Author: Michael Lucas

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of August, and the world at the beginning of September.

Wow, is it raining. The word “acquerne” has nothing to do with water, but I believe the acquerne are crazy damp and none too pleased.

Anyway. In the name of Dog I’m tired, but here’s where things stand.

Most importantly, I learned how to pronounce “floccinaucinihilipilification” and “hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.” That should guarantee I live my next life as ringworm.

Run Your Own Mail Server is now through copyedit and print layout. The paperback proof arrived in my hands about an hour ago. This paper back is the same thickness as a hardcover most other Mastery books. This is my last chance to find and fix any errors in my best selling indie tech book EVER but hey, no pressure. I can’t say I’m happy with the book because I am never “happy” with any of my books, but I am not displeased. The dang thing is done. Nobody else wanted to write it, but I believe independence is vital, so I had to. Yes people have written excellent tutorials, but a tutorial isn’t the same as an in-depth book. RYOMS is context-rich, something most tutorials lack.

Getting RYOMS to this stage feels disorienting. I’ve spent so long with this book filling my head, having it in print feels like a scoop of my brain is in my hands. I need to let it settle before reviewing it.

Amidst the copyedit corrections and page layouts and so on, I did get to write some short fiction for anthology calls. I’m not sure if the tales work, but they knocked the RYOMS rust out of my head, so that’s good. She Who Must Be Obeyed’s broken leg is healing, so that’s good. The garden refused to provide squash but the next morning offered up a twelve-inch Ambush Zucchini, so we have food and that’s also good.

Been pondering publishing schedules and Kickstarter timings. I normally launch Kickstarters when I send the book to copyedit, because at that point I’m confident the book will actually come out. I can’t launch a new Kickstarter until the old one fulfills, for obvious reasons. I find that I might want to run three before the end of the year, however: Dear Abyss, Networking for Systems Administrators 2/e, and one I can’t yet discuss. I doubt I have time to fit them all in using that model. Clearly, I need to leverage standard Mean Time Between Failure/Mean Time to Repair logic here, and reduce my Mean Time To Fulfillment. If I delay the Kickstarter launch when the book is back from copyedit, I can fulfill more quickly and launch the next. It feels wrong, but that’s mostly because I’ve trained myself to release books as soon as humanly possible. I want sponsors, Patronizers, and Kickstarter backers to get theirs before the general public can–with exceptions for people who live in places with slow mail service, sorry South Africa. (People in South Africa order my books? How did this happen? What’s going on?)

The switch from video hangouts over to Discord is complete. Not much traffic there, but I’m posting things. If you’re a Discord user at the right tier or above, say hello.

Next week I’m going to a writers’ meeting in Las Vegas. If you’re in the area, there will be a gelato meetup Monday night. Ostensibly, this is to work out the contents for a series of anthologies. In practice, I’m there to pick people’s brains about neat things they’re doing. Foil-edged tech books with embossed dust jackets, anyone? I don’t know that I’ll do any of those things, but I want the knowledge so I can choose the right project. We’re in a covid surge so I’ll be masking everywhere indoors except my hotel room.

The one major piece of work left is the RYOMS special edition. I have to write a page for it and add certain carefully-honed commentary throughout, much as I did for the Networknomicon. I’ve also commissioned special interior art for it. I plan to have that ready by 20 August, so I can get a proof and do the final order of all the sponsor, Patronizer, and backer copies. I don’t know that the books will arrive here by the end of August, but it’ll be dang close.

While I wait for those books to arrive I can work on integrating print book sales into tiltedwindmillpress.com, so I can sell print/ebook bundles on an ongoing but hands-free basis. Looks like I’ll be using Bookvault for the back end on that. They print North American sales in the US, and the rest of the world in the UK. My “worst case scenario” is shipping to Australia, and shipping costs from the UK to Australia are much better than from the US. It won’t beat Amazon Prime’s free in-country shipping, but folks who want to buy print direct from me probably don’t have Amazon Prime. I’m hoping to be able to offer a cheaper price on direct print/ebook bundle sales, perhaps through a coupon, to offset some of the shipping costs.

RYOMS will be the first book I offer direct print sales for. I’ll add other books as time permits.

After all that, what will I write next? I’ve decided to work on a second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators, which needs a couple new chapters and a meticulous audit. I’d also like to finish the $ git commit murder trilogy, so I’m going to take a run at $ git merge murder.

I also have to a tax attorney investigating my finances and my intellectual property inventory. Because I asked him to. RYOMS was an income shock, and might have made it sensible to start depreciating my IP like the big companies do. Disney is still depreciating Cinderella, and there’s no reason I can’t do the same. The question is, will accounting expenses outweigh the financial gains? If the answer is no, I’ll spin up “Burke and Hare Press” in the next few months as a C-corp and proceed. TWP will become an imprint thereof, and I’ll contract to provide books to the corporation. I’ll have to negotiate carefully, though; that Lucas dude who’s going to run B&H press is known to be a jerk, and I must protect my intellectual property from him.

No wonder business people are mad.

Anyway, that’s this month. Hope all of you are enjoying your fading summer. Or, for those of you down south, your fading winter. Whatever’s fading, enjoy it.

I discovered today that my mailing list signup forms have been broken since last December. (Yes, I need to figure out how to monitor this.)

If you’ve tried to sign up to one of my announcement lists and couldn’t, I do apologize. If you still want to sign up, it actually works now! Nonfiction subscribers get a free tech book, fiction subscribers get a story or two a week for six weeks, and sponsors get left the heck alone until I want money for no good reason.

I only send mail for event announcements. New releases, bundles, sales, Kickstarters, that sort of thing. Basically, new excuses for you to give me money.

Or there’s the Everything list, where you get… uh, well, everything. It’s three smaller mailing lists in a trench coat.

https://mwl.io/about/mailing-lists

Now back to work on the RYOMS Backers-Only Edition.

Because this all certainly feels like a jape.

Last month, I hoped the RYOMS Kickstarter might round out at $50k. It hit $76,883, with 1966 backers. $25K of that was in the last three days. Plus, there were a few hundred sponsors. This is what we in the writing business call “freaking insane.” My reaction once again proved that I am temperamentally unsuited to success.

This isn’t life-changing money. I’m estimating half for fulfillment. Half of what remains will be reserved for taxes. It does take the emergency fund from “busted water heater” to “totaled car,” and that’s most welcome. Before you ask: yes, I assign a specific definition to “life-changing money.” Life-changing money changes my monthly cash flow for the better without reducing my lifestyle. Paying off ongoing bills is life-changing, but we no longer buy anything on installment payments. The only big bill that can be permanently paid off is the mortgage. Once you have all your bills paid off, “life-changing money” is enough to improve your life without adding new ongoing payments. (Huh. Maybe I need another edition of the cash flow book some time?)

But BSDCan was successful. The Kickstarter is over. RYOMS is at the copyeditor. SWMBO’s leg is healing. This has been a rough few weeks–but in their defense, they’re all rough weeks.

I’ve been fighting with WordPress on tiltedwindmillpress.com. It uses the Jetpack module to send new Patronizer post announcements by email. For a handful of users, Jetpack was conflicting with the Woocommerce credit card module. I had to temporarily disable that function. I believe it’s fixed, but will be watching Patronizer renewals closely. Fingers crossed!

The crush of finishing RYOMS and running the Kickstarter has left my brain kind of wrung out. I have a stack of anthology invites that I’m writing short stories for. Short stories are quick hits of success. It doesn’t matter if the story sells or not. My brain needs to finish something.

It did prompt me to look at my spreadsheet of incomplete collections. A collection should be about 60,000 words or so. Twisted Presents, the Christmas collection, is over 40,000 words. That’s enough for a Christmas book. Books of Christmas stories should be small–nobody wants a doorstop of mayhem for the holidays. I still need to write an orcish Christmas story to round it out. Somehow I have over 40,000 words of Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales. A couple more stories and that’s a proper collection. Found Meat, the next Prohibition Orcs collection, has 22,000 words. Lots to go there. So I’ll probably launch Twisted Presents next June, for an October delivery. There’s some overlap there–does the Rats’ Man’s Lackey Christmas tale go in Twisted Presents, or the RML collection? My gut says both.

The last anthology call is due 14 July.

RYOMS is due back from copyedit 15 July. That’s the rest of July tied up, I’m sure.

Amidst the chaos of the Kickstarter, I’ve been looking at options for sponsors and Patronizers. Of all my readers, y’all are the ones I must treat best.

The general reaction to the whole “what if Patronizers had private chat instead of video” was met with “use Discord,” so I’m going to be setting that up this next week. Will people like it? Who knows? That’ll mean quarterly video hangouts for all Patronizers, as well as invitations to any release parties I have. The RYOMS Kickstarter did well enough that I’m having two release parties, one in the morning and one in the evening. With 2000 people, I’m thinking I’m going to need a moderator to help me out. Perhaps someone to interview me.

Then there’s sponsors. Sponsors get their names in the book as a thank you. The print sponsors have me slightly worried, though. The Kickstarter backers could get the same special edition that print sponsors are getting, but the sponsors pay me months ahead and have faith that I will finish the damned book. I’ve figured out something odd, unique, and limited for the print sponsors, but I have no idea how it’ll go over. If it’s well-received, I’ll do it for all future books that have 90 or more sponsors. If it’s rejected, I’ll do something else next time. Being creative is like cooking spaghetti: you throw stuff on your most enthusiastic readers and see if it sticks.

I’d been pondering doing a second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators next. I suspect that might Kickstart well. Right after the RYOMS Kickstarter closed my inspirational muse soiled my skull with the title It’s Always DNS, and what you should do about it. It is always DNS, but that’s because people don’t know DNS. That seems like it might do well.

And there’s the ugly part of a runaway success Kickstarter. It makes me ponder how I can make that kind of money again, instead of what I want to write.

So come mid-August, when I have RYOMS put to bed, I’ll start writing one of those. I’ll also need to make sure I spend a couple hours a day writing something for pure fun. I don’t want to do another RYOMS forced death march. It kills my joy in life. And if I’m not having fun, I might as well send my resume to an AI company.

At the same time, I’ll open the next tech book for sponsors. And launch Dear Abyss. Because the Lucas Book Machine never stops. NEVER. NO MATTER WHAT. THE BOOK MACHINE MUST WRITE WRITE WRITE GRIND ON AND MAKE MORE WORDS AND MORE WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS <bzzzt> <zap> <thud>

I will be at in Las Vegas next week for a private writing event. Coincidentally, it’s during Black Hat. Probably not a coincidence. Vegas hotel rooms go cheap during August. My schedule is absolutely jammed, but I’m slicing out an hour or so Monday night to get gelato.

7PM at Up In Scoops, 4624 W Sahara Ave #2, Las Vegas, NV 89102. It’s well-reviewed and looks nicely indie. Off the Strip, so parking should not be as big an issue as last time I tried this.

I’ll be eating outside because covid, but after a day of flying and a day sitting in a hotel meeting room it’ll be a good break.

Again, it’ll be about an hour and won’t run late. I’ll be jet lagged, and must return to the hotel for more meetings.