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Don’t Mess With The IRS!
How to complete the tax form to receive all of your self-published royalties.
(Note: this piece was written in August 2020 — please be aware that things may have changed since then. As a UK writer, it’s written primarily from a UK perspective.)
No business likes giving away 30% of its income when it doesn’t have to, and that applies to your writing business too. If you’ve opened your first self-published royalty statement to discover 30% of your income has been withheld, you need to act now to stop it happening in the future.
It’s all down to the American Inland Revenue Service (IRS), which requires American companies to withhold 30% of any income earned through them by non-US citizens.
Most of us who self-publish do so via an American-based organisation, such as Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, or Draft2Digital. This means they all have to adhere to IRS regulations. Unless you’ve told these organisations to the contrary, they assume you owe the IRS tax on this royalty income that you’ve earned.
Luckily for us, the American IRS has international treaties that allow citizens in some countries to receive all (or most) of their royalties earned through these American companies without having any monies withheld. These treaties insist that the beneficiaries…
