VAT to rise on UK ebooks

I was reading through some of the pre-budget coverage and I saw that VAT on ebooks is going to rise from 3% to 20%.

At present Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc charge VAT at 3% because they are all registered in Luxembourg. From January 2015 VAT is going to be charged based on the country the purchaser is in, not the country the company is registered in. As such VAT on UK ebooks will rise to 20% and a £1.93 ebook will rise in price from £1.99 to £2.32 (assuming the author/publisher doesn’t reduce their cut).

As this is quite a significant increase I expect Amazon to respond by altering (amongst other things) the lowest price they will allow to be charged in the UK (currently that’s 77p), but we will see. January is quite a way off, and I’m meant to be writing book 3.

This is also going to impact on other e-goods (and services), such as apps, games etc and there’s an article in the FT here which goes into more detail:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ef6bcd10-93e9-11e3-bf0c-00144feab7de.html

Hugh Howey Has A Time Machine (Book 3 update)

There are a few book blogs I check for inspiration - one of those belongs to Hugh Howey. Almost daily I check his site and look at his progress meter. I have to confess that it baffles me.

How does Mr Howey know how close one of his books is to be completion? A rational explanation might be that he’s doing a daily word check and plugging that into a bit of script where he’s already set an arbitrary final word count. That sounds logical, right? I’ve learnt, over these last few months, that writing and publishing is neither rational nor logical. As such the only possible explanation that fits is that Mr Howey has a time machine. Clearly, he travels forward in time, checking his work in progress against word count, publication date and so on, then returns to the present to get on with the writing. 

And that begs the even more disturbing questions. Where does he get his inspiration from? Are his books fiction or are they merely true and accurate descriptions of the world to come? And do all authors get issued with time machines?

I’m half-way through the second to last edit of book 3, it currently stands at 63,000 words, but is missing a section that can’t be completed until I take another trip to Kew Gardens. I’m hoping, but not promising, to release it next month.