Payment, Pricing, and Accounting Questions

December 20, 2023 00:26

How should I price my product?

When you upload your Storytellers Vault product, you will enter all of the metadata for your product, including setting its price. You have the option to set the price to be free ($0). You can also set the price to be Pay What You Want (PWYW), meaning that each customer can set their own price (from $0 up) to pay for your product. Most products, though, will be priced at a fixed price.

The ideal fixed price varies with the length of RPG product and its quality of writing, art, and design. Based on historic data from DriveThruRPG sales for PDFs, the most successful price points are $1.00, $2.00, $2.95, $3.95, $4.99, $7.95, $10.00, $14.95, and $19.99.

More detail can be found in this OneBookShelf blog post.

How do I get paid?

Once you activate your Storytellers Vault title for public sale, your account will begin to accrue a 50% royalty every time your product sells. You can withdraw your accumulated royalties via PayPal by going to the My Money section of the Account page. Note that the My Money section of your Account page will not display until you have a balance accrued.

There is a $1 fee to cover the cost of each withdrawal, but you will pay no other fees, either to us or to PayPal, to receive your money.

To prevent certain types of fraud, we must hold back the amount of royalties you earned in the past 30 days from being eligible for withdrawal. The amount eligible for withdrawal at any time, is your total account earnings balance less the amount earned in the past 30 days. You may use your earnings as site credit to pay for orders on site; this will lower your earnings balance and the amount eligible for withdrawal.

We pay royalties only via PayPal. Creating a PayPal account is free and easy, and in most countries, you can connect your PayPal account to your bank account and transfer money from PayPal to your bank in a few business days.

Will I receive a 1099 tax form for my royalty income?

We do not issue 1099-MISC forms to authors who receive their royalties from us via PayPal payments. The Internal Revenue Service does not require us to include payments made via PayPal on Form 1099-MISC, and as PayPal is currently the only means of withdrawing author royalties, we do not issue 1099-MISC.

Please be aware the Internal Revenue Service does require PayPal to send you a separate, Form 1099-K for PayPal payments when both of these are true: a) payments into your PayPal account total more than $20,000 and b) the total number of payments exceed 200, within a calendar year.

It is therefore likely that many authors will not meet the thresholds for PayPal to send a Form 1099-K. In this case, authors will neither receive a Form 1099-K from PayPal, nor will they receive a Form 1099-MISC from us.

Such taxpayers can then self-report this royalty income with their annual tax-filing by going to their Account page’s My Money section and visiting the “Customer Account Payment History” page. This page will report the total payment amounts made via PayPal during the calendar year. For purposes of reporting this royalty income, the payer is our site’s parent company OneBookShelf, Inc.. The payer information is:

Roll20 LLC.

4593 Hancock Way SW

Lilburn, GA 30317

EIN: 20-5670573

For authors who also have publisher accounts with Roll20 marketplaces, you may have additional payments from Roll20 made by PayPal or check from your publisher account. See the Partner Help Center tax information section for more information.