Author: Michael Lucas

Writer. Sysadmin. Owns this site.
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640% Kickstarter, Sponsorships, and Shipping

In forty-eight hours, my experimental Kickstarter funded six hundred and forty percent.

Those of you who told me so, may now commence declaring that you told me so.

I am considering using Kickstarter for future books, in combination with my sponsorship program. (Sponsors pay me while I’m still writing the book.) The sponsor program will never go away, mind you. My end goal is reader disintermediation; I want folks coming directly to me for their books, instead of buying through Amazon or whoever. Sponsorship is the culmination of disintermediation. But sponsorship is for dedicated readers, while Kickstarter attracts casual ones. I’m thinking that I’ll use sponsorship to pay bills as I write, while Kickstarter will pay the bills of publishing. I’ll have to figure out how to make any sponsor books more precious than the Kickstarter ones, though. Maybe a special SPONSOR EDITION note on the cover.

One wrinkle with Kickstarter that’s raised a bunch of questions, though, is shipping. Overseas shipping costs are EXPENSIVE. They are set by my experience with sponsor gifts.

When it comes to shipping books internationally, the US post office provides three options.

  1. Media Mail. I can get it just about anywhere in the world for less than $10. No international tracking. No guarantee of delivery. Might take months or years. Those container ships moored outside every port in the world, waiting months for an opportunity to unload? There are Media Mail packages adrift in every one.
  2. First class mail. Costs $25 +/- $5-ish. Delivery guaranteed, eventually. Might take months. I can complain to the post office, and they’ll fill out a form. What they’ll do with that form is another issue.
  3. International Priority Mail. Costs about $40 ($30 to Canada). Ouch. Delivers within a week or two, sort of guaranteed. Insured. Complaints are taken mostly seriously.

I normally use First Class mail.

Ever since the pandemic started, sponsor gifts anywhere outside the USA keep going astray. Thanks to the tracking number I am able to watch packages bounce between, say, Chicago and London, England. I don’t know if the actual package keeps circling or if the computer is confused, but either way the sponsor does not get their gift. This is unacceptable. If some maniac generous soul puts food on my table as I write the book, my ethics declare that I must get their thank-you gift to them. Asking the post office staff for a better solution gets me the same answer every time: Use International Priority Mail.

Delivery failures are not my fault, but they are my responsibility. Here in the USA, a backer with a tracking number can contact the Post Office themselves. That’s not an option for a backer in Farawayistan. I must be able to investigate and resolve problems. That means tracking. I elected to go with Priority Mail all around this time, so that any complaints merit more than a tally in a database.

I would prefer to offer backers shipping options like “Would you like cheap ‘I promise to ship it, good luck getting it and I can’t help you’ or expensive ‘will arrive ASAP’?” Kickstarter does not offer that flexibility.

When I offer OpenBSD Storage Mastery for sponsorship, I will offer that choice. Sponsors already accept some risk–if I drop dead while writing the book, they’re out of luck. 1 Some of them will choose the cheap mail, probably the same people who tell me not to ship them a gift.

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“Domesticate Your Badgers” Kickstarter Opens

My first ever Kickstarter crashed past its first stretch goal in three hours.

I think nonfiction books should be written by people who have done the thing. If you write a book about systems administration, you ought to have been a working sysadmin for years. If you write a book about rats, you better spend quantity time with the squeaky little bastards. If you write a book about martial arts, you better have been a serious student for decades. That’s why I don’t write a book about, say, devops. The book would make me a heap of money, at the expense of my reputation and integrity. Friends know better than to get me started about how-to books written by dilettantes, because the rant can go on for hours.

Well, minutes. But they feel like hours.

Similarly, someone who writes a book about the long game of writing, how to establish your writing skills, and how to build a long-term writing career, had better have written a heap of books that got published. Sadly, that person is now me.

Last year, I figured out something unique to say about the craft of writing. This year, I wrote Domesticate Your Badgers: Become a Better Writer through Deliberate Practice.

Every time I publish a book, I run an experiment or test. Most of these experiments are invisible, and of no interest to anyone except publishing nerds. This time, I’m experimenting with Kickstarter. Other writers have success launching books there, so I’ll try it. If it’s successful, I might add Kickstarter options to my other books. My goal is still reader disintermediation, but sponsorships target existing hard-core fans and Kickstarter is about more casual fans and attracting new readers.

The stretch goal format also lets me play with my expenses. I’d like to illustrate the interior, because badgers, but are people willing to pay for it? Is including a Foreword written by an enemy (a “Foeword”) as funny as I think it is? Dunno. People will tell me, though, and as they’re speaking with their wallets they will tell the truth.

And I learned how to glue snippets together to create more complicated videos. I have no idea what I’ll do with this skill. Probably something ill-advised.

If you have any interest in how I not only write books, but keep writing books, I wrote it all down. Take a look.

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New time travel short story escaped, new Kickstarter approaching

In the aftermath of getting DNSSEC Mastery to tech review and getting my first ever Kickstarter ready to launch, I went in search of easy dopamine. I have maybe forty-odd short stories ready to publish, so I seized the one on top of the heap and flung it out into the cold hard world.

My tale Drag Air Through Fire is now available at all fine bookstores. Supply chain problems have made the paper chapbook stupid expensive, so I solidly recommend the ebook.

She isn’t dead.
He just hasn’t saved her yet.

He invented new kinds of math, new engineering, new science. His colleagues and friends failed to stop him. He surrendered everything for last one chance to rescue his love.

The chances of a new Big Bang? Acceptable.

Originally appeared in “Boundary Shock Quarterly: What Might Have Been”

And oh yeah, I’m trying Kickstarter. After 45 books and uncounted other stuff, I’ve finally written something on how to write. You can’t back it yet, but you can tell Kickstarter to poke you when you can. I’ll post Monday when it opens.

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October 2021’s Bipolar Updates

This business is enough to make you bipolar.

Yesterday, someone went out of their way to inform me that while the technical content in TLS Mastery was impeccable, the book was not as funny as my other tech books. If any other author had written this book they would give it five stars, but on the Lucas Scale it rated only four.

First: it is very true that writers rely on reviews for their business. I appreciate reviews posted anywhere, for any reason, of any rating. I explicitly don’t want to know about them, however. It’s number five in the beginning of my FAQ.

Second: When you encounter a book that weirdly lacks some of the author’s usual glee, check the publication date. Any book written in 2020 is not going to have the usual bonfire of delight. We were lucky to strike even a spark.

I started writing TLS on 5 May 2020, as we were realizing exactly how awful the pandemic would be. I finished the first draft on 1 March 2021, when vaccines were an exotic treasure limited to health care workers. My wife is a nurse. We lost colleagues and family members to covid. It was not a good year. The mortgage waits for no writer, though.

Thinking I’ll use Camus’ “The Plague” as a motif for the OpenBSD storage book.

Also yesterday, I got copies of two new anthologies I’m in: Fantastic Christmas and Mysterious Christmas, both edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She has won so many dang awards for writing and editing that she uses the heavier ones as doorstops. (Truth.) While it’s horrid form to quote from one’s own reviews, quoting what an anthology editor says about your story is merely gauche and I’m all about gauche. The editor’s intro to my story in Fantastic Christmas says:

The reason I decided to lead with “The Last Hour of Hogswatch,” though, is that it is one of the best stories I’ve read all year, if not one of the best I’ve read in the past several years.

Both of these, on the same day.

I probably should see a physical therapist about that whiplash.

In other news: DNSSEC Mastery 2/e is now at the technical review. It uses BIND as the reference implementation, but it’s less BIND-centric than the first edition. If you’re a DNSSEC expert and want to tech review, drop me a note. Tech reviews are due 8 November. It’s only 35,000 words, so a smaller book. I’ll be on OpenBSD Storage Mastery next. Sponsorships for that will open when I ship the DNSSEC sponsors their gifts.

Here’s the current 2020 books. I suspect this will be it for the year, but one of the things currently cooking might sneak out before the end of the year.

The question you’re all dying to ask, I’m sure, is: does this make the total stack taller than me? I don’t think so. Maybe next year. But publishing eight and a half inches in a year isn’t bad.

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Halloween Ebook Sale: Immortal Clay

If you want something scary to read this October, the ebook of my novel Immortal Clay is on sale most everywhere for $2.99. If you saw John Carpenter’s The Thing and thought “hey, wouldn’t it be great if the alien had lived and escaped and eaten every living thing on Earth,” this is the book for you.

You can grab it from:

Google Play is coming in a day or two.

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2021 Soroptimist Auction Results

I’ve been screaming my fool head off on social media for the last few months about my auction to support Soroptimist International Grosse Pointe. After I post this, I can shut up about it.

We raised $2200. The money will be used to help human trafficking survivors clear their records. This is an extraordinarily high amount for a single auction, and achieved that only because of the generosity of my readers.

Jay Hannah kicked things into gear by bidding $1000–and immediately donated the entire amount to SIGP. For all the charity auctions I’ve run over the last ten years or so, I don’t believe anyone’s ever done that.

Five minutes from the end, Tim Olsen sniped him with a bid of $1200.

Tim gets the special FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, signed by the membership of SIGP. Many left notes of gratitude, or signed the page that corresponded with their age, or both. I’m not going to show photos, because SIGP’s membership isn’t public the way, say, OpenBSD’s is. Trust me, it’s seriously signed. I’m also adding a couple extra books, because come on–$1200?

I’m also sending Jay some books, to thank him for his generosity. Because come on, $1000 without winning?

I had particular bonus titles in mind to send each, but I don’t have some of them. I went to take them off my brag heap, thinking I would order replacements, but they weren’t in the heap. Seems I need to audit the heap? Ah, well. Perhaps when I fill in the missing titles, it really will be taller than I am.

Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word. If you were wondering, the Soroptimist International Grosse Pointe tip jar is still open.

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My Inevitable(?) Amazon Tech Ebook Exit

Warning: publishing business book neepery ahead, as I try to figure out a problem. It includes a bunch of tedious ground-laying. I also round many prices to the nearest dollar.

I am specifically talking about nonfiction here. The fiction business is different. (That’s the problem.)

Amazon’s Payment Model

Amazon’s direct publishing program, KDP, is one of several distribution channels that allows writers to reach audiences without going through a publisher. KDP is the largest such distributor. In any business, the largest distributor uses its power to impose extra rules that benefit it. One of those is the ebook royalty structure, which is dictated by the ebook’s price. Ebooks priced up to $2.98, the author gets paid 35% of cover price for each sale. From $2.99 to $9.99, the author makes 70%. At $10 and up, they make 35% again. (Traditional publishers have a different structure.) Authors also pay delivery fees, so the actual payment is a little less than that. Amazon clearly wants ebooks to be priced between $2.99 and $9.99. Other distributors might have limits at the bottom end, but generally pay 65% to 80% — and nobody else has this artificial $9.99 cap.

Amazon agreements have a Most Favored Nation clause where they can price match any other distributor. If an ebook is $9.99 at Amazon and $4.99 at Apple, Amazon can cut their price to match.

If I price an ebook at $9.99, I make about $7 at any distributor.

If I price that same ebook at $14.99, I make about $10 everywhere but Amazon, and $4.50 at Amazon.

In short, ebook prices of $10-$19.99 are a “dead zone” that benefits nobody but Amazon. I must price my book over $20 to make more per sale than I would by pricing at $9.99.

Novels versus Tech Books

Tech books are fundamentally different from novels. Writing tech books takes a different skill set than novels, and the potential audience is different. Amazon treats the two identically, to tech authors’ detriment.

I can write a mid-size novel in about a month, barring debacle. (Yes, other writers are different, I know.) I spent about a year researching and writing SNMP Mastery and another writing TLS Mastery.

The maximum potential audience for each type of book is very different. A novel’s maximum potential audience is effectively unlimited. It might sell ten copies or fifty thousand copies. A lucky few sell millions. The maximum potential audience for a tech book is far, far smaller. I will be thrilled to unreasoning giggles if SNMP Mastery sells five thousand copies.

Every author knows this going in. $ git commit murder might sell a million copies. It won’t, of course, but it might.

Compare a $5.99 novel ($4 payment) to one of my $9.99 ($7 payment) tech books. Fifty thousand readers for that novel nets about $200,000. My five thousand readers at $7 each is about $35,000. That is not much for a year’s highly skilled work.

Kindle Unlimited

Amazon really pushes authors towards their Kindle Unlimited program. This is a flat rate subscription program, where authors get paid on the number of pages read. Books must be exclusive to Amazon, however. If someone reads a novel, they read every page. If someone grabs a tech book, they might read only one chapter. I design my books to be read from front to back, letting the reader build a comprehensive body of knowledge on the topic, but I know dang well some of you read one chapter and fuddle through without context. The KU program as it is currently structured is hostile to authors and non-Amazon readers alike, and I will not participate. That post is several years old, but the basics haven’t changed.

Additionally, I can destroy the career of any author in KU by setting up my own instance of scam software and aiming it at them. It would cost a couple hundred bucks of cloud computing and a couple days of my time, sure, but any number of the folks I’ve pissed off by insisting that women exist in tech would gleefully pay that to take me out. (As an aside, that’s the same reason my print books are non-returnable despite several bookstores requesting otherwise. I don’t know that enough of my haters are adept enough in the publishing biz to run the Returnable Books Exploit, but I can’t take that risk.)

Finally, consider the word monopsony.

The smaller maximum audience size, combined with techie reading habits, makes Kindle Unlimited absolute death for my tech books.

Mastery Book Goals

Most tech books are huge. I wanted to write shorter tech books that dive deeply into narrow aspects of system administration. I saw a gap that $9.99 ebooks would fill nicely. The books would be about 30,000-45,000 words each, and cover what every sysadmin must know about the material. The argument over whether or not the books achieve that is best had over a drink, but that’s the goal.

Some of my topics were poorly chosen. SNMP Mastery wound up at over 60,000 words. I looked at the completed book and thought: a fair price on this would be $14.99. If I do that, though, I make less on each ebook sale at Amazon. I might figure out how to survive that. I would not survive thinking of Amazon making more off my work for purely arbitrary reasons.

The books must be fairly priced, both for you and for me. I won’t ever get wealthy writing tech books, but if I don’t pay the bills I’ll have to go to work for someone else. They must be a win-win purchase.

Long Term Pricing

Prices increase over time. This is not a surprise.

Consider the cost of tech books through the years. Ebooks should not be priced the same as print books, and booksellers discount print books, but print books have the MSRP on the cover so they’re a decent yardstick for measuring scale of change. My books Absolute BSD, Absolute FreeBSD, and Absolute OpenBSD are all about the same size and have similar audiences.

These books cost $39.95 in the 2000s, and $59.95 in the 2010s. I expect them to hit (ugh) $79.95 in the 2020s.

Amazon is fairly rare among dot-coms in that it started off thinking very long-term. Its long term goal is to make books inexpensive, just like they make everything inexpensive. They’re not looking at 2021, they’re looking at 2030 and 2050.

Why would they ever eliminate the dead zone? Keeping it fits their long term goals. I would like to be wrong, but I’m pretty confident the $9.99 hurdle is perpetual.

The Future
Writers might not need pants, but we do need health care and gelato and caffeine. The price of the Mastery ebooks must eventually increase, along with everything else. This change is not imminent, but I can see the day approaching and am considering strategies against it.

My main options for “price increases above $9.99” seem to be:

  1. Drop Amazon Kindle for all new books. Amazon’s print book description would have near the top: “Due to Amazon’s discriminatory treatment of technology authors, ebook versions are available everywhere except Amazon.” I don’t know how long that note would survive, but I would take great satisfaction in posting it. It might alienate Kindle fans, though.
  2. Increase prices into the $10-$19.99 dead zone, and hope that my proceeds on other distributors overcome my Amazon losses. Theoretically possible, but rewards Amazon for discriminating against tech book authors.
  3. Artificially increase the price above $20 on all platforms. If I need to make $10 on each ebook sold at Amazon, I could increase the ebook price to $30. Thanks to the Most Favored Nation clause, the price must be identical on all platforms. I think $30 is an unfairly high price for SSH Mastery or even the overly long SNMP Mastery. Not a win-win, I won’t do it.

Other options do exist, like release windows, but these are the primary strategies. Of them, numbers two and three are unacceptable.

Decision Factors

If you look at my 2020 income, Amazon is my single biggest source, at 36%. My Amazon sales are pretty evenly split between print and ebook. Let’s call it 18% each. Taking an 18% pay cut would suck. Some of those readers would buy elsewhere, sure, but businesses must be pessimistic. For my calculations, and my laziness, let’s say Kindle is 20%.

(Dear tech author friends: don’t use my numbers. What percent of your sales are on Kindle? Do you know? And yes, I’m a freaking unicorn, I get it.)

Let’s say I write another tech book that should be priced fairly at $15, and examine it in three scenarios based on a baseline 1000 ebook sales.

Scenario 1: I price this book at $9.99, and sell 1000 ebooks across all platforms. I make $7 per book, and make $7000.

Scenario 2: I drop Kindle. I make $10 on each sale through every platform except Amazon, but sell only 800 books. I make $8000.

Scenario 3: I keep Kindle, but price at $14.99. I make $8900, at the price of feeding Amazon’s anti-tech-author discrimination. Plus, they make about $2000.

Is my annoyance at Amazon’s bottleneck practices worth $900? Is reader convenience worth $900? How about the two of them combined, against an “I win, you win, Amazon WINS BIG” situation? Good questions.

So what’s my actionable plan?

  • Write shorter tech books that can be fairly priced at $9.99. (We all know how I will fail, but it’s a goal.)
  • Watch inflation.
  • Continue disintermediating readers.
  • Steer readers that cannot be disintermediated to distributors other than Amazon.

I wrote this post to try to figure out the Kindle exit conditions. I guess I’ve already hit them. Or, I sell out for a few hundred bucks. Those folks who know the technologies I write about will understand that ethics matter to me, though.

This might get interesting…

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Forthcoming Mastery Book Price Changes

Just like the rest of the industrial world, the print book supply chain is struggling. All over the world, my printers are raising their prices. My indie publishing unit, Tilted Windmill Press, must roll with the changes. If you want print books, I recommend purchasing them soon.

I don’t know what the final prices will be. I have many titles, and churning through them all is a right pain. Some will require cover updates, because I foolishly put the prices on the back cover just like big publishers do. (I have built Tilted Windmill Press by producing products that can compete with the big publishers, which meant looking like Big Publishing books. Unfortunately, Big Publishing lets books age like milk, when my books age like wine.) (Also, why did nobody warn me that this insane business might succeed? I had dozens of exit strategies for my inevitable failure, but never asked “What will you do if your self-pub biz–hang on, hear me out–works? What if this book is still in print in, oh, I don’t know, TEN YEARS?”)

Prices are going up everywhere, for everything. The pandemic has everything higgledy-piggledy, and there’s no way to know where it will settle down. I’ll post shortly on what that means for my ebook side.