I found a few useful things in my stroll around the Internet this morning. Not so much for me, but perhaps one of you could use this information.

I hadn’t understood that authors outside the U.S. are subject to withholding tax when they publish through a U.S. system like Amazon’s Direct Publishing. You can file some tax forms to get around this, but apparently a lot of the self-publishing systems don’t make it too clear exactly how to do this. Fortunately, Canadian author Cheryl Kaye Tardif has put together an informative guide explaining exactly how to go about obtaining and filing a form W-7, W8-BEN and obtaining an ITIN from the IRS.

I’m a huge fan of Scrivener myself, but lots of people enjoy Open Office as an alternative to using Word for their writing. Apparently Open Office files don’t always work well with Smashword’s Meatgrinder engine. So author J. Daniel Sawyer has developed a template for formatting your stories for Smashword. I don’t use Open Office so I can’t personally guarantee it works, but Open Office users might want to check it out.

And, on the “just for fun” side of things, I’ve fallen in love with this My Writing is Fine Snake Mug. It will be perfect for cranky writing days. (Note: not my mug design)