PSA: Fledgling Mailing Costs

[rolanni]

Down in another thread, slash_reader asks the following question:

I live in the UK & am concerned about the postage you will be facing to send my copy. I feel like I made my donation at the time & now you will have to give me back $10-15 of this donation for the postage... I am not so pleased about this.

Is there a way to donate to cover postage costs which won't annoy your tax authorities?

To which I replied:


Thank you for thinking of this.

I went over to the US Post Office site and fed in the information for sending Fledgling to the UK. It would appear that, cheapest, we're looking at $14.20 for one book, which is, frankly, somewhat more than we had budgeted for postage out of the donations*. The post office has been going, er, batshit the last few years with rates, which of course we didn't -- and couldn't -- know in 2007, when this all started. (We have, for the record, seen four postage rate increases since January 2007.)

Because we are freelancers, the IRS considers any money we take in to be taxable -- that's just how it is.

Let me poke around for a couple minutes and see if I can set something up with PayPal. I will make a new post at the top of the journal detailing what I may discover.

Watch the skies!

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*the accounting for Fledgling and Saltation went like this: 33% off the top for taxes; split the remainder in half, one half to postage and (so we thought at the time) printing, the other half to keeping the authors under roof.
* * *

This message is to note that those who wish to donate money toward postage, may do so by sending an amount they deem appropriate to postageATkorval.com (where AT is replaced by @).

This is not a requirement; we said that we would send those folks who donated $25 or more a signed copy of the book when done, and that we will do. This is an option provided to those folks who, like slash_reader feel that they want to do something more.

Thank you all. We have the Best Fans Ever.

Comments

[fridayflute.livejournal.com]

As I understand things, you only pay estimated taxes on your net income, not the gross -- at least that's how I figure it. I do mine based on gross income minus expenses minus a pro-rated portion of last year's home office deduction and it seems to come out reasonably square - or at least within the margin that keeps me from paying penalties.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I do mine based on gross income minus expenses minus a pro-rated portion of last year's home office deduction and it seems to come out reasonably square

The chances of my (1) remembering to do this every single quarter and (2) getting it right are into the negative numbers, I fear. Even doing a percentage of gross, we somehow wind up always owing taxes.