There was much hullaballoo on Twitter this
afternoon that I arrived late at and didn’t understand fully, all I saw were
tweets from bands and indie labels informing everyone that they were ditching
their Bandcamp accounts or at least removing all of their payable downloads as
from January 1st. I was busy sifting through piles of records
upstairs in a charity shop so I hadn’t cottoned on to this story at all and
tweeted a plea for a link to help me out. Thanks to a handful of responses I
eventually found out that from tomorrow digital downloads will be liable for
VAT. While this is a bit of a pisser for me and hundreds like me who work on
the DIY basis, I don’t think it is the Armageddon that people are making it out
to be. Perhaps I should read more into it, but to be honest I don’t know for
sure if it will make a major difference to the money I make from audio book
downloads. I will monitor the situation in the next few days and see if it
would be worth abandoning the Bandcamp profile in favour of the system I used
this Christmas for my audio book of A Christmas Tree,
which was too big a file for Bandcamp to cope with so I emailed it to anyone
who donated using the PayPal button above the blog. This would be an easier
system in a way because the money would go straight to my fund to make free
online content without anyone taking a slice. To be honest I am long overdue
updating the shop page on this site so it would be a good excuse to change how I
sell things.
I leave 2014 behind a lot happier than how I
parted company with 2013, although there are good and bad points to both. 2013
was a far more productive year professionally, (I had three weekly radio shows
to add to my work average of course) but I did take a few financial kicks in
the bollocks which puts a cloud over it. This year has been an improvement on
that score but for some reason my professional productivity was far lower than
last year and I don’t really understand why. It is my intention to hit the
ground running next year (tomorrow) and focus my attention on working my way
through the to-do list I have written for this year. As I have said already, I have
set myself the challenge of doing something creative and work related every
single day of the year, (the blog only counts on ‘holiday’ type days such as my
birthday and Christmas Day) and marking the day in my diary with a tick and a
brief description of what I did.
Having said that, tomorrow I will begin 2015
by cheating slightly by releasing a podcast that I have had gathering dust
since the summer when I recorded it and forgot all about it. The release will
count because I made the rules.
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