February’s Fervid Sausage

This See the Sausage Being Made post went to my esteemed Patronizers at the beginning of February, and will go to the public in March. Not a Patronizer? You could be.

One of the advantages of being a self-employed writer is that my schedule is infinitely flexible. I can work any hours I want, so long as I work them. The down side is that everybody knows my hours are endlessly flexible, and when there’s a family emergency I get elected to cope. A sane society would have supports for medical emergencies, but this is the United States and everything is terrible.

Still, words are being made. I hope to have Project IDGAF finished by the end of February, and the new Networking for Systems Administrators done by the end of March. As Douglas Adams said, “deadlines are wonderful: I love to hear the whooshing noise they make as they shoot past.” Still gonna try to make them. The Windows examples in N4SA2e are pure PowerShell, which has been an education. PowerShell has an interesting and design that makes many things possible in managing Windows. Unfortunately, it’s burdened by managing Windows. Want to look at a network interface? Great! There’s several different commands for doing that, each slightly different! It has a built-in select command for grabbing columns out of the output, rather like the bastard child of SQL and awk. You have to have that, because the output of any one of these commands might be hundreds of characters wide. If you can remember which of the several similar commands you need to look at, that is.

Anyway. Windows admins need network competence too.

Once that’s done, I’ll be working on a new ZFS book with Allan and finishing Skybreach. After ZFS, I’m planning a core DNS book.

And now, for some tedious business neepery.

People have been asking me about this new author web site tool, Fourthwall.com. It promises to be all things an author would need: web site, store, monthly patronage, and so on. It pretty well replicates what I built on tiltedwindmillpress.com. They only charge 3% of all sales, plus transaction fees. It seems like a great deal, doesn’t it?

Rather than give an opinion, I’m going to discuss how I decide to use an outside service.

The core postulate of service selection: The Internet’s business model is betrayal. Amazon was willing to lose millions of dollars a year until they achieved market domination. Once they crushed the competition, they promptly raised prices. Uber spent millions to destroy taxis. It’s not just the Internet, of course; look at the devastation Walmart inflicts on community businesses. Short of malice, there’s also inexperience and incompetence. When my first business back in the 90s, I sat down and figured out my cash flow and decided the company would work. My inexperience showed itself through expenses that far outstripped my predictions. I failed. It happens. From my customers’ perspective, I’m certain it felt like betrayal. So: The Internet’s business model is betrayal.

Before using a service provider, ask yourself: if they betray me, what is the cost of no longer doing business with them?

I use BookFunnel to deliver books. They provide ebook delivery, track who has what books, and let buyers re-download their books months or years later. The service costs me $100 a year. I switched to BF because I was spending 20-30 hours a year dealing with delivery and redelivery issues. My time isn’t worth a lot, but is more than $4/hour.

If BookFunnel betrays me, I have to switch back to delivering books myself. I would probably hire a contractor to set up something, or persuade a WordPress developer to write a book delivery system suited not only for my customers but for the customers of every other affected author. In the grand scheme of things, the impact is vexing but minimal.

Mind you, I don’t really expect BF to betray us in the foreseeable future. Why? Because of profitability.

Consider what Bookfunnel does for me? They run a database, a web front end, and provide file downloads. That’s it. The web site doesn’t offer news updates or anything that would lure the Hacker News crowd, so it’s not likely to experience massive traffic and load spikes. Running such a site as a business requires a meticulous attention to detail, but it’s not technically hard. Tens of thousands of authors pay BF $100/year or more for work that can be done on a single rack-mount server. That’s a nice business. They also support author stores, charging fees that are better than Amazon but reasonably profitable for them.

Suppliers need to feed their pet rats. (Or children, whatever.) If a supplier’s business model doesn’t generate enough cash for the supplier to meet their bills, it’s a good sign that the supplier intends to capture and then betray their market.

Just as important as profitability is the path to profitability. I have no idea how BF started, so I’m going to assume it’s the success story I hear over and over.

Some programmer hears their author friend griping about the problems of indie book delivery and thinks, “I could solve that!” They hack together some PHP and Postgres, rent a VM, and pitch it to their author friend. That friend helps them discover the most vexing bugs. Once the thing basically works, that author tells their other author friends how this site solved all their problems.

One hundred dollars a month times one user? Your VM bills are paid and you made a few bucks helping a friend, cool.

Ten users? It’s staring to look like real money.

Fifty users and more signing up every day? Quit the day job and ride this cash cow as far as you can!

Best of all, their customers are technical enough to configure WordPress payment gateways and have enough traffic to consider that $100/month a worthwhile investment over managing files themselves. They’re not complete newbies, and support responses like “update your plugin” require no further explanation.

The path to profitability is obvious and predictable. So is the path to failure.

Let’s consider Fourthwall in those terms, and assume I set up shop there. This example uses novels, because most writers running their own stores are novelists.

The path to profitability? You’re offering every author in the world a free web site and free store! They’re gonna flood in. While file storage is almost free, it’s expensive at scale. Many of those customers will have never set up a real web store before, and are going to have questions.

Writing books is one of the hardest ways to make a living. Selling books as an indie author is even harder. Most authors sell nothing. Three percent of sales? I charge $5 for my novels. That gives Fourthwall $0.15 per sale. Many novelists sell their books for $1 (a terrible practice for anything but loss leaders, but that’s a separate argument). Fourthwall gets $0.03 per sale.

How many three-cent purchases will it take to cover monthly server rental?

The numbers on my tech book sales are slightly higher, but still depressing.

If I ran my site, my store, and my Patronizer program through Fourthwall and they took three percent? They’ll eventually either go out of business and leave me hanging, or be compelled to raise their prices. When either happens, I must drop everything and scramble to replace those services elsewhere.

Again, none of this requires malice. But authors are so prone to falling for scams that entire web sites exist exposing scammers. After thirty-two years kicking around publishing, an honest business is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.

And I might be wrong! I have made claims and been proven wrong before. (Performative Buzzword Compliance is very real, but the specifics of Kickstarter’s case made me wrong. Oh well.)

Being independent is not easy. I opened my bookstore eleven years ago. Getting it to its current state has been long and slow, and I’m still working on integrating print sales into it. I’m hoping that my outside contractor figures out the final shipping problem. I’m a tiny customer so I’ve told them to fit me in wherever.

For the curious, why did I outsource a silly WordPress problem? Because I’ve been fighting this problem for over a year. In the immortal words of ZZ Claybourne, “my job is book.” I don’t want to delve sufficiently deep into WordPress to solve this problem. I’d prefer writing “More SNMP Mastery” or “[ Mastery.”

In other business-related stuff: the new US presidential administration is just as bad for business as I expected. We’ve flipped our spending to Yellow. Business thrives on predictability, and predictability is now in the same narrow niche as the Ford Edsel and the mechanical calculator. While I am always grateful to my Patronizers, my thanks are especially fervid now.

But if I’m gonna get this book done, I better go make some words.

“SSH Mastery” now available in print direct from me

The headline kind of says it all, but it won’t let me put a link so I’ll repeat it. If you want SSH Mastery in print you can buy it from me. Unlike any other store, buy the print and you get the no-DRM ebook for free.

Thanks to the number of retail channels I use I have no ability to generate per-title book sales figures, but SSH Mastery is consistently near the top at most of the stores.

Print and ebook editions of all future Tilted Windmill Press titles will be available first through my store. Adding a backlist title is a few hours work, and a couple weeks of waiting to be sure that the printer does a good job. Yes, it’s a third printer. I’ll rant about why in March’s See the Sausage Being Made column, which I still owe my Patronizers.

Anyway, you can get a print/ebook bundle of SSH Mastery. It’s a mere eight years later than I wanted, but that’s tech for you.

If you want to know if I have a particular title in print, see my store’s print category.

The Reader Acquisition Funnel

I keep referring people to the Reader Acquisition Funnel, which I wrote about in the middle of one of my monthly See the Sausage Being Made posts. It’s clear I need to pull this out into its own post. I’ve twiddled with the text because I can’t leave bad enough alone.

My goal is to spend my life doing work I enjoy. That means I’ve had to learn unholy business concepts that I would rather not soil my soul with, and apply them to my trade. Disintermediation is one of those concepts. I want you to reduce the number of middlemen between you and I. How does one accomplish this? Marketing experts create a Customer Acquisition Funnel describing how they lure people into their employer’s clutches. I have a similar Reader Acquisition Funnel.

  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 (fediverse, bluesky)
  4. Sign up for my mailing list in exchange for freebies
  5. Buy books directly from me
  6. Kickstarter backer
  7. Sponsor books
  8. Regular monthly contributor
  9. You do all my chores so I can write more

I just realized this funnel has nine rings, exactly like a famous legendary funnel. I promise that my ninth ring is not eternally frozen. I live in Michigan, it’s only frozen for half of the year.

My goal is to make the mouth of the funnel as broad as possible, to suck folks in. With fiction, that’s straightforward. Now that the Prohibition Orcs books are out, I’m working on making the first orc story free everywhere. If someone reads the tale, gets to the end, and wants more, they’ll see the friendly note at the end of the tale inviting them to check out the full-length books.

My nonfiction is less blatant, but that’s why you’ll see my FreeBSD Journal column. I give nonfiction mailing list subscribers a copy of Tarsnap Mastery to give them a taste of what my books are like. I also carefully choose which topics to write about. If you have a problem with PAM, there’s only one book on the topic. Same with ed(1). Such books broaden the funnel’s second level. People keep asking for a book about LDAP, but there are many good tomes on that topic and it would do nothing to widen the funnel. Plus, LDAP is evil.

Does a book on a forty-year-old text editor broaden the funnel? Yes. Ed is legendary.

And yes, I did monetize the FreeBSD Journal column. By popular demand.

A business school graduate would say that the readers at the bottom of the funnel are more likely to buy more of my books. I acknowledge that’s true on the spreadsheet, but the only way I can guide people to purchase my books on an ongoing basis is by providing a quality emotional and educational experience. Yes, my nonfiction is emotional as well as educational. The emotion is why certain folks hate my tech books.

Each ring offers subtle notifications that further levels exist. Buy a book? In the back you’ll find a link to my web page and a list of other titles. Back me on Kickstarter? I will thank you copiously. As the campaign reaches fulfillment I will mention my crowdfunding and sponsors mailing list. I’ll also mention that the only way to get a challenge coin is to sponsor a book directly with me.

Anyway. Someone encounters my work, buys a few books, perhaps follows me on the fediverse, signs up for my mailing list, and eventually starts paying me to exist like my wonderful Patronizers do. At each stage, I gently make them aware of the next level.

The Reader Acquisition Funnel guides my business decisions. For example, I was waffling on whether I should provide my free titles in my bookstore. I was spelling this out for my Penguicon publishing talk when I realized that the people who get my free things from my e-bookstore? They are in the funnel’s first ring, and if they like the sample are willing to immediately leap down to the River Styx — uh, my fifth ring. MY fifth ring. Not Dante’s.

By providing the freebies from my store, I make that leap easy. As I revise this post, I realize that my bookstore should also offer a Freebies Bundle.

The lesson? If you’re wondering what to do, review the basics.

And now I want to write a book on the business of publishing, themed after the Inferno. Dammit Muse, I don’t have that kind of time!

Now available: combined print/ebook bundles direct from my bookstore

The question I get asked most often is “Can I get a print and ebook combo of your books?” No, hang on, that’s not quite true. Technically, the most common questions are “Are you mad?” followed by “Are you serious?” but the print/ebook combo thing is a solid third place.

I am delighted to announce that after years of work, I am deploying direct print sales from my bookstore. Buy the print book and get the ebook free. Ebook will arrive in minutes. The print book will ship in about a week.

Only Run Your Own Mail Server and Dear Abyss are available so far.

While I’d like to offer a discount, the big bookstores would price match me. And yes, you pay shipping. With shipping charges it’s more expensive and slower than Amazon Prime. Every penny outside shipping, printing, and processing fees goes to feeding my family, however, so that’s a win (for me). I’m looking at ways to reduce the cost, but I need to see if anyone will actually order this way before I sink more money and time into it.

When you place an order, my store invokes BookFunnel for the ebook and files a print order with BookVault. In minutes, BookFunnel will send you an email with links to download your books. They’ll be available for redownload at https://my.bookfunnel.com. A few hours later, BookVault will send you a print order confirmation.

All new books will be available on my site before anywhere else. I will also be adding older titles as time permits.

I’ve been working on disintermediation for over ten years. This is the last big piece. I am delighted.

Why did this take so long? Well, shipping in the real world is kind of a mess. That makes shipping in WooCommerce kind of a mess. For most authors BookVault would be plug-and-run, but I’m special. My sponsorships are incompatible with BookVault. I wound up employing Sleeping Giant Studios to resolve incompatibilities between the two. I highly recommend SGS for any WooCommerce daftness.

January’s Joggly Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of January, and the public at the beginning(ish) of February.)

My thoughts on last month? “Well, that was a thing that happened.” Lost two weeks to holiday chaos, but managed to get a few words made anyway.

The Dear Abyss Kickstarter is basically complete. Three people still owe me their addresses to ship books. That’s a problem, but I’ve poked them to fill out their backer surveys. When I get addresses, I’ll ship. My conscience is clean. I’m having an online launch party for this book. You’re invited. Details are at the bottom of this post.

Releasing a weird book on 1 April might not be my annual tradition, but after the Networknomicon, the two editions of Ed Mastery, the Savaged by Systemd audiobook, and Only Footnotes, it’s certainly a tradition. One that I’m continuing this year. This is a full-length book that I have done actual writing for, unlike Only Footnotes. (People claim they want a book containing only the footnotes, but when I release one they don’t buy it. Weird. Well, at least they stopped asking for it. I’ll take the win.) However low your expectations are, I can guarantee that this book will not meet them.

I’m still on the accountant hunt, but it appears that I’m not going to find an accountant specializing in intellectual property who is interested in taking me on as a client. I don’t make enough to be worth their while. Oh well. If you’re interested in the money side of my career, I put up my annual “where my money comes from” blog post.

I’m also still pondering doing a large book. For contractual reasons, I’m not going to indie publish a large OpenBSD or FreeBSD book at this time. Allan Jude is interested in updating our ZFS books, though, so that’s probably what’ll happen. Yes, I still want to write It’s Always DNS and What To Do About It, but I gotta shamelessly vacuum Allan’s brain while it’s available. FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and FM: Advanced ZFS are still valid, but ZFS has developed many new features since those books came out. We’ll cover both FreeBSD and Linux. Yes, ZFS is better integrated with FreeBSD than Linux, but there are myriad Linux OpenZFS users. On the publishing side, I’ll combine them in one large book and call it OpenZFS Mastery. I’m guessing it’ll come to about 150,000 words, about three times the size of the typical Mastery title. That’s enough that it’ll need professional indexing and heavy copyediting and tech review, but it’s less ambitious than a big Unix book.

It’s a small step, not a giant leap, but it’s probably wiser.

One of my goals over the last couple of years has been learning to speak coherently. Yes, I give talks. Those talks get recorded and put online. Those recordings show the whole world that I am a) incoherent, and b) daft. I can discover antigravity more easily than I can change the second, but the first could be improved. That’s why I have the 60 Seconds of WIP podcast; it forces me to speak regularly. One of my dear Patronizers used professional-grade podcast equipment at work for an internal company podcast, but the company shut down the podcast. Long story short, I now have professional-grade podcasting equipment. This might be the impetus I need to convert my office bathroom into a recording room. I at least need to set up a computer in a different room for recordings: the fans on my new desktop are loud enough to show up on the recordings. I’ve never played with audio or video on BSD, so that might be fun. Especially with a fancy Heil mic. I do worry that it might require understanding more about video formats than I want to know, but if it stops being fun I could move it over to the MacOS laptop. I’ve ordered a small wheeled standing desk that should fit nicely in the bathroom. Running water doesn’t mix with sound-damping foam, but even with bare walls it will be an improvement over the Apocalypse Fans.

The new Networking for Systems Administrators is coming along. It now has over a hundred print sponsors, which means I I’ll do a challenge coin. This book has picked up more sponsors than any other I’ve written. Many of the new sponsors are folks who backed the RYOMS Kickstarter and signed up for the sponsors mailing list. That gives me a horrid nervous complex that I better deliver a quality book or they’ll hunt me down–uh, I mean, warm fuzzy feelings. Yeah. Warm fuzzy feelings.

Anyway: you’re all welcome to the Dear Abyss launch party. Party is a strong word for a Zoom session, but we live in an age where companies describe their new shoes as “hope” so I’m going with it. Saturday 25 January 2025 at 10AM EST, or 15:00 UTC. The US West Coast can get up at 7AM, the Europeans can skip dinner time, and as usual Australia is fubar. One day I’ll do one of these in Australian time and annoy everyone else.

(zoom info deleted, because it’s past and wasn’t public.)

New Rats’ Man’s Lackey story: “and the Bringer of Leaves”

“The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Bringer of Leaves” previously appeared in Pulphouse #33, and it’s now standalone in ebook for a paltry $1.99 on my bookstore.

More Rats’ Man’s Lackey stories exist, but the dang things keep selling to trad publishing. Seems there’s a market for “supernatural Witness Protection cosplaying as urban fantasy Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin” tales. At this rate, I’ll probably publish a collection in 2026.

You can’t get this at Amazon. I am no longer publishing short stories standalone in other bookstores. The pricing just doesn’t work. I think I should make a “a buck or two” on a story, and that you should pay “a buck or two.” If I price it for $1.99 on Amazon, I make about sixty cents. At $2.99 my cut jumps to about $2, but that’s a lot for you to pay.

Patronizers, your free copy is on the way. Well, I say free. You pay for the right to get my stuff for free. It’s a terrible deal, but you knew that.

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.”