanks for sharing - I fear this would not work for adult content; with the age verification now required, self-hosting is basically a non-starter. I need a big company to handle that for me, and outside the likes of D2D, Amazon, or Patreon, most of them won't anymore. I suspect the plugins you use would cite morality clauses about my tentacle sex stories 🙁

@rubyjones I thought it was the other way round? That having your own site gives you control?

The plugins I cite work in the background and aren't visible and I don't think they verify what a person sells - like the WP eStore Plugin, you can't know if a site uses it especially if, like me, it has customised the "add to cart" button or the shopping cart page (I didn't bother to change much).

But I had not thought of age verification so can't say if they are an option in that regard.

@dilmandila It gives you control, but much, much bigger responsibility. I'm fully familiar with WP and its plugins - my point is that they are highly likely to have T&Cs that exclude adult content. The WordPress.com website does.

Age verification is specifically the sticking point. I do not have the resources (mental, financial, technical) to securely perform age verification myself, and it's not legal to sell adult content without age verification anymore.>

@dilmandila >Which leaves you reliant on companies that will do it for you, and the ones that used to do so have got much, much stricter about what they will allow (especially from indies), because they don't want to be sued and because credit card companies have caved to neo-puritan pressure groups. It's bleak.

One of my books I can only, currently, publish through D2D to Smashwords. And it's my most popular work 🤷‍♀️

@rubyjones Ha. That is sad. But then you will be at the mercy of the big platforms. I remember when YouTube de-monitized my most lucrative film because of like 3 or so seconds of sex, and it wasn't even explicit. There was no full nudity. Just kissing and simulation of it.

It's indeed tough times to be an artist.

But perhaps there is an age verification plugin that can do the work for you? I'm sure the big platforms rely on automation rather than a human checking each and every customer....

@dilmandila Yes, indeed we are.

I've already been over a few times why a plugin is not going to work for me. I think this is one where I need you to trust that I know what I'm talking about.

@rubyjones Sorry, might have missed it/forgotten while typing/ tired brain after long meetings.

But if I'm to ask, say a website that's safe for any age, without selling anything, but points readers to where they can buy the books, would that not work? Would it still need verification? Then if one platform deletes your book your site points readers to a new shop? I think some reddits are like that, pointing people to pirate sites without hosting any pirate material and that appears legal???

A. P. Howell Apr 20

@dilmandila @rubyjones It's potentially a flying-under-the-radar sort of situation, but not reliable. (I did a little work on a now-defunct FOSS project where the idea was to aggregate links to individual stores, and the folks talking to payment processors determined that you do potentially risk being cut off on the basis of linked material.)