Author: Michael Lucas

This post goes to Patronizers at the beginning of July, and the public at the beginning of August.

Once upon a time, I owned a Chevrolet SSR hard-top convertible. It retailed for fifty thousand dollars in 2005, back when that was real money. No, I didn’t buy it. I won it at a $500/plate charity auction. That I got into for free.

It was a fantastic car. It devoured road. The sound system stunned drivers on the opposite side of the divided highway. Over the fifteen years we owned it, three women and one men ran up to me at stop lights to give me their phone number. Not that I called any of them. Even if I wasn’t happily married, anyone who wanted to hang out with me because I drove an expensive car would find themselves disappointed in every other aspect of my life.

When I had a real job that required my presence on site, I would drive that car one day a week. If I had a day where I ran errands after work and needed to drive extra, I chose that day. Now that I’m directly employed by all y’all I leave the house to go to Costco, my monthly writers’ meeting, the dojo, and BSDCan. Costco is about a four mile trip, maybe once or twice a month. The writer’s meeting, once a month. I drove the convertible to those whenever possible. I had no trouble taking the convertible to the dojo, but I sure wouldn’t let my stinky sticky self back in the car afterwards, so that was a no. Driving it to BSDCan was fun.

Here in Detroit, I could use the car five or six months out of the year. That’s thirteen trips, most of them only a few miles and one over a thousand miles.

I put the car up for sale in 2019, and it sold in January.  I was paid in 2020 dollars, sadly. The pandemic hit immediately afterwards, so we put the money in the bank and waited for the next debacle.

This June, our home air conditioning stopped working.

The HVAC mechanic came out and informed us that the system was thirty years old and had been incompetently installed. Hearing that from a service mechanic is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary proof. He provided it, with details like “the interior unit draws power from the electric meter, not the breaker box” and “the reason your bedroom is warm is because rather than put an angle connector in the ductwork, the installer bent it with a hammer.” It’s not that the 1990s coolant this thing used was illegal, but it’s now expensive enough to discourage using it. If we replaced the pipe that blew and recharged the system, one of the others would probably blow.

The lifespan on a modern AC unit? About fifteen years.

How much for a new AC?

Almost exactly what we made selling the convertible.

One of the annoying things about this business is that borrowing money is difficult. The United States runs on credit. I firmly believe in paying cash or doing without, and I don’t mind heat if I can open the windows, but the wildfires get worse each year. I’m not sure if the high particulates give me asthma, or if my lungs are still inflamed from covid, but air conditioning is now mandatory. The HVAC company claims they offer easy financing, but one look at my employer and they’d dial the interest up to “loan shark.” My family needs to pay cash or do without.

I don’t mind living on a cash basis.

I do mind not having options.

We now have air conditioning, and I’ll spend the next year or two replenishing the emergency fund. It’s okay. That’s what emergency funds are for.

And writing is for replenishing that fund.

Run Your Own Mail Server is congealing. The topic requires more up-front explanation than usual, with walking the reader through the basics of forging email and sending spam and exactly why email is a very special trash fire.         I keep thinking I’m going to buckle down and pound through these words, but illustrating every step feels like dragging a moose through quicksand and explaining anything requires explaining another topic first. I must disassemble every topic and put the pieces in a meticulous order. That order is achievable, yes, but the reader doesn’t immediately gain anything from that background. I’m pulling every trick I know to make the text pleasant to read, even if the reader doesn’t get the constant slow dopamine hit of technological epiphany. (Some of you will get that hit from the text. You are nerdier than most. Congratulations.)

I took half a day and released a new Prohibition Orcs short story. Yellow-Eyed War is exclusive to my web site for a couple reasons. Yes, disintermediation is one; I prefer people buy direct from me. But it would take me about five hours to upload this tale to every single distribution channel, and I’m not going to make enough on the story to pay that back. So I’m trying exclusivity. We’ll see how well that works. Many of you got this story as part of your Patronizer benefits, so the sales channels is irrelevant.

That leaves the question of what to do with chapbooks, however. (A chapbook is a print edition of a short story or tiny novella.) I put short stories in print to make the ebook versions look inexpensive. (That’s the same reason I offer tech books in hardcover.) I would sell one or two of them to hard-core collectors, but most of the sales were electronic. Of the chapbooks, most of them went to print-level Patronizers.

Additionally, I put stories in print so I can test different fonts, layouts, and other formatting options. I’ll keep designing chapbooks and shipping them to print-level Patronizers, but I suspect that Patronizing is the only way folks will be able to get them. I want to reduce my administrative overhead, and managing yet more stuff in IngramSpark and Amazon’s print program when there’s almost no sales is pure overhead.

Speaking of adding administrative overhead: I seem to be starting the world’s lamest podcast. 60 Seconds of WIP has one guest, me. I read sixty seconds of a current Work-In-Progress, such as RYOMS. It was Allan Jude’s idea, so please direct any blame his way. I got recording and posting each down to less than five minutes, so I’ll probably do one a week for a while and see if anyone cares. This week I’m switching to audio-only, and perhaps sending them into the various podcast distributors instead of just my blog.

Thank you all for your support. I sincerely appreciate it.

Folks seem to appreciate the “60 Seconds of WIP” tracks, so I’m planning to record more and distribute them more widely. That means I need to set up my site more properly. It’s a straightforward task, but I’ll need to test integration with the blog’s RSS feed.

Unfortunately, if I post podcasts in a blog category I can’t distribute them to other vendors. Podcast RSS feeds require additional metadata. The WordPress software for doing so assumes that your podcast is its own thing, separate from any blog. I need to create the podcast and its feed, and then aggregate that feed into my main blog. Accomplishing that means recording a couple more episodes and experimenting with assorted plugins.

So you might notice some instability with my blog’s RSS feed as I figure this out. I will try to hold it to a dull roar.

Fortunately my subscribers are technically literate, and I’m certain you all have their RSS readers set to check my feed every day or so rather than every fifteen minutes. If you catch posts appearing and disappearing while I sort this out, maybe check your reader’s settings?

I’ve been reading Asimov’s Science Fiction for decades. Back when I still had hope and hair, I dreamed of being published therein. I no longer submit to slushpiles, but almost every issue I discover a meatspace friend in its table of contents.

Maybe ten years ago, I switched my subscription from paper to electronic via Amazon. I do all of my fiction reading on a backlit e-ink device. E-ink is a much better reading experience than a screen, especially for us voracious readers. I don’t want the print edition; not only is the font size not adjustable, I’m stuck with a stack of paper. (I still read a lot of nonfiction in paper, especially if I want to highlight and make marginalia and leave bookmarks everywhere.)

Amazon’s Kindle program has stopped supporting magazine subscriptions. Many magazines have been shoved into Kindle Unlimited. (There’s discussion that the individual issues will only be available through KU, not for regular purchase, but I’m having difficulty confirming that.) Neil Clarke has an excellent discussion of how this might put several magazines out of business.

Today, I looked for a way to continue my Asimov’s subscription electronically. In addition to KU, Asimov’s is available through Barnes & Noble and Magzter. Magzter is a tablet app that uses a proprietary format, and not suitable for an e-ink device. B&N does epubs, but I’d have to either purchase and carry around a whole new device or strip the DRM to move it to my current device.

Penny Publications, Asimov’s publisher, does not have a direct electronic subscription option or even a “buy this issue in ebook” option. If a doofus like me can manage it, surely Penny Publications could.

So I guess I’ll be picking up the odd issue of my favorite magazine when I think of it. If that’s still an option.

Why did Amazon stop supporting subscriptions? To force subscribers to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, and to pay magazines less for their content. Amazon has recently made several changes that make them less friendly to readers and publishers alike. While I have chosen to reject their electronic publishing deal for new nonfiction titles, I don’t condemn other publishers for succumbing. Amazon has monopoly and monopsony power. The magazine has decided that they’d rather take a fifty percent reduction in income than lose everything. I’m certain I’ve lost money by not having OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems available in the Kindle store, and I will lose still more by not having Run Your Own Mail Server in there–but the alternative is unacceptable. Amazon’s goal is to reduce the price of writing to almost nothing, and will continue increasing the pressure on creators until we capitulate or leave.

I encourage you to buy direct from authors and/or publishers whenever possible (cough)my store(cough).

And when this device dies I’m buying a Kobo. They don’t carry Asimov’s either, but they’re much more friendly to sideloaded content and understand that their customers want to read.

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of June, and the public at the beginning of July.)

Hi folks!

BSDCan dominated this month. It was good. It wasn’t the biggest con we’ve had, but for the first year back it was nice. A handful of folks said they wouldn’t attend because the pandemic is still raging, and that while we would be masked the rest of the world isn’t. I can’t blame them. A couple of random folks on the Internet complained to me that they wouldn’t attend because we had a mask policy, but I didn’t recognize the names as attendees so who cares? If you didn’t know, I’m taking over coordinating BSDCan next year. I plan to do as little as possible, shoving everything off onto a team of volunteers.

That leads into my next change:

My writing business is hiring help. Part-time help, but help.

Every title I publish adds administrative overhead. That overhead usually isn’t terrible, except when something changes and I must touch every title. The Mastery books have been $25 since 2011, and I can’t absorb any more inflation and meet my bills. My printers have increased their prices again, so I spent four days going through Amazon and Ingram’s web interfaces to increase retail prices. I spent a few days last week fighting a bot network registering useless accounts on my web store. It’s not that those accounts could do anything, but the constant registrations slow everything down. Then there’s the improvements I want to make to the web site, and the corrections to what’s already there. This time adds up, keeping me from achieving the flow state so critical to creative work.

I can do everything in my publishing business. That’s why it’s part of my publishing business, because I can do it. I forced myself to sit down and take a good hard look at the things I spend my time on, in order of importance.

Writing
Publishing
Business and money
Marketing
Dealing with retailers
Web site

Of those tasks, which do I hate the most? Obviously, the money. I have everything set up so that I can handle paying my bills and reconciling my receipts in a couple hours a month, provided I do so every single month without fail, so the pain is minimized. Dealing with money is the last task a business owner can outsource, however. Can’t ditch that.

Publishing? I can hire help for that, sure. It’s expensive for what you get. I know perfectly well that transforming a correctly formatted tech book manuscript into an ebook is an hour’s work. I allocate two hours to it, because ebook formatting exposes every formatting flaw in the source manuscript. I don’t do that kind of work that often. The work I do more often resembles the price changes, where I log into retailer portals and make adjustments. Most retailers offer small publishers a single account with all privileges. I have no problem sharing that access with someone I completely trust, but that trust has to be earned. I’m not going onto fiverr and picking up a random publishing assistant. That’s like hiring the itinerant laborers loitering in front of the home improvement store to polish your diamond collection.

Marketing? I loathe marketing. Marketing is about voice, a combination of attitudes and opinions and word choice and syntax. While any number of people can and do use my “I loathe marketing” approach to marketing, they can’t do it exactly as I do. I must be involved in marketing. Outsourced marketing assistants can reuse and repackage marketing content I’ve previously created, but can’t reliably generate new content without extensive coaching and interaction.

Writing? That’s why I’m in this business. ChatGPT can bite my nearly-nonexistent butt.

That leaves the web site.

Outsourcing web site maintenance feels wrong. I’m a techie. I can maintain a web site, especially on WordPress. WordPress is the easiest possible way to maintain the technical parts of a web site. But my web site has an entry for each of my dozens and dozens of books, and each entry has a dozen links to various retailers. There’s my web store, which is an entirely separate site. The technology now exists for me to offer touchless print/ebook bundles, but it requires I once again touch every single title and configure plugins.

The thing is, I bring nothing special to the web site. Sure, I write the blog posts and the jacket copy for the books. But as far as fixing the front page cover image gallery and updating plugins and figuring out how to block all registrations from spam domains (Ban Hammer is the bomb, by the way), I bring nothing special.

Will I lose geek cred by handing my web site off to an hourly aide? Nah. I am not known as a web site designer, and I still run the underlying operating system. I’m not outsourcing mail or DNS or even httpd.conf; just the WordPress pointy-clicky-linky stuff. My new flunky, Soma, actually likes running web sites. (I don’t get it, but there’s folks out there who like durian so he’s basically normal.)

Hiring people is like everything else: the first time it’s a Big Deal, but eventually it becomes routine. I have hired and fired while working for a company, but never on my own. This is unnerving. While we have a written contractor agreement and have agreed on a scope of work, I’m proceeding slowly. Many of the links on my web site are incorrect or flat-out missing, so he’s starting with those. If he survives that tedium, I’ll get him to fix up the rest of the site, then tune up the ecommerce site. That would let me do things like making my short stories exclusive to my site.

For an employee to work in the long term, it has to work for both myself and him. Here in the US, I can pay someone $599 before filing tax paperwork in their name. We’re going to meet just before we hit that limit and talk things through. I would rather let him go at $599 and remain friendly than pay him $650, let him go, and screw him on taxes. That would be not merely rude but downright uncivilized. (Yes, taxes are civilization. So is minimizing them.)

If Soma works out the way I hope he does, I might start a daily one-minute podcast containing whatever I’ve written that day. I’d post the recording on my blog, and feed it to the various aggregators. But that’s a future possibility. Right now, I’m fiercely protecting every writing minute.

The plus side to all of this? Hiring someone is a new business experience. I’m making notes on it. In a few years, they’ll feed into a second edition of Cash Flow for Creators. I deliberately wrote that book to be evergreen, blissfully ignoring the fact that I would foolishly continue to learn business.

If I really wanted to jump deep into this business: many universities offer degrees in publishing. Starting pay in publishing in Detroit is somewhere around $40k, which would cost me about $50k including taxes and insurance and all that. It would be a serious hit for me, but doable. I could spend the next year polishing some bright young thing into my personal publisher, turn the whole mess over to them, and focus on writing. I’d eventually give us both a raise. I’m not that ambitious yet. Mind you—if I have to transform some bring young thing into being a publisher, I’m not sure them having a degree in publishing would be a prerequisite?

Other news? Going to BSDCan has knocked some things loose on my current writing projects. There’s nothing for contemplation like a long drive across the Ontario beautiful desolation. The mail book has gained extra clarity, and I’ve figured out why I’m having such trouble starting $ git merge murder. A crime novel is not the same as a mystery novel, and I want this to be a particular kind of mystery, which means I get to practice a new skill. Woo hoo! It’ll take me some time to prep that practice, though, so I’m switching back to Skybreach for a bit. That monstrosity is halfway done, I might just buckle down and pound through it this year.

But first, I gotta get the mail book rolling. I have no more conferences this year, so that should help.