Crash course in small business

In recent days I may have mentioned that Mary's book had arrived from Germany and that our bedroom and the rest of our upstairs suite is now positively infested by them. It is true. Though at least they are not crowding out my new couch, which continues to hold pride of place of all the upstairs objects.

But it is an awful lot of books, so now we have to get rid of them. That's where you come in, my dear readers, in your natural capacity as customers. Just click right here and you can go get one of these beauties. If you live locally, select "Pick Up" rather than putting in your address and Mary or I will swing it by your house sometime. Or meet you in a dark and secluded location for a discreet handoff.

To be honest, it's not your money we need, it's the revenue. See, the thing is, we have a lot of expenses for this book. If you are not an art superstar, art book publishing now is a pay to play deal. We paid $30k or so to a company in Germany (Kehrer Verlag) and they designed and printed the book. They didn't do hardly any editing. That was all on me. But they did a fine job printing the thing. The pix look great. Mary agrees, which is kind of key.

So we are expensing that $30k and reducing our income. But if we're gonna do that, the IRS wants to see a good faith effort to make money on our part, lest we run afoul of the "hobby rules." For some reason the IRS doesn't want to let people just throw money away and reduce their taxable income. I get it, makes sense. 

Another thing the IRS wants to see is a concerted attempt to improve business methods, to be business-like. Mary has been packing books in boxes and running them down to the post office. That will get old quick. Soon we will have the postal service come and pick them up, like my neighbor John does with whatever weird crap he is shipping out that week.

Frankly, we're also gonna need to get a business bank account for this. Mary is gonna have to suck it up and come down to the bank with me. Otherwise all this will flow through our personal accounts and it will get messy.

But for today, I'm done.