Tax tips for authors: Understand foreign taxes, tax credit and tax certification

If you have sold your textbooks in foreign markets, foreign publishers may withhold foreign taxes at the source before the money is paid to your agent and before it is paid to you. If they are doing that, and you earned, for example, $10,000 in a foreign country, 10 percent, or $1,000, will have been withheld from your payment. Your agent would have received $9,000, and withheld his 15 percent commission on the $10,000 you actually earned. So you would end up getting about $7,500.

Think of yourself as a writer

Authors need to understand the process by which their manuscript will be evaluated and take that into account when they submit. If a smart recent college graduate can’t decode what your book is about, you’re in trouble.

When I graduated from college I hoped to land a job working on a dude ranch in Wyoming. Instead, I fell into a career in scholarly publishing, acquiring books for Oxford University Presses. I realize now that as an editor I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the prose. I cared more about the ideas than about how well they were expressed, at least that’s what I told myself. It wasn’t true.