🚀 go-pugleaf

>Without such an organization, there's no clean answer. It costs us American
>authors a significant fraction of the product price (for most products,
>anyway) to convert foreign payments. I'm sure foreign subscribers have the
>same problem when they try to pay up in foreign currency.  Anyone got any
>suggestions?

Not many, unfortunately. This isn't just a problem with shareware, but with
many/most international situations. 

The way it is generally handled with Science fiction things (conventions,
fanzines, etc) is that you set up a relationship with an agent/distributor
in the given country. They handle all of the payments for that country, do
the mailing locally (you airship the issue to them in bulk) and do all the
administrivia. They hold onto the money for expenses or convert the currency
in bulk at one time. In return, they get something like a free subscription
or membership, egoboo, or perhaps a cut in the profits, if any.

This unfortunately assumes that you have a known audience requesting a
specific service, rather than sending the product out as sharware and
waiting for payment. But it's possible that the shareware authors can band
together in the major countries (like France seems to have) and have a
central clearing bureau. Or perhaps shareware authors can find shareware
authors in other countries and agree to sponsor each other's products. 

It's a nasty situation. Unfortunately, the only real winners seem to be the
banks. 


Chuq Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ
Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms