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It would be taxed like regular income made from investments, as it turns out the SEC requires me to register these as asset backed securities (in the works), but I'm not sure my market is the typical investor who already knows those ins and outs, so better believe there will be tons of hand holding in that regard, up to offering a free e-filing service in house, just to trim that barrier to adoption as low as possible. As for being worried about Hollywood accounting, you won't have to worry, as the company will act as the exclusive publisher and copyright holder of the works belonging to the authors that want to join. It's the only way to insure against authors offering their works on other platforms behind our backs such that investors are defrauded of their cut (aside from costly monitoring and litigation), also, I can't depend on them to get their royalties direct deposited in their accounts, and then send us that portion belonging to their investors to disseminate it, rather, we need to receive said deposits, then distribute as needed. This limits the sort of authors who would be willing to join the platform to a certain sort of upstart writer, one with a small but growing catalog, and a small but passionate reader base, right at the cusp of getting on the radar of the mainstream publishing world due to their ebook sales. At least those are my thoughts at this time. I'd love to just trust authors to do right by their investors, but I can't ask the investors to be so trusting, and one author deciding to betray the company, if I leave the power in their hands, can tank the whole thing. I'm thinking owners transfer copyright of their works thus far and sign a contract to publish exclusively with us all works in the future, and in exchange they get 95% of the asset backed securities created for their books/future ten years of work, at which point they can then offer any amount up for sale like any other anonymous seller. The firm retains the other 5% for itself for its fee, and does the same. After ten years they are free to renew, or leave the firm to publish with others, but the firm retains the copyrights it paid for until they enter the public domain. Anything an author can make outside of royalties resulting from sales of their works either transferred to us or written under contract to us is their business, and in this case royalties refers to both royalties from sales, and royalties from kindle edition normalized pages read, as we're looking to have a special relationship with Amazon moving forward based on talks with them thus far. |