December’s Diptheroid Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of December, and to the public at the beginning of January. Not a Patronizer? You could be.)

Autumn is my favorite Michigan season. Cool enough at night to wear sweatpants, warm enough in the day to wear shorts. Oh well, it’ll return. Some distant day.

Mostly shorter bits for you this month.

The immediate news is that despite the election, we’ll be staying in Detroit for now. We’re under less threat than many other people, and there are family issues with leaving. All I can say about this is that we’re preparing for trouble. On to happier things. Among them, long-term and short-term goals, business structure crap, and what I’m doing next.

I have a daft career. Tales that I dash off in a day go viral. Books that I spend a year writing and that fill obvious needs crumple like tinfoil submarines. The good news is, I’m far from the only creator this happens to. Well, my favorite mainstream rock band is Blue Öyster Cult. (Who? That’s as mainstream as I get, sorry.) If you know nothing else about the band, you’ve almost certainly seen SNL’s Cowbell Sketch about recording their biggest hit. That sketch went viral. Decades after the sketch, guitarist Buck Dharma was interviewed about surviving that sketch, and how to have a fifty year career. If you make stuff, and intend to make stuff over the long term, it’s worth reading.

Also, be careful when you pick your nom de plume. You might be stuck with it in your 70s, so be sure it’s cool as hell.

Next up: taxes. I’ve been struggling with my business structure for a while now, and the RYOMS kickstarter has shifted reorganizing from “an item on the to-do pile” to “set it on fire and shove it up my nose until I fix it.” The trick is finding an accountant who can handle intellectual property. That’s a highly specialized field, even among tax attorneys; your local CPA ain’t it. I have a bias towards using local people as much as possible, so I’ve been hunting in Detroit and then through greater Michigan. I had a call today with a top tax attorney, who told me I wouldn’t find the person I’m looking for in Michigan. I’m now querying my out-of-state writer friends, many of whom have IP tax attorneys. I get access to the same tax rules as other IP creation companies, so I need an actual, legitimate Hollywood accountant. Dog save me.

Finding that person is a right pain, though. I’m pretty sure I could hire Ernst & Young or one of those companies, but I’d rather have someone a little smaller and with a brain that’s a little more twisted. Fortunately, a friend JUST sent me a couple firms that presented at Author Nation so I have a small amount of hope.

Finally, the bit that’s probably of more interest to folks:

My experience over publishing the last few books, especially RYOMS, tells me a few things.

  • People will sponsor tightly focused tech books.
  • People will back such books on Kickstarter.
  • If an ebook is not available on Amazon, people will come to my store or Gumroad instead–especially if you explain why.

Self-publishing and print-on-demand technology has improved over the last few years. I can now produce a reasonably robust ebook. Current POD binding techniques let us reasonably publish 600-page 7″x10″ books. I’m wondering if it’s time I self-publish a big tech book. Ideally I’d get the Absolute OpenBSD rights back from No Starch Press and do a third edition. (While I own the copyright on my NSP titles, that copyright is exclusively licensed to them.) If not that, a title like “Transcendent OpenBSD” would suffice. (NOT SAYING I’M DOING THIS BOOK, RIGHTS ARE COMPLICATED, THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL.)

There’s some risks in this, even beyond the time I’d spend writing the book. My back-of-the-envelope math 600-page print-on-demand book would retail for about $100, the ebook version about $40-$50. That’s steep. I know many tech books cost that much, but still. I’ve never even imagined charging that much for a self-pub title. The sponsorship and Kickstarter prices would increase. Basically, with that many words everything doubles or triples. Daydreaming about these kinds of numbers feels deranged.

Holding the price down that far assumes I make some fierce changes to the production process. I’d outsource indexing. A larger book would require several rounds of print proofs. The print Mastery books use a larger font. Squeezing an Absolute book into 600 pages doesn’t allow that; it’s basically “cram half a million words into this form factor no matter what it takes.” The result looked fine half a lifetime ago, but so did many other things. Here’s a page of RYOMS versus a page of AO2e. NSP’s print size is comparable to that used by other big tech book publishers, so I’m confident that they have achieved Minimum Viable Font.

Smaller print makes a huge difference, both in how many words you can cram in and legibility. This is clearly an Old People Problem.

On a related note, I have to do my production work on a commercial operating system. Microsoft is deprecating Windows 10 and my 9-year-old desktop can’t be upgraded to Windows Bloody Vomit11, so I bought a new workstation. I’m not saying I bought something with 128GB RAM because of this project, but Adobe has long considered my hardware a suitable replacement for their programming chops.

This whole concept is built on sand, though.

If I said, “Hey sponsors, I’m doing a giant book but ebook/print sponsorships will run $75 and $200,” would they nope out?

If the print book retailed for $100, would people buy it?

If I reclaim the rights for Absolute OpenBSD, the third edition would have a different production style than the first two editions. Would that alienate returning readers? Should I emulate the earlier edition’s cover art or use a Mastery-style cover?

Every book needs copyediting. Making changes after publication would be extra expensive, so I would need two copyeditors. Both would cover the entire book.

So, yeah. It’s tempting. A Kickstarter might break $100K, but have commensurate expenses. No reward without risk, no debacle without daftness.

But it’s getting late. I should put down the spreadsheets, put on Extraterrestrial Live, and be glad that SNL has never noticed me.

2024 Income Sources

How do I make a living at this silly business? By gathering money through every available channel. For the last few years I’ve posted where the money comes from.

First, the usual boilerplate. I’m a writer. My income comes from writing books and making them available. I publish both independently and through publishers. I don’t consult. I don’t seek out speaking fees. I desire to make my living as an author, creating and licensing intellectual property. I make my books available in every channel that offers reasonable terms.

Whenever I share actual dollar figures, people inform me that I can’t possibly be making that much, or that I don’t deserve to make that much, or demand I share “the secret.” The first two are not worth my time, and I’ve been trying to tell everyone the dang secret for years: keep writing with an attitude of deliberate practice and manage your cashflow. Nothing productive comes from such discussions, so I don’t share those numbers.

The numbers this year are weird because the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter went viral. When you express values year-over-year as percentages and one of the values decides to bloat, everything else skews. How weird? Well, here’s 2024.

Here’s the detail.

Kickstarter – 41.63%
Amazon – 16.34%
TWP direct sales – 14.09%
TWP sponsorship – 11.30%
Trad Pub – 6.07%
TWP patronizer – 3.53%
Patreon – 2.67%
IngramSpark – 2.25%
Gumroad – 1.12%

What about Apple, Kobo, Google, and so on? The mighty Barnes & Noble? All under one percent. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the cash, but at that level the sale of a single book can shift a retailer’s ranking.

What conclusions can I draw from this?

First, disintermediation works. Eliminating rent-seeking middlemen is a viable path. Yes, Kickstarter is a middleman. They are a much less intrusive middleman than Amazon, however.

If you just look at the percentages, however, you might think that I’ve replaced a dependency on Amazon with a dependency on Kickstarter. Kickstarter backers are much closer to the bottom of the Reader Acquisition Funnel than Amazon customers, however. Those readers are highly willing to back authors they like, and they prefer to do so as directly as possible. Most of my Kickstarter backers are happy to sign up for my mailing list and even sponsor future books.

That’s a strong statement, but consider this. The print sponsorships for Run Your Own Mail Server were open for a year. I got 148 epub sponsors and 89 print sponsors in that year, and was delighted. That book advanced to Kickstarter, and I was thrilled. Happy RYOMS backers signed up for my sponsors mailing list.

The sponsorships for the next book opened 12 October 2024. Since then, it’s picked up 70 epub sponsors and 113 print sponsors. Many of those sponsors came from the RYOMS Kickstarter.

Lure people into a direct relationship with you. Offer special bait to suck them in. It works. Remember that you want happy readers who come back over and over again: be a rose, not a pitcher plant!

But what about Amazon? What about discoverability?

Amazon is just a discovery platform, like Apple Books and Kickstarter and everything else. The most recent tech books are available in print from Amazon, but not in their Kindle store. You can buy Kindle-compatible versions in many places, but not on Amazon. Again, I don’t hate Amazon. I don’t love them, either. They’re just another retailer offering yet another nonnegotiable deal, and for my tech books I must refuse their Kindle store deal.

So, are there long-term trends? I ran the numbers to compare my above-1% retailers to my non-retail channels. For what it’s worth, I graphed them.

That huge blue block that dominated everything this year? That’s driven by the viral Kickstarter. A sudden surge in one channel throws off the so-called trends.

Each year, more people buy more directly. Treating retailers as discovery channels works.

The question is, can I replicate RYOMS’ crowdfunding success? The real test will be when the new Networking for Systems Administrators advances to Kickstarter. But I’ve already promised people disappointment for another Kickstarter and 81 people have signed up for it, so I’m inclined to say that initial signs are good. (Once I launch that they’ll run screaming, of course, but at the moment it looks promising!)

I should also say: I neither love nor hate Kickstarter. I’m fond of them at the moment, sure, but that’s because it worked. If it keeps working, I will remain fond of it. If it stops working, I move on.

But now, it’s time for me to turn the actual numbers into a tax return. Wish me luck. I’m gonna need it.

BSDCan 2025 Chair’s Entirely Personal Comments on the Con Mask Policy

Yes, we discussed this in the organizing committee. Nothing has changed since last year. And yes, some of the new covid treatments give hope for a better future.

Degreed scientists have performed large amounts of actual research. Their data shows over and over again, that masks work. Multiple sorts of studies have shown this.

YouTube is not science. Neither is Twitter, nor Substack, Facebook, any social media, blog, or influencer web page. Fox News certainly is not.

The BSD community has quite a few people with above-average respiratory risks. They include a few members of the BSDCan organizing committee. The world needs one conference they can safely attend. At BSDCan 2024, many attendees with marginal health personally thanked me for requiring masks so they could attend.

Are we serious? At BSDCan 2024 I told more than one person that if they wouldn’t wear a mask, we would remove them from the event. I expect I’ll have to do the same this year. If you are adamantly opposed to consistently wearing a mask, I suggest that you save me the trouble and choose another conference.

We also have people with hearing problems. I am investigating buying transparent N95 masks in bulk, either for just the speakers or for all attendees. Because people who need to read lips should also have their needs met.

All this falls under “I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people.”

“Networking for System Administrators, 2nd edition” cover art

The inimitable Eddie Sharam has finished the cover painting for the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. It’s a parody of Giuseppe Zocchi’s Pietre Dure of Architettura. It’s a wraparound, but you can see a mockup of the front cover at the sponsorship page.

Eddie painted this. Like, on paper. With paint. The current plan is to include the painting as a Kickstarter reward level, much as we did with the cover for Run Your Own Mail Server.

At this moment, N4SA2e has 98 print sponsors. Two more sponsors and I have to do a challenge coin. If I have to do a coin, it’ll have the usual rat and bear the words NEVER MY FAULT/ALWAYS MY PROBLEM.

Mind you, my plan is that I will get exactly one more print sponsor and then y’all’ll stop backing it, so I don’t have to do any extra work.

New Releases: Dear Abyss, The Last Hour of Hogswatch

It’s the end of the year, so I’m shoving a couple titles out the door at the last minute. Like you do.

First up we have Dear Abyss: the FreeBSD Journal Letters column, years 1-6. The ebook is on most platforms now, and print is leaking out.

For the folks who are into solstice holidays, my story The Last Hour of Hogswatch is now available standalone. It’s only in my bookstore; I don’t bother putting short stories on the big stores any more, or in print.

Happy holiday-of-your-choice, folks!

November’s Neurypnological Sausage

[This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of November, and to the public at the beginning of December. Not a Patronizer? Sign up at https://patronizemwl.com. Okay, fine, technically, you don’t sign up there. You get to choose between my Patreon and my private patronage system. Still, you all get treated with the same confusion and astonishment. There’s no way these silly posts are worth $12/year, let alone what the daft folks like the infamous First Wildebeest send me. But here you are anyway.]

The important thing first: if you’re reading this on tiltedwindmillpress.com, and you want to receive announcements of new posts by email, you need to sign up again on the right-hand sidebar. I previously used Jetpack for emailed announcements, but the WordPress.com/WP Engine feud moved “ditch Jetpack” up to the top of my “annoying tech tasks” list. This is the last announcement that will go out via the old system.

Also: the RYOMS online launch party (a result of the Kickstarter campaign) will be held on 23 November 2024. There’ll be one session at 1500 UTC (10AM EST), and another at 2400 UTC (7PM EST). That’ll give the Europeans and the US West Coast reasonable sessions, and once again welcome the surprisingly robust contingent of Australian insomniacs. Mark your calendars.

I don’t have links yet, because this launch party will be different than previous ones. My last one was for Prohibition Orcs. That campaign had 197 backers, plus y’all. 26 folks attended. If I scale that up to RYOMS’ 1966 backers, that means I’ll have about 260 people. Even divided between two sessions, that’s a lot. My Zoom account can handle 100 attendees. I’m running a survey to see which backers wish to attend. If there’s anywhere near 100 per session I’ll need to beg, borrow, or steal videoconference facilities and probably suck someone into playing moderator.

Watching the rest of the RYOMS Kickstarter fallout is kind of mesmerizing.

My big experiment for this Kickstarter was dropshipping direct from printers. After the IOSS saga and resolving delivery problems, it comes out that I had about a 7% error rate. A few packages just… didn’t arrive. Some places, like South America, needed 45-60 days to deliver. Most problems fell into three categories:

  • EU shipments without phone numbers
  • Non-ASCII addresses
  • Canada

Each of these are mostly fixable, except for Canada. My loss rate for dropshipping to Canada was about 35%. It didn’t seem to matter if the recipient provided a phone number or not. Some packages took two weeks to arrive: others, six or eight weeks. I suspect Canada customs loathes international media mail and puts it at the bottom of the processing pile.

The current Kickstarter (Dear Abyss) does not offer dropship outside the EU, UK, and Australia. I need to figure out the failure patterns and what I can do about them before I dropship across national borders again.

I also launched sponsorships for the second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. I declared that if I got 100 print sponsors I’d do another sponsor-exclusive challenge coin. About a month in, and there’s 77 print sponsors. Many of them are first-time sponsors, lured in by the RYOMS Kickstarter. Just wow. Sucking people further down the Customer Acquisition Funnel works! And there’s a good chance I’ll have to follow through on the challenge coin.

Making new words has been difficult, what with the buildup to the most consequential US election in my lifetime. By the time this post hits the public we’ll know the outcome, but at the moment I’m hoping these posts don’t turn into “the difficulties of being a self-published writer building an entirely new legal infrastructure while living on a Digital Nomad visa and learning a new language.” At the time I write this, that’s a real possibility. Yes I’m a straight white middle-aged guy, but I’m also an insolent anti-authoritarian writer who throws around words like “neurypnological.” As soon as the list works through “women” and “queer folks” and “PoC” and down to Q-list celebrities, I’m on it. Creative work while carrying this sort of mental overhead is like losing half your RAM, and the human platform has incredibly poor paging and swapping performance.

If things go well, though, I’d like to crunch to finish Project IDGAF by the end of the month. It’s not a long book. All I need is time and spoons. I mean, I had time to write a Fediverse bot, so it should be perfectly doable. If. I’m amusing myself by imagining how I would market this ridiculous atrocity.

I am going through the N4SA manuscript, marking stuff to check and places to add stuff and discussions I need to have. Overlay networks like VPNs and MPLS are much more broadly used today than ten years ago. TLS, which was the main driver for this edition. Lots of little warts. It doesn’t matter how large a wart is, though; it’s still a wart and should be removed.

The nice thing is, I’m about out of inventory for Things I Need To Sell. I have an assortment of short fiction collections that are nearly ready. My Christmas collection needs a Prohibition Orcs short story, but I don’t want to launch that until next June so that’s okay. I have about 50,000 words of Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales, which is 1-2 stories short of a collection. There’s about 25,000 words of uncollected Prohibition Orcs, just short of half a collection. I could finish up any one of these but the truth is, I want to build up some inventory first. I want to do some damn writing.

So I’m going to try to do that now.

My Social Media in 2024

I left Twitter right after Elon Musk bought it. After exploring many alternatives, I’ve settled in the fediverse (often called “Mastodon”) as my main social media channel. I also have a Bluesky account, but it’s decidedly secondary.

Why did I choose this? Isn’t Bluesky the Next Big Thing? Isn’t it “like Old Twitter but better”?

Bluesky sucks less than old Twitter did, yes. It has nice features, like subscribable community-maintained block lists. It’s still a business, though. They are not making money yet. Their plans to do so appear remote. Which means that somehow, I’m the product.

I’ve said this so often it’s turning into a Lucas Cliche, but: the Internet’s business model is betrayal. Every mature social media platform has betrayed us. Every big search engine has betrayed us. (Search Google for “the strike is the compromise”. Then ask yourself why they’d be hiding some of the most contentious bits of labor history. No, I’m not afraid that the Goog will deprioritize me. They already have. Google once sent me hundreds of blog each day. In the middle of the year, that fell off a cliff.)

Bluesky might be a public benefit corporation, but that only means they are allowed to consider public benefit as well as profits.

Is it possible that Bluesky will stand by their declared morals and not eventually sell us out? Yes. But I’ve watched Internet companies rise and fall for decades. I haven’t seen any company remain benign, and extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. I don’t want to invest ten years in a third party platform only to have it do a rug pull at the end of my career.

Until it can prove otherwise Bluesky is just another company, sowing another crop of victims.

Yes, I know you can’t prove a negative. I do not own that problem.

The fediverse is open. Any social network I build there is mine to grow or destroy. I control my experience, and can easily block alt-right/TERF/racist garbage at the server level. Does it grow more slowly? Yes. Does the fediverse lack a coherent user story? Also yes. The whole “by picking a server you’re picking the kind of moderation you want” aspect is critical, deeply confusing, and unadvertised.

Despite all that I’ve built a fedi following as large as I had on Twitter, and it supported me through the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter.

What about Threads, Instagram, or Facebook? Pffft. Meta is the poster child for betraying its users.

So: follow me on the fedi. Or on the RSS feed here. Or subscribe to my announcements-only mailing lists. Or, if you must, follow me on Bluesky.

October’s Ostrogothic Sausage

[This article contains RYOMS gift spoilers for print-level sponsors and Patronizers. I think everyone has their packages, but just in case, you’ve been warned.]

[This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of October, and the public at the beginning of November. Not a Patronizer? You could be, for the low price of $12 a year all thee way up to the high price of “however much money you want to dispose of.”]

It’s Halloween Month, and there was much rejoicing.

I perform one experiment with every project I do. Sometimes, like with RYOMS, I do two. I’ll discuss the boring experiment at the end of this post, but let’s start with the one that bit me.

For the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter, my experiment was “drop shipping.” A reader buys the book from me, I order it from the printer and have it shipped directly to the reader. Seems fine, right? I discussed the problems with the EU’s IOSS last month, but this month has uncovered new wrinkles.

Dropship books might take weeks to deliver. If I’m lucky.

They might or might not get tracking numbers, depending on the recipient’s country, but the form email the printer sends includes the text “Here is your tracking number.” If they won’t give a tracking number, that space is blank. People are understandably confused. I can say “give me a tracking number for all shipments,” but printers charge a great deal for that. Some destinations are only $20 in shipping, but some are over a hundred dollars! There’s no way to tell before you order. It’d be cheaper to give up on dropshipping altogether.

I’ve said many times that I believe in incremental progress, not virality. Expecting that your project will go viral is a great way to fail. While I don’t believe in virality, virality believes in me. Suddenly I was performing my little dropship experiment on hundreds of people. A smarter author would have limited the number of dropships to a manageable level, but “smarter author” goes in the same heap as “jumbo shrimp” and “Trump’s intelligence.” I suspect the dropships were part of why this campaign went viral, though.

So now I’m managing expectations for hundreds of people, and I’m not entirely sure when the books will arrive or where the are. Because no tracking numbers.

The next time I do an experiment with something that runs a risk of going viral, I’ll be labeling that option “experimental” and add text like, “I have learned how this is done and understand the mechanical process, but have no personal experience with it in the real world. I have no idea what the problems will be, but I will work through them and communicate.”

New words proceed slowly, thanks to me shipping about five hundred signed books this month and various family emergencies. While I can have my job as long as I do the work, I also have the most flexible schedule. This means that if a parent winds up in the hospital, I’m elected to deal with it. Lucky me!

But initial feedback on RYOMS is mostly positive. Except for the dropshippers, and they’re complaining about delivery rather than the book itself. Publishing is hard, y’all.

So then there’s my second experiment. It affects sponsors. I talked about my Reader Acquisition Funnel over a year ago, but as a quick reminder: that’s the process I use to lure readers into a closer tie with my work. It has nine layers, just like Dante’s Inferno.

  1. Read my free or discounted samples (articles in magazines, free first in series, sample pages in bookstore, library check-out)
  2. Buy my books through retail channels
  3. Social media follow
  4. Sign up for my mailing list
  5. Buy books directly from me
  6. Kickstarter
  7. Sponsor
  8. Regular monthly contributor (you folks!)
  9. You do all my chores so I can write more

My goal is to lure people down into the deepest layers so it’s harder for them to escape to cut out middleman fees. But if I’m offering backer-exclusive special editions on Kickstarter, I need to offer something something to entice those people to descend into sponsorship. The special editions are exclusive to prepublication backers, but what do the sponsors get?

For RYOMS, the sponsors got this.

It’s the RYOMS Challenge Coin! It’s weighty. The rat is solidly three-dimensional, looming out of the coin. Plus, I firmly believe that SIGYIKES would be a valuable addition to Unix.

Which is perhaps the daftest thing I’ve ever done–other than the Manly McManface edition of Ed Mastery, of course.

And the Networknomicon.

Okay, yeah, fine, there’s the systemd satirical erotica.

And the blockchain dystopian erotica.

Look, we could be here all day. Let’s move on.

The minimum cost-effective press run is 100 coins. The only way to get this is to be a print sponsor or print-level Patronizer. I do have a few extra coins that I’ll use to solve fulfillment problems. Any survivors will be auctioned off for charity. The coins seem to amuse people, so if I ever have another book with 100 print sponsors I’ll probably do it again. I must offer something unique to lure people deeper down the funnel, after all!

I must once again thank y’all for hanging out in Malbolge with me. I’m not saying that my career is a fraud–no, wait, I say that all the freaking time. At least I’m honest about it. I’m sure that’ll count for something when I reach the Afterlife. Not that I believe in an Afterlife, but if it’s a real thing I’ll be able to shout “Yay, I was proven wrong!” which is infinitely better than not having the chance to lament being correct as the neural network I call me dissolves into the Void. It’s Pascal’s Wager in reverse.

On the 15th of this month I’ll be launching the Dear Abyss Kickstarter and sponsorships for Networking for Systems Administrators, 2nd Edition. Because a sane release schedule is something that happens to neurotypical neural networks.

And with that, I better go make some words.

“Dear Abyss” live on Kickstarter

Confession time: I don’t love Kickstarter. I don’t love money either, but it does seem to be a dependency when living in capitalism.

When I release a book on my site, I sell a few copies. When I launch it on Kickstarter, sales go up tenfold.

So: Dear Abyss is live on Kickstarter. The book exists, and the moment I get paid it goes to everyone.

Backers immediately get a copy of Letters to ed(1), the out-of-print three-year compilation.