Image by ClawzCTR via Flickr

One of the things I’ve had the hardest time figuring out since my freelance writing began producing a significant income was how to manage my estimated quarterly tax payments. For the time being, I’ve been over-paying my taxes at my day job and hoping that it was enough to cover the taxes I wasn’t paying on my freelance income. Last year my overpaid taxes just barely covered my freelance taxes – assuming my income keeps climbing at the rate it is (and especially once I start scaling back my day job) this jury-rigged system isn’t going to work for much longer.

Enter Outright, a free online service to help freelancers manage their taxes. Using Outright is fairly simple – you just enter in your income as it comes in, and your expenses as they go out. Around the end of each quarter, Outright sends you a reminder saying your upcoming taxes are about due, and figures them out for you (including Social Security – both employee’s and employer’s contributions) and Medicare). Where several methods exist to figure out your taxes, Outright uses the one that requires the highest payment, on the principle that  its better to overpay a little now and get it back at the end of the text year than to underpay and get hit with fees.

[NOTE: Outright is designed for the US tax system and, as of right now, does not support non-US taxpayers.]

What makes Outright really shine, though, is its integration with other services. On the “income” side, Outright integrates with online bookkeeping system FreshBooks, importing paid invoices every night and updating your tax estimate. On the “expenses” side, you can track receipts using Shoeboxed, an online system that allows you to scan receipts into the system so you can dispose of hard copy (paid versions even allow you to mail your receipts in and have them scanned for you).

Altogether, Outright, FreshBooks, and Shoeboxed create a full accounting system freelancers – particularly at low– and mid-range incomes. Outright scales pretty well, though – as your tax needs get more complex and demand the attention of a bookkeeper or accountant, you can easily give them access – a couple clicks and the system sends an email with a link to set up third-party access to your books.

With a system like this, there’s no longer any excuse to avoid paying your quarterly estimated tax payments. Entry-level versions of FreshBooks and Shoeboxed are free, as is Outright – why not set them all up and give it a try?

Enter e-Junkie. For $5 US a month, e-Junkie provides you with an online shopping cart, storage for digital downloads, order processing, inventory management, email autoresponders, and a lot more.

Let’s say you’ve written an e-book. You upload the file to e-Junkie, write a sales page on your own site, and insert e-Junkie’s code to place a “Buy it now” button on your page. When visitors click through to buy your e-book, they’re directed to your e-Junkie shopping cart, where they can pay via PayPal or Google Checkout (or a couple of other services) and instantly get a download link.

e-Junkie will also handle physical products — it works the same way, except that when an order is placed, you get an email with the details so you can fulfill the order yourself. You can offer several variants — say, a paperback and hardcover of the same book. e-Junkie will even calculate the shipping costs and sales tax (where applicable).

What makes e-Junkie especially compelling is the ability to set up affiliate programs so that other people can promote and sell your product. You choose how much you’d like to pay per sale — say, 20% of the sale price — and e-Junkie will provide your affiliates with a tracking code they can use to send sales your way. e-Junkie doesn’t administer the affiliate program; at the end of the month, you’ll get a tally of affiliate sales and you have to pay off your affiliates (via PayPal, usually).

Of course, you can always join the affiliate program of any of your fellow e-Junkie sellers. Signing up is easy — find a product you like in their affiliates directory (under the “Affiliates” tab), and click the link at the bottom to join their affiliate program. You’ll get a choice of either a text link to customize or a “Buy Now” button you can put on your site — the idea is, you write your review, sales page, blog post, or other copy, and the author pays you for your help.

Although e-Junkie allows sellers to market a wide range of products, it seems designed with e-books and software — downloadable products — in mind. Tough luck for everyone else, but good news for writers!

Go check out e-Junkie. As far as I’ve seen, they’re the only ones offering this kind of service, and they do it very well.

But for the most part, I’ve tried to recommend free or, as much as possible, low-cost software and services — and when possible, open-source software. There are a number of reasons for this, which add up to something like a philosophy:

1. Writers, especially beginning writers, often can’t afford expensive software. There are programs out there that promise to help you write better, faster, and clearer copy — for a price. And it’s usually a high price — some of these packages run over $200 US! If you’re just getting started, it might be months (or even longer) before you see any financial return, let alone enough to make back the cost of these programs. Why spend so much when there are plenty of free programs that do the job as well?
2. A lot of software for writers seems “scammy”. Writing isn’t easy; good writing even less so. I’m deeply suspicious of software that promises to make writing a novel or screenplay easier. Organizing notes, handling formatting, etc — these are things I expect software to do well, not make writing easy.
3. Open source software is free in more than just cost. There’s a saying in the open source/free software world: “Free as in speech”. Writers above all people have a responsibility to support efforts to protect freedom of speech (and the most to gain from those efforts), including the freedoms that are embodied in open source software — to look at and modify the code. Even if you can’t modify your software, there are programmers who can, and open source software gives them the freedom to do so. (Actually, I’d like to find more open source software specifically for writers, so if you know of anything, drop me a line.)
4. Free tools are often as good or even better than their paid alternatives. If there’s a paid program that’s really the best for its purpose, I’ll recommend it. But where free programs do the job as well, I see the cost of the paid alternative as unwarranted.
5. I can’t afford it. I’ve written largely about products I use, or would use, and cost is a factor in whether I decide to use something. I can’t afford a hundred or more dollars to evaluate a program — and even less to evaluate all the programs available for writers.
6. I don’t do the kinds of writing a program supports. For example, since I’m not a screenwriter, it’s hard for me to be fair in evaluating a program intended for screenwriters. When hundreds of dollars are on the line, it’s even harder.

There are programs that are worth the money, and I cover them when I can. There are also programs that are industry standards, like FinalDraft A/V for screenwriting. My feeling is that if you’re at the stage in your career where you need to use FinalDraft, you’re probably pretty comfortable with the technical aspects of the software — and you can probably afford (and probably need) the support material (books, classes, etc.) you need to use the software. A blog post probably isn’t going to cut it for you.

All that said, if there’s paid software that people really need to know about, let me know. Most paid software offers evaluations, and the 30 days or so they let you us the software for free is enough time to figure out most of the basics. I can also try to get a review copy from companies that don’t offer demos, though that’s a hit-or-miss prospect.

Finally, I’d be happy to post your reviews, if you want. If there’s a piece of software that you’d like to see get some attention, write a short review and I’ll consider posting it to the site (and I’ll give you credit). The ultimate goal is to help writers find out about technology that can help them, so if there’s something I’m missing that would help you or your fellow writers, I’m more than willing to figure out how to add that to the site.

And here’s the kicker — your commission ranges from 4% to 8.5%, which means that, depending on how many sales you achieve and what your agreement with your publisher is, you may end up making more from Amazon sales than you do from your royalties! Look:

Royalties: If you sell a book at $19.99, and get 5% of the wholesale price (usually 60% of the cover price), you’ll make .05 x .60 x $19.99 = $0.60. If you sell 100 copies, you’ll make $60 in royalties.
Amazon Associates: The same book might be marked down at Amazon to $15.99. If you sell one copy, you get 4% of 15.99, which is $0.64. If you sell 100 books, your commission is 6.5%, which nets you $1.04 per copy, or $104 for 100 books. Of course, you still get royalties on those books, too.

To create a link, you can log into your Amazon Associates account and select from dozens of “Widgets”, including ones that will scan your page and automatically create banners targeted towards the keywords on your page (it’s called Omakase). I don’t generally like their widgets, though they’re ok as ads to run in your site’s sidebar. Usually, I create links manually, by adding my associate ID to the end of the URL for a product page. Here’s how:

1. Search for a product. For illustration, we’ll use my book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War.
2. Go to the product’s main page and copy it’s URL. For my book, it’s: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203705368&sr=8–1
3. See that string of numbers after the title and before where it says “ref=pd_bbs_sr_1…”? We only need the link up to there, so cut everything after the slash.
4. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/
5. That’s enough to find the book with, but it doesn’t have my associate ID attached yet. My associate ID code is “dwax-20″, and I’ll just add it to the end — Amazon is really good at picking out your associates ID.
6. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/dwax-20. Clicking that link will take you to the exact same page, but I’ll get credit if you buy the book. In fact, I’ll get credit if you decide not to buy it and buy something else, instead, as long as you entered the site using my link.

Barnes and Noble also has an affiliate program, if you prefer working with them for whatever reason. I find Amazon’s to be far more useful (in terms of providing value to website visitors) but in the end, it’s links to books — and whichever company you feel offers the best combination of value and compensation should get your traffic. Borders recently “divorced” Amazon, launching it’s own online bookstore after several years of fulfilling orders through Amazon. Their affiliate program, then, is only just getting off the ground, but if you prefer Borders, that’s the way to go.

Use your affiliate link wherever you promote your book — on your website, in your email signature, on forums, anywhere you can paste a link. Obviously the vast majority of your sales will not come from you telling people where to find your book, but if you’re an active promoter, a significant number of sales will come from your link, which will be a nice bonus above your regular royalties — and you won’t have to wait a year to collect, either.

• 25+ Pieces of Writing Software You Should Know About
  Ali at Daily Writing Tips offers up no less (and possibly more) than 25 applications that writers might get some use out of. There are apps for collaboration, word processing, writing novels and screenplays, organizing your research materials, and more. Some are free, some are somewhat expensive. Not all of them are apps I would recommend, but you might have a different opinion.
• The Benefits of Writing a Pillar Post
  Tay at Super Blogging pays a visit to the territory I covered in my Build Your Blog’s Traffic and Impact with Resource Posts, with 4 very good reasons to think about writing your own pillar posts, and a few examples to get you started.
• Junk for Writers
  Paperback Writer lists 10 office supplies every writer will want to clutter their writing space with. Pure office supply porn!
• 24 Rebellious Resources for Freelancing
  Quiet Rebel Writer is tearing it up lately with more rebellious resources than you can shake a stick at! (Not that you’d want to – what would that accomplish?) Here, Amy Lillard sends you off with the message that we writers, we can write ANYTHING – and gives you 24 places on the web to make that platitude a reality.
• 6 Productivity Tools for MS Word
  Ah, MS Word, the savage witch-queen of the writing profession. WE hate you, yet are compelled to bow down before your greatness. Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily gives you a handful (if you’re polydactylic) of tips to help you tame the beast.
• The Hidden Freelance Writing Job Market
  Jodee Redmond at Freelance Writing Jobs suggests ways freelancers can find work by taking a step or two out of the ordinary.
• Could The Freelance Writer’s Most Important Tool Be The Lowly Spreadsheet?
  Tom Chandler at The Copywriter Underground tells you how to use a spreadsheet to help keep you on top of your freelance work. Spreadsheets are all mathy and stuff, and writers tend to want to forget they even exist, but as Tom reminds us, there’s some real value for writers who remember that they’re running a business, too.

And a couple of self-promoting links, if you don’t mind:

• Smithereens is holding a contest to find the wittiest twitterer on Twitter. To enter, tweet something witty and copy the tweet and the link to the comments of that post. I’m judging entries, along with James Chartrand of Men with Pens.
• James and I are judging another contest, this time at my fellow Lifehack writer Joel Falconer’s site, Joel is looking for someone to write a great post on how bloggers can use FriendFeed. Check out the post for more information. (For the record, I have no idea why James and I are suddenly the go-to pair for judging contests – we actually don’t know each other. Coincidence, I guess.)

What have you come across this week that might interest your fellow WTC readers? Or, better yet, what have you written that you want to share with the rest of us? Leave a link or three in the comments!

Whatever the reason, creating a donation form for your website is pretty easy using PayPal’s form builder. Go to PayPal’s Donation Button page and click “Get Donation Buttons”. You’ll be asked to log in and then will be taken to a form to fill out. Enter your name or the name of your site where it asks for the “Donation name/service”. Leave the “Amount” field blank so your guests can enter their own amount, but be sure to select a currency and your country.

Then choose a style for your button. The next section asks you  whether you want your button encrypted; if you choose “yes”, you’re done and can click the big “Create Button Now” button at the bottom. If you select “No” you can add further options, like whether you want to allow donors to include a note.

When you create your button, you’ll be given a field full of code to cut-and-paste into your site. Make sure you paste it in as HTML, not as text (for example, don’t use the visual editor in WordPress). The code I generated looks like this:

You can paste it anywhere on your site, but if you’re on WordPress, you’ll probably want to paste it into a “text widget” — go to Design > Widgets” and add a “text” widget to your sidebar. If your theme isn’t widget-enabled, you can also paste the code into your sidebar; go to “Design > Theme Editor” and select “Sidebar” from the menu on the right side.

You probably won’t get rich asking for donations, but it might help defray the cost of hosting, and maybe put a latte in your hand every now and again too. What do you think of donation buttons on websites? Does it turn you off, make you feel useful, or something else entirely?

PayPal offers three different kinds of accounts: Personal, Premier, and Business. A personal account lets you send money and receive small amounts from other members — it’s essentially a “starter” account and useless for any real business. Most writers are going to want a Premier account, which allows you to accept credit cards, accept unlimited payments, and get a debit card you can use to shift funds out of your PayPal account (though you can also link your account to a bank account and wire transfer funds from PayPal for free). If you run a business and need several people to access the same account, get a Business account, which is otherwise the same as a Premier account.

Of course, PayPal takes a cut — but it’s the same as or less than other merchant accounts. If you receive less than $3000 US a month, you’ll pay 2.9% plus a 30-cent transaction fee; the percentage drops the more you make. Keep track of your PayPal fees, since they’re deductible business expenses.

PayPal offers a bunch of business services to make selling products from your website (e.g. books, e-books, artwork, etc.) easy. Once you’re logged in, click the “merchant services” tab and check it out. One handy thing is the “Buy now” button, which you can customize completely and insert on any page where you’re selling something. When visitors click the button, they’re taken to a PayPal sales page where they can either pay with their own PayPal account or enter a credit card number. PayPal will figure the sales tax and shipping, based on the information you provide. If you have several products and want to get really fancy, you can integrate PayPal into many shopping carts, though that’s a little too complex for the beginner — you’d be better off hiring a developer or getting your teenage nephew to do it. (Maybe I’ll come back to that in a future post.)

PayPal also offers invoicing, though I prefer to use BlinkSale for invoicing, which allows a greater degree of control over the appearance of my invoices — and which allows me to embed a “Pay with PayPal” link to automate payment. If you’re going to use PayPal to receive payments from clients, regardless of whether you use their invoices or BlinkSales or your own, make sure you add your professional email address to your PayPal account. Don’t tell your clients to send their payment to crazydrunk81583959302435@collegechicks.com or anything else that offers too close a look into your personal life — make sure your yourname@yourname.com email address is linked to your PayPal account.

If you haven’t already, open a Paypal account right now!