[M T McGuire]

I've come up against this, at the moment LuLu are looking into it for me because there, with a British ISBN I believe people do publish through LuLu's UK gateway without having to do the IRS bollo**s. Even though Britain does have a tax treaty with the US and they will refund you all the tax, you have to send things like your passport to them, you have to get annotated copies to prove who you are two, at £70 a pop... unless you know a tame lawyer... that you're not married to, I mean.

Amazon is even worse, you can upload e-books for kindle users if you are outside the US but only through the US site, your books will only be for sale in the US and of course they'll only pay you once you've earned over $100... by cheque... in dollars.

I'm assuming Amazon don't want the authors and publishers in countries outside the US to profit from the kindle.

I do keep coming up against this completely bizarre attitude that the US is the only english-speaking market. What about SA, Oz, NZ, India... oh yeh and Britain, those populations must add up to a bit more than 250 billion.

I'm selling to mainly UK readers so it's really irritating for me... it also means I'll have to refer people to my own website for things I want them to pay for and of course that means I have to pay - or struggle - to convert my book to the major formats.

Mind you, Smashwords seems to be down so much these days I'm not sure it makes any difference.

Sigh. Sorry too much whinging... but surely a UK gateway would sort it out, then you'd be selling your books through smashwords.co.uk/au/za etc and non US authors and publishers would be publishing in their home countries for their home markets.

MTM