A New Literal Cover for MOUSETRAPPED, Literally!

27 Jan

So yesterday’s post was about how The Literal Police are driving me ten kinds of nuts with their “She wasn’t ‘mousetrapped’ as she puts it—she didn’t work for Disney!” and their “I think there is a definition issue with the word ‘backpacking’—it NEVER involves a hairdryer” etc. etc. Who knew that book titles could cause so much trouble? Not me, which is why my next book is going to be called Whatever You Think This Title Should Be Once You’ve Read It.

But it was soooo worth blogging about because your comments were priceless, and they really made me feel better about the whole thing. And if they hadn’t, what David Wright sent to me late yesterday afternoon definitely would have…

I’m seriously considering switching them out. I could do it for seven days and make it a promotion, i.e. “Literal Week”…

Thanks, David! For more fun covers from David, visit his blog.

Click here to find out more about Mousetrapped, which is a book about a girl who worked in the geographical area south-west of Orlando, Florida that’s labelled on maps as the Walt Disney World Resort, on ground owned by the construction company who built Epcot Park which they received in exchange for unpaid bills on Disney’s part, in a hotel operated by a third party who are not the Walt Disney Company but who, in co-operation with the Walt Disney Company, called their staff ‘Cast Members’, dutifully sent them to Traditions, Disney’s orientation program, and employed the Disney terminology (back of house=backstage, uniform=costume, puddle of vomit=protein spill) at all times, and who was, at no time, help captive by a mouse. Jeez. 

Title Woes, Or Why I Wish People Would Stop Taking Things So Literally!

26 Jan

People often ask me what I know now about self-publishing that I didn’t know back at the start, but wished I did. There are a few obvious things—that paperbacks are a pain in the arse, that your family won’t understand why the guy in Waterstones has never heard of you, that someone will want to take a photo for a newspaper when your roots are dark to your ears so keep them maintained—but then there’s also things that have come as a complete surprise. The burning pain of a bad review, for example (and while we’re on the subject, how venomous bad reviews can be), the daily e-mail from an internet crazy and the I Took This Title Literally Brigade, who are giving me migraines of late.

This photo has nothing to do with this post, but isn’t it nice? I had this coffee in Pepe Pica, Valenica. 

It started with Mousetrapped. I had the title before I even started writing the book, after a friend joked that I could write a book about working in Walt Disney World and call it that. I didn’t work directly for Disney—I worked in a hotel between Epcot and  Hollywood Studios but we were “Cast Members” in nearly every sense—but it never occurred to me to change the title because, well, the book is about me being in Orlando, and Orlando is a town dominated by the Mouse. Also, Mousetrapped is the name of one of the chapters, in which I’m stuck (without a car) in a triangle formed by Disney World, my apartment and a grocery store by the Disney gates.

So did I think there was anything wrong with calling that chapter Mousetrapped? No. I was trapped in Walt Disney World because I couldn’t go anywhere else. Did I think there was then anything wrong with calling the book after a chapter? No, because that just makes sense. Was I concerned that people would be duped into thinking that Mousetrapped was a memoir about drunken sex parties behind Cinderella’s Castle or why Goofy smells like a brewery when he’s posing for photos with your kids? No, because of the subtitle (“A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida”) and the blurb, which you can read on its Amazon listing. You can also read the paragraph I added to the description explaining why it’s called Mousetrapped, how I didn’t work directly for Disney but did work in Walt Disney World and, if you miss both of those, there’s, like, forty reviews you can read, most of which mention one way or the other what the book is about.

But apparently people are just clicking the “Buy” button on title alone, because I still get reviews that say things like:

  • “Hate is a strong word, so I’ll say that I despised this book. The title is misleading, as Howard wasn’t so much MOUSEtrapped as she was FLORIDAtrapped. With a title like “Mousetrapped,” Howard played in on the fact that thousands of Disney fans would pick up her book and be fooled into thinking it offered a behind-the-scenes look at Disney World. It doesn’t. Not even one bit.” (1 star)
  • “No one would buy a book about my daily life unless I hinted that I worked for my town’s NFL team (which I don’t). The only reason I bought this book was because it appeared to be about working at Disney. It’s not. It’s really a story about a 20-something girl who was clearly unprepared to be so far away from mom and dad.” (2 star)
  • “I’ll admit it—I bought this book looking for a juicy tell-all about working for Disney. So disappointed. She wasn’t “Mousetrapped” as she puts it; the author didn’t even work for the park, but rather for a hotel close to the park.” (2 star)
  • “I was expecting entertaining anecdotes on the author’s experiences in Disney World. What I took away from this book was she lived in a crappy Orlando apartment, learned how to drive, and loves the Kennedy Space Center. I skipped over page after page after page of her KSP experience as it was irrelevant and boring. She should’ve skipped the Disney thing and gotten a job the Space Center.” (2 star)
  • “Mousetrapped is a very entertaining story, but it has a completely misleading title. I originally bought this book in hopes of reading a behind the scenes account of a cast member at Disney World. The “Mousetrapped” title certainly leads you to believe the author worked for Disney and had some knowledge of the parks. This wasn’t the case. The author worked at a non-Disney hotel on Disney property, wasn’t a cast member, and hardly had anything to say about Disney at all.” (3 star)
  • “I wanted to hear the dirt on Disney but instead got tourist information and a lecture on Americas space program. [Ed note: get ready for my favorite line in a review of mine EVER!] I found her revelling in breaking the law rather disturbing and all in all not what I was expecting to read.” (2 star)

Nice, right? Especially when you consider that a) giving a book one star for being something it’s not then drags down how good the book is for being what it is and b) some of these people bought the book despite some of these reviews being posted on the listing at the time. All I can say is:

HUH?!

Mousetrapped is Mousetrapped; I’m not changing the name. I’m sorry if you can’t be bothered to find out from the information readily available to you what a book is about before you buy it, and I’m sorry if you then feel compelled to review a book based on what you thought it was going to be about as opposed to what it is about, even if your expectations were utterly erroneous.

And I had this irrelevant coffee on the Via Ludovisi in Rome…

I figured I’d just have to deal with it, and move on. But would you believe I am having the very same problem with Backpacked?

I mean… seriously?

Seriously?

The book is called Backpacked because we went backpacking, and I wanted a word that ended in -ed to match Mousetrapped. Before we went on this trip, we said “We’re going backpacking.” While we were on it, we said “We’re backpacking.” Since we’ve come home, we’ve said “We went backpacking.” If a friend of mine puts her bathing suit and hairdryer into a backpack, hops on a plane to Asia and moves from tourist hostel to tourist hostel, I’d call that backpacking.

But the Literal Police are out in force again.

This is the blurb for Backpacked:

“Catherine Ryan Howard prefers bath robes to bed bugs, lattes to lizards and mini-bars to malaria. So why is she going backpacking?

Catherine isn’t the backpacking type. Working for one of the world’s biggest hotel chains, she and her employee discount have become accustomed to complimentary bath robes, 24-hour room service and Egyptian cotton sheets. As for holidays, Catherine likes places that encourage lying – lying on the beach, by the pool, in bed… She’s been on what feels like one long holiday in Florida when her fearless best friend, Sheelagh, announces plans to backpack across Central America. With Catherine’s US visa about to expire, her having no desire to return home to Ireland just yet and her common sense, evidently, on a day off, she agrees to go along. After all, how bad can this backpacking thing be? Um… very bad, actually. Catherine soon finds herself showering with the threat of electrocution, living with mutant cockroaches, sleeping on wooden planks, suffering from all but one of the side-effects listed on her bottle of anti-malarial tablets (liver failure, in case you were wondering) and riding a horse up the side of a smoking, lava-filled volcano. And that’s just the first week.

Picking up where her bestselling memoir, MOUSETRAPPED: A YEAR AND A BIT IN ORLANDO, FLORIDA left off, BACKPACKED is the wry tale of what happened when one very reluctant backpacker hit the backpacker trail and discovered that beyond the mosquitoes, bad coffee and flea-infested hostels lie bigger mosquitoes, even worse coffee and flea-infested hostels whose bathrooms have no doors.”

I think that’s a fair representation of what’s in the book. I think it’s even fairer than Mousetrapped‘s blurb. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Now, if you were heading off into the Central American jungle with a Swiss army knife, a tie-die bandana, a well-thumbed Moleskine and a stubby pencil, looking for the truly authentic, off-the-beaten-track, humble traveller experience, do you think this book would give you an insight into what that might be like?

HARDLY.

And yet, these are choice quotes from two one-star reviews Backpacked has on Amazon.com:

  • “There is apparently a definition issue here with the word ‘backpacking.’ Backpacking is NOT simply using a backpack instead of a suitcase or duffle bag to transport your things around. Backpacking is not staying at the HoJo in G City and eating at McDonald’s every day. Backpacking NEVER involves a hair dryer. I only made it halfway through this book, so perhaps there is some actual backpacking somewhere in this story … but I doubt it. The author is humourous at times, but I was tired of reading the word ‘latte’ after 20 pages (lattes are rare in actual backpacking). If you are interested in how lazy, pampered urban dwellers get freaked out by everyday life in other places then you will love this book. If you are interested in actually backpacking through Central America then this book is, well, totally useless.” (1 star)
  • “Readers must understand this book has nothing to do with the sport of Backpacking. These two females are only using the backpacks as luggage, as a means to transport their belonging from taxis or chicken buses to the tourist hotels, that they are planning to stay in. They haven’t the slightest idea or interest in what real Backpacking is all about.” (1 star)

Well, color me informed. Backpacking is a sport? They are rules about hairdryers? You can leave an Amazon review that clearly states you only read half the book and Amazon will allow it?

…and I had this irrelevant coffee near the Trevi fountain. YUM.

For the love of cute puppies people, if you read Mousetrapped or Backpacked and you got that what’s in the book is a match for what the Amazon listing (title, cover, synopsis, customer reviews, other information) led you to believe was in the book, please consider leaving a review to help me offset the Literals. If you don’t have time to do that, maybe you could click “Yes” after “Was this review helpful to you?” on the customer opinions that are at least balanced and fair, from customers who might have at glanced at the product description before clicking buy.

Also, if you have any ideas for what I could do to stop this from happening, do let me know. I know I shouldn’t care, that I shouldn’t let it get to me, that I’ve sold something now like 15,000 copies of these books and the reviews above total 8, but that is infinitely easier said than done. I saw an author interviewed on The Book Show on Sky Arts a few weeks back who said that his first novel got something like 100 glowing print reviews, was an international bestseller and was nominated for prestigious awards, but it’s the one bad review he remembers—and he remembers it word for word, to this day. He has no idea what the positive ones said. That’s just the way it goes, I think. So be prepared, fledgling self-publishers.

And if you’re writing a book yourself, keep the Literal Police in mind when it comes to choosing a title…

Click here for a chronological listing of all my self-printing posts or subscribe to this blog (see sidebar) to receive future posts by e-mail. 

Holiday Snaps

25 Jan

So I’m trying out this WordPress “gallery” business to show you some of my holiday snaps. Click on any image to see a larger size or click on the first one to start flicking through them in a snazzy carousel-type thingy. (Oooh, fancy!) Not sure how they’re going to look on Google Reader or e-mail so you may need to pop over to the blog to see them properly. They’re of Marrakech, Essaouria (Morocco), Rome and Valencia (Spain).

Can you spot my “Yes, I’m in the Vatican!” picture? And my man-standing-in-beam-of-sunlight-in-St. Peter’s-Basilica X-Files style snap? Incidentally I really liked the Vatican, especially since I found a medal flown around the moon by Frank Borman on Apollo 8 (my favorite mission!) and the Vatican flag carried to the moon and back by the crew of Apollo 11, along with some moon rock fragments. It was definitely a NASA-themed adventure in Rome, as on drinking “Rome’s best cappuccino” in Café Sant Eustachio (it was soooooo good), I happened upon a signed photo of NASA Administrator and Space Shuttle astronaut Charlie Bolden behind the counter, thanking them for the great coffee. Weird, right?

We had some great adventures—tip: don’t travel between continents on Friday 13th—so much so that you never know, you might be reading about some of them some day soon…

(Oooh, mysterious!)

Catch Up If You Can

23 Jan

I’m baa-ack! Did you miss me? No, wait—don’t answer that!

In the craziness reunion yet of the “Duck and Tuna” girls (i.e. Andrea, Eva and I), we managed to fit Marrakech, Rome, Valencia and Madrid—and Chinese New Year celebrations, two taxi driver lightning strikes and approximately 294 cappuccinos—into twelve hectic but amazing days. I may pull out a slideshow of some of my many, many photos later in the week (especially if the motivation to write a proper blog post doesn’t show up soon…) but for now, here a few worthwhile reads that popped up while I was gone:

and you simply MUST watch this absolutely beautiful video, a spellbinding reminder that there’s nothing quite like a real book.

The only news I heard while I was away were Costa Concordia bulletins every 15 minutes thanks to BBC World News, but some stuff did happen in the self-publishing world too, namely:

and I saw a stack of Spanish language Amanda Hocking books in a FNAC in Valenica. Impressive, when you consider that it all started with her uploading an e-book to Amazon and Smashwords.

Also in the past fortnight:

So that’s that. Gone are my €1.30 cappuccinos at countertops in Rome; it’s back to making a vat of plain Jane coffee every morning and using it to keep my eyes open at my desk. (I may actually have to move to Rome for a while just for the cheap and delicious coffee. Rosetta Stone Italian, anyone?) And getting back to a daily word count. And wading through e-mails. And—

Well, there’s a long, long list. So, back to it.

Out of the Office (Or At Least I Would Be If I Had One)

9 Jan

This morning I’m doing one of my Top 5 Absolutely Favorite Things To Do—leaving the country—and as a result I’ll be disconnected from all things internet between now and Monday January 23rd.

If two weeks without Catherine, Caffeinated leaves you at a loose end, you might like to:

  • read one of my books. If you’ve never read anything of mine and you own a Kindle, you can get the whole lot for less than $5: Mousetrapped and Backpacked Too includes both my travel memoirs and is just $3.99, and my novel, Results Not Typical, is 99c. If like me you still prefer paperbacks, The Book Depository has them at discounted prices and they do free shipping worldwide.
  • join me in a Goodreads Reading Challenge. My goal in 2012 is to read 100 books. I read 54 in 2011 and left a further 9 unfinished, so I’m hoping that signing up and making it all official will motivate me to up my reading game. I haven’t finished a single book yet (!) but should be able to get started soon, especially with my 5-flights-in-10-days travel itinerary…
  • read this amazing post by Mark Edwards about his writing journey—alongside his co-writer Louise Voss—which as he puts it, was a case of going from “being left on the shelf to being on the shelf.” If ever there was a “never give up” tale of publishing success, this is it.
  • help me update Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing. As soon as I get back, I’ll start work revising and reworking Self-Printed. If you’ve read it and you felt something was missing—or that there wasn’t enough of something—e-mail me through the Contact Page or leave a comment on this post and let me know. For example, one reviewer commented that she would have liked a bulleted check-list at the end of every section, and a few others mentioned how helpful an index would’ve been. Both of those features will hopefully be in the second edition of Self-Printed, due out in May (ish).
  • sign up to my mailing list, The Caffeinated News. So far there’s only been one edition and it’s nowhere near as entertaining as Karin Slaughter’s newsletter but, hey, I do what I can. And signing up will keep you amused for at least fifteen seconds. Click here to sign up.
  • book a ticket to come see me in the caffeinated flesh. I have two events coming up: Bring Your Book To Market at Faber Academy, London, February 17-19 (3 day course, self-publishing and social media, me and Ben Johncock, £425) and How To Self-Publish Books (or Self-Printed: LIVE! as I’ve taken to calling it; where can you get one of those handsfree mics…? [JOKE!]) with The Inkwell Group in Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, on Saturday March 3rd (1 day, €125).
  • write a review of/for me. If you’ve read Mousetrapped, Backpacked, Results Not Typical or Self-Printed and you have an Amazon account and five minutes to spare, Amazon customer reviews can really make a difference when it comes to selling self-published books. I’ll love you forever if you have the time to write one.
  • entertain yourself with some of the blogs I read. Here’s a few for you to try: A Cup of Jo (a gorgeous New York writer with a beautiful baby, a sexy husband and great taste—you’d be sick with jealousy if she wasn’t so nice and didn’t post links to so many pretty things—which I found through Keris Stainton’s blog. Thanks Keris!), Regretsy (“Where DIY meets WTF”—hours of endless amusement. My favorite category is “Not Remotely Steampunk”), The Fearful Adventurer (girl pushes herself out into the world; adventure ensues—funny and inspiring), Enough Talk, More Writing (fellow Corkonian takes off to the States to follow his dreams, ends up in LA), The White Elephant in the Room (heartbreaking but inspiring and beautifully written blog by a 30-something widow) and Julie Cohen’s blog (best bestselling writer’s blog ever—and I love a gal who plots with Post-Its!).
  • continue on with your life as normal without even noticing that I’ve been gone for two weeks because you only read this blog when you’re waiting for the pizza to arrive or the ad break to be over or when you’re at work, and so who gives a cupcake?

Travel wallet by Paperchase. Procrastination activity masquerading as being organized by me.

And can I just show you my travel document wallet? Isn’t it a thing of beauty? Don’t I seem to be painfully organized? Is that this month’s issue of Writing Magazine (available in all good newsagents in Ireland and the UK, priced just £3.75) in which the lovely Jane Wenham-Jones gives little old Catherine, Caffeinated a mention in her column on page 56? Yes, yes and why yes.

See you in two weeks!

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So [Innocent Whistling], About That KDP Select…

6 Jan

Apologies in advance, but today I’m going to do something a tiny bit cruel. I’m going to tell you the first half of a very long story, and then make you wait a couple of weeks for the second part. Okay? Okay. Let’s go.

You may recall that the day after Amazon announced KDP Select and the “indie” blogosphere proceeded to lose their tiny minds about, I blogged about why I wasn’t going to blog about KDP Select, which of course was blogging about KDP Select. I also said that I’d enrolled one title, Mousetrapped and Backpacked Too, which was a special combination of both Mousetrapped and Backpacked (you’d never have guessed, eh?) that had never been available anywhere but in the Kindle store.

What I didn’t tell you at the time is that I also availed of KDP Select “promotions” which allows you to offer your enrolled title for free for up to 5 days out of each 90 enrollment period. And let me tell you today what happened with that.

(Or the first part of what happened with that, anyway.)

What KDP Select enrollment does to your Kindle listing

Mousetrapped and Backpacked Too was priced $3.99 and essentially, a dud. I’d sold 7 copies of it in September, 13 copies of it in October and 6 copies of it in November. But of course this was just a combination of two books I already had for sale—two books that were doing really well, my top 2 sellers—so it was no big deal. It was just another Amazon search result, just another chance for a reader to discover me, and save a dollar by buying two books at the same time instead of each one separately.

Which was why when the KDP Select train rolled into town, I was happy to enroll it, to use it to find out what all the fuss was about.

Oooh, free stuff!

It became free on Saturday 10 December across all Kindle stores. At the time its sales rank was in the 300,000-350,000 region on Amazon.com, I’m not even sure it had a sales rank on Amazon.co.uk and it wasn’t ranking in any bestseller lists on either site. (I don’t really sell much of anything in the other international Kindle stores, so I’ll be leaving them out here.) And remember: I’d sold just 26 copies of it in the three months or so prior to this.

After three days (Saturday-Monday) of it being available for free:

  • 193 copies of it had been downloaded from Amazon.com where
  • it was #2 in Kindle Books –>Non-fiction -> Travel -> Essays and Travelogues
  • and #1,856 overall in free Kindle books.

Over on Amazon.co.uk (a smaller Kindle store):

  • 209 copies of it had been downloaded
  • it was a#1 in Kindle Books –>Non-fiction -> Travel -> Essays and Travelogues
  • and hovering around #300 overall in free Kindle books.

Impressive, considering I didn’t even tell anyone about it until the evening of the third and last day, when I tweeted about it, so it’s clear that the sudden increase in sales was solely down to its price suddenly being free.

Now if I’ve sold those books, I would’ve made over $1,000. But I wouldn’t have sold those books. Going by the previous months’ sales, I would’ve sold more like 8 copies, making $22. And am I happy to pay $22 to inform 400 or so new people about my existence, improve my visibility on Amazon and potentially secure some paid sales in the future?

In a word, yes.

A big benefit of being free: a few hundred transactions worth of “Customers Also Bought” data. Great for transforming your Amazon listing from Johnny No Mates into Johnny “People Are Actually Buying This” Mates.

But that was just the first 3 days of a 90-day enrollment in KDP Select. What happened next? And what about borrows? Well, when it comes to being borrowed under the KDP Select scheme, I think the self-publishers pushing each other out of the way to spit bullets about Amazon missed two crucial points:

  • You, the cheap self-published book, are not first in the list to be borrowed
  • If you earn 70% on your e-book through KDP, you’ve already enabled lending for Kindle owners who’ve bought your book anyway.

I’m joined Audible where for a small monthly subscription fee, I get to download one audio book free per month. (Free really meaning heavily discounted because of course I’m paying a subscription, although that’s always much less than the cost of the book to buy outright). I never buy any additional books but since the books I buy are usually a day long and I only listen to them on the treadmill, a book a month does the job. Now do you think I’m going to use my one audiobook credit to download anything other than the most expensive audiobook I want? Do you think if you, the self-published author, created an audio version of your book, I’d even consider making it my one free download? There is more chance of me willingly getting on the treadmill than there is of that happening, which is to say it will never occur.

Back to Amazon KDP Select. You’re a Prime customer and a Kindle owner, and you have one free book a month. (Let’s dispatch with the lending terminology; they’re basically getting the book. It doesn’t matter.) Do you think you’re going to use that one credit to get your hands on a book priced 99c, $1.99, $2.99 or even $4.99, when in all likelihood there’s ebooks on your wishlist priced $9.99 or more? I never would. So I was kind of surprised I got borrowed at all—shocked, more like; I was fully prepared to never be borrowed—but 9 people used their one credit to borrow Mousetrapped and Backpacked Too in December. Now I know I wrote the book and I should happy about this, but a part of me wants to grab these people by the shoulders and shout, “You should borrow something that’s expensive!”

I don’t know yet how much I was compensated for these borrows out of the much fabled KDP Select fund of $500,000 for the month of December, but I’ll let you know when I find out.

The 3-day offering had gone so well I decided to use up my other two days over December 23rd-24th. In this period, a further 217 copies were downloaded for free from Amazon.com, and 117 copies from Amazon.co.uk.

Here’s what’s really interesting though, and what should be especially interesting to those who believe that enrollment in KDP leads to losses.

This is what I’d sold of Mousetrapped and Backpacked Too before I went anywhere near KDP Select:

  • September 2011: 7 copies
  • October 2011: 13 copies
  • November 2011: 6 copies.

But up to December 23rd 2011 (and so, before the Christmas rush became responsible for an increase in sales), I’d sold 26 copies of it that month, at $3.99 a go. In the first five days of January, I’ve sold 6 copies of it, and its been borrowed another 6 times. After KDP enrollment and a 3-day free offering, my sales of the enrolled book jumped up to the point that they equalled the total sales of each of the three months prior combined.

What is us being able to enroll in KDP Select is really about? After my limited test run with the service, I had improved sales ranks, more readers and even a bump in my paid for sales. I’d found a booster rocket for my e-book sales. But we’re talking tiny numbers here, and not a book really but a combination of books that were already doing well.

What would happen if I took a book that wasn’t doing at all, and applied the enrollment/free offering to that? Would it help kick start that book’s sales? Would it be a booster rocket?

And as luck would have it, I had a book that needed a booster rocket—Results Not Typical. And when I offered it for free from December 24th until December 28th, it was downloaded over 3,000 times and, from what I can see so far in January, is now selling significantly better than it was before. KDP Select might—might— be just what the doctored ordered for an e-book with sluggish sales.

But you’re going to have to wait a few weeks to hear more about that.

(Sorry!)

The ITIN, 30% Withholding, Tax Refund Saga: An Update

4 Jan

Back in November I shared with you the long and headache-inducing adventures that was applying for an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN), the magic digits that stop the likes of Createspace, Amazon KDP and Smashwords withholding 30% of everything you earn and passing it onto the United States’ Internal Revenue Service on your behalf. If you need a reminder, it took me eight months, three attempts and countless stress balls—and that was just to get the number. Once you have that, you have to send it to each of your self-publishing companies on a form called a W-8BEN.

As I said back then:

“If you submit your ITIN successfully and use the W-8BEN that has an affidavit on the end, you will be refunded all the money the company has unnecessarily withheld from you so far in the current calendar year. You can see why, despite starting the process in April, I was starting to get nervous as spring turned to summer and summer turned to autumn. Again, I used the instructions on Roz’s Nail Your Novel blog for filling out the form. Make sure you use the proper form – you want the one with the affidavit of unchanged status at the end, which you can find here. You don’t need to include anything with your letter, but you do need to put something in the “Reference” line of the W-8BEN form that will identify you to the company.”

I sent off a W-8BEN to Createspace, Amazon KDP and Smashwords back on November 4th.

On November 16th, I got an e-mail from KDP confirming that they’d received the form. Then on November 29th, RESULT! A cheque from KDP for every last cent they’ve withheld from me since January 1st 2011.

On December 5th, my monthly cheque from CreateSpace arrived—except with some extra. It was my payment for the month, along with all my withholdings from January 1st 2011. Again, RESULT!

So now, in 2011, I had received 100% of all my earnings from CreateSpace and Amazon KDP. But I still hadn’t heard a word from Smashwords. One day I noticed that on my account information page on Smashwords, there was a notice saying they had received my ITIN and my withholding rate was now set to 0%. Great, but what about my refund? I e-mailed them, and yesterday I got this back:

“We do not hold onto the tax withholdings, but send all the withholdings to the IRS when we pay authors.  This means that we collected and paid your withholdings when we sent your last payment. The IRS requires us to send them the withholdings within 10-15 days from the time we pay you.  Unfortunately, we don’t have the withholdings and you will need to reclaim them from the IRS.”

So… no refund from Smashwords. I’m sure what they’ve told me is true, but why is this different with them than it is with Createspace and Amazon KDP? I think my refund is only around $200—I don’t sell a lot on Smashwords, never have—but the fact that it’s a small amount actually makes it worse, because it would have to be a significant amount for me to even consider going through the additional hell of applying to the IRS* for a refund.

Createspace and KDP made it so easy; they gave me back the money straightaway.

So why is Smashwords different? Anyone know?

*I was considering using a service like TaxBack.com until I found out that in order for you to sit back and relax while they take care of everything, you have to sign a power of attorney form and change your address with the IRS. Your only other option is to fill out a bunch of stuff and get them to “prepare” it for you (check, presumably) for which you pay a fee of around a hundred dollars. Considering how priceless I consider an absence of stress to be, it’s just not worth it.

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