The hardcovers are in stores now, so I think it’s official. $ git sync murder is out everywhere except my print bookstore. You can get it at all of the usual stores. I have the ebook in my store.
Every time I release a new book, or dare to show my face in public, folks ask me how many books I’ve written. My answer is, “define written and book.” That’s not as snarky an answer as you might think.
First, they’re asking the wrong question. I’ve written many books that were not published and that you will never read. Immortal Clay didn’t pick up a bunch of 4-star and 5-star reviews by being the first novel I ever wrote. It got those by being my fifteenth finished novel in a series of deliberate practice that continues to this day, and my first published novel. So, let’s change the question to “how many books have you published?”
Here’s the current output of the SNMP object where I keep my publications catalog. (Accessing this object is an easter egg in the Networknomicon or, if you’re still attached to your sanity, SNMP Mastery.)
SNMP table: TWP-MIB::mwlBooksTable
titleIndex title year genre length
1 Gatecrasher 1992 fiction full-length
2 Believe it or Else! 1993 fiction full-length
3 Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995 fiction full-length
4 Women who Run with the Werewolves 1995 fiction anthology
5 Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
6 Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
7 Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
8 PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
9 Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
10 Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
11 Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
12 Horror Library volume 2 2010 fiction anthology
13 Opening the Eye 2011 fiction story
14 Breaking the Circle 2011 fiction story
15 SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
16 Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012 fiction full-length
17 DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
18 Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
19 Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
20 No More Lonesome Blue Rings 2013 fiction story
21 Sticky Supersaturation 2013 fiction story
22 Lavender 2013 fiction story
23 Pax Canina 2013 fiction story
24 Wednesday's Seagulls 2013 fiction story
25 FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
26 Immortal Clay 2014 fiction full-length
27 Waking Up Yesterday 2014 fiction story
28 Calling Control 2014 fiction story
29 Moonlight's Apples 2014 fiction story
30 Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
31 Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
32 FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
33 Forever Falls 2015 fiction novella
34 Spilled Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs 1) 2015 fiction story
35 Whisker Line 2015 fiction story
36 Wifi and Romex 2015 fiction story
37 PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
38 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
39 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
40 Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016 fiction full-length
41 Hydrogen Sleets 2016 fiction full-length
42 Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016 fiction novella
43 Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016 fiction full-length
44 Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016 fiction novella
45 Butterfly Stomp (Beaks #0) 2016 fiction full-length
46 Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth 2016 fiction story
47 FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
48 git commit murder 2017 fiction full-length
49 savaged by systemd 2017 fiction story
50 Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
51 Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction novella
52 Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction novella
53 SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
54 Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
55 Bedazzled by Blockchain 2018 fiction story
56 Face Less 2018 fiction story
57 Boundary Shock: Tuesday After Next 2018 fiction anthology
58 Boundary Shock: Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My! 2018 fiction anthology
59 Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
60 FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
61 Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019 fiction full-length
62 Winner Breaks All 2019 fiction story
63 Boundary Shock: Apocalypse Descending 2019 fiction anthology
64 Fiction River: Superstitious 2019 fiction anthology
65 Snot-Nosed Aliens 2019 fiction anthology
66 An Interpretation of Moles 2019 fiction anthology
67 SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
68 Boundary Shock: Alien Dreams 2020 fiction anthology
69 The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
70 Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
71 Boundary Shock: What Might Have Been 2020 fiction anthology
72 Face The Strange 2020 fiction anthology
73 Bloody Christmas 2020 fiction anthology
74 Drinking Heavy Water 2020 fiction full-length
75 Final Gift 2020 fiction story
76 Woolen Torment 2020 fiction story
77 Drums with Delusions of Godhood 2020 fiction story
78 Uncollected Anthology: Deities 2020 fiction anthology
79 Woolen Torment 2021 fiction story
80 Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021 fiction full-length
81 Fiction River: Chances 2021 fiction anthology
82 Fiction River: Dark and Deadly Passions 2021 fiction anthology
83 TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
84 Only Footnotes 2021 nonfiction novella
85 git sync murder 2021 fiction full-length
86 The Holiday Spectacular #2 2021 fiction anthology
That’s 86 things with my name on the cover, excluding articles in periodicals and web sites. (I don’t have the energy to go through all that stuff.) So, I’ve published 86 books.
Except some of these are stories in anthologies. Anthologies are written by multiple authors. They’re only partially “by me.” Excluding those, the catalog has 70 entries. I have published 70 books.
Except some of those are basically chapbooks: single stories, put out on their own in print. I have many more stories than these, by the way, but they’re electronic-only. I ran out of energy before I collected all that information.
47 things with my name on them that are classified as either “full-length” or “novella.” This categorization is incorrect, however. The word “novella” means “a short novel.” The definition on “novel” has bloated over the last one hundred fifty years, driven by manufacturing concerns. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, is about 43,000 words. Publishers would laugh at Doyle today and tell him to try a chapbook publisher based on the length alone. In the 1920s, a 20,000-word tale was considered a novel and might be published as such. I have a great big stack of Rex Stout mystery novels, and many of them contain fewer than 40,000 words.
Let’s take a nonfiction “novella.” Ed Mastery. It is a short book, but it’s unquestionably “a book.”
Alternately, consider Drowned Mirovar the second Prohibition Orcs tale. It’s over 30,000 words. In the era it was set, it would be a full novel that would appear first in a magazine, then as a standalone book. Today, it’s a prologue. As it’s packaged, it’s “a book.” It would look just fine on the shelf next to any of my 1950s novels.
Then there are collections. Vicious Redepmtion is a collection of my short stories. Aidan Redding Against the Universes collects short stories and novels. They’re listed here as “full-length,” which they certainly are. Should I could those as books?
Surely there’s a culturally-accepted standard or industry standard on how to count the number of books you’ve written?
Er… no.
Isaac Asimov established a standard that “if I appear in it, it counts.” He counted anthologies. He counted chapbooks. By that standard, I’ve published 86 books. I am uncomfortable with this definition.
I know authors who won’t count anything shorter than 60,000 words. By that standard, I’ve published 22 books. It excludes all of the Mastery titles except SNMP Mastery. That’s clearly not right for me, either.
For me, the original question is about milestones. It’s about accomplishments. I want to be able to say “I made this thing” and stand by it.
My preferred definition is, if I whack you with it, will it leave a mark? Bystanders would object, however. And I have created some titles that, while they’d leave a mark, I don’t consider them independent books. An example would be the Bail Bond Denied edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. It is literally the exact same text as the regular FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, but with a cover drawn in crayon by yours truly. It is a thing. It gets offered up for charity auctions. I have a small amount of pride in it. It’s not really a discrete book.
So I’m trying this definition.
a) 15,000 words or longer
b) requiring distinct and discrete effort to create
c) something I’m not embarrassed to call “a book.”
This definition lets me exclude titles like the ZedFS version of FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS, the Beck and Provost editions of Terrapin Sky Tango, and the Manly McManface version of Ed Mastery. Only Footnotes might have brand new footnotes in it, but it wasn’t hard to make. It’s excluded. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of these, but only because they polish my reputation as the good sort of troll. I knocked them all off in a morning. (They’re still in the pic of me with one copy of every edition of everything I’ve written, because that picture is only for fun.)
It lets me include works like Ed Mastery and Cash Flow for Creators. I spent three weeks writing the cash flow book, and thirty years learning how to write the cash flow book. It include volumes like the Networknomicon, because producing that required a whole bunch of work. It was a different sort of labor for me, but that unspeakable tome fine educational work is clearly a discrete, unique book.
I’m also counting collections. Again, the “how many books have you published” question is about milestones. Writing enough of A Thing to create a collection is a milestone. Aidan Redding Against the Universes is the closest thing to a Brandon Sanderson doorstop I’ve produced on the fiction side. (Also, that hardcover has two different covers, one on the dust jacket and one on the laminate, and they’re both lovely.)
Applying this definition leaves me with these titles.
1 Gatecrasher 1992 fiction full-length
2 Believe it or Else! 1993 fiction full-length
3 Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995 fiction full-length
5 Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
6 Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
7 Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
8 PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
9 Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
10 Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
11 Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
15 SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
16 Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012 fiction full-length
17 DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
18 Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
19 Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
25 FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
26 Immortal Clay 2014 fiction full-length
30 Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
31 Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
32 FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
33 Forever Falls 2015 fiction novella
37 PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
38 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
40 Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016 fiction full-length
41 Hydrogen Sleets 2016 fiction full-length
42 Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016 fiction novella
43 Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016 fiction full-length
44 Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016 fiction novella
47 FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
48 git commit murder 2017 fiction full-length
50 Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
51 Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction novella
52 Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction novella
53 SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
54 Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
59 Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
60 FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
61 Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019 fiction full-length
67 SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
69 The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
70 Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
74 Drinking Heavy Water 2020 fiction full-length
80 Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021 fiction full-length
83 TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
85 git sync murder 2021 fiction full-length
This makes $ git sync murder my 45th book.
Could this definition be gamed? Sure it could. But I don’t care enough to game it. I stopped counting my releases somewhere around 17 or 18 books. I counted titles on my brag shelf at one point a few years ago, using my gut as a definition, and got a number like 31 or 33 or something like that. I haven’t cared enough to count until today, when I’m putting off doing real work. Now that I’ve counted, I suspect I’ll maintain a silent count until I break 50 and then lose count again. 50 is a milestone, after all.
If you want to argue about my definitions, please find someone else to argue with.