Why I don’t charge for my Substack IP

tl;dr: Substack is not set up for small accounts with international paid subscribers

Why can’t I take your money on Substack?

Let me preface this by saying that technically, I could turn on paid subsriptions - goodness knows I have a few supporters waiting in the wings who have offered to contribute to my sharing of my intellectual property on Substack.

Most of my audience is based outside of the UK. (In fact, since moving back to the UK, I have had one small gig with a UK-based client; 99% of my income is from international organisations.)

The harsh reality of having international readers

On Substack It’s not practical for content creators with international audiences to turn on payments unless you are earning so much money that you can pay someone to figure out how much tax you owe on your earnings in each country where you have one or more paid subscribers. Quite frankly, as much as I enjoy being recognised for the work I put into the expertise I share, I have a day job, and spending time, energy, and money to register as a merchant of record in potentially dozens of countries.

Mark A. Shryock discusses the ins and outs of the situation well in this post:

WHY DOESN’T SUBSTACK WARN WRITERS ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL TAX TRAP IT BUILT INTO THE PLATFORM

The précis is that “When a reader from another country buys a subscription from you, you legally become a cross border business selling digital services into that country. In places like the European Union or the United Kingdom, you can owe Value Added Tax, VAT, starting from your very first sale. Substack shifts one hundred percent of that tax liability onto the writer, and it does this through its own corporate structure and the limitations it builds into the platform.”

For UK tax residents, HMRC (the UK tax authority) taxes all worldwide income, so then I imagine I’d have to figure out all the reciprocal tax arrangements with other countries, a time-sink nightmare at best, and a money-sink nightmare at worst. Mark has blocked paid subscriptions from everywhere except his home country (the US). In my case none of my pledged subscriptions or one-time donations comes from the UK, so it doesn’t even make sense to do that.

For the foreseeable future

I’m fortunate in that I don’t need to rely on Substack for my income, with the side effect that eliminating tedious accounting tasks for myself means HMRC has no taxes to collect from me and Substack has nothing to take a percentage of. (Weighing down authors under the weight of bureaucracy is never a good look.)

So you get to enjoy the fruits of my labour as my gift to you. It’s oddly freeing, as I don’t stress about publishing on a schedule, or worrying that my use of AI to organise my thoughts into an outline might trigger some authoring alarm. I’ll keep writing if you keep reading!