I have royalties from a book I authored back in 2002. As a result, evidently, I owe "self-employment" tax even though I am not self-employed. Is this right?

[MiriamF · Accepted solution]

No, this is not correct. Royalties are not subject to self-employment tax.

Royalties are reported on Schedule E as passive income. You don't owe self-employment tax on royalties. If you don't otherwise have self-employment income, you can report royalty income in the Premier version of TurboTax Online.

To enter royalty income, you can type "1099-misc" in the Search box, then select Jump to 1099-MISC. You will be able to enter your royalties there.

[kristin_lavransd]

Miriam, what if I receive legacy book royalties from my fathers book?

[Treppenwitz]

TurboTax quite annoyingly thinks that by "royalty", you mean you have an oil or gas well and tries to steer all your responses in that direction. Stick with it this flowchart, though, and you will eventually get into a situation where you are correctly reporting your intellectual property as royalties, which wind up in Schedule E, not Schedule C.  Turbotax does not make it easy for writers or music composers to report passive income from previous works if you are no longer self-employed in that line of work.