For the next couple of days I’m reviewing the paperback print proof of Run Your Own Mail Server. I received the proofs just before I flew to Vegas, and while I glanced through the book in between my meetings, I spent most of my energy selling work and learning new ways to insinuate myself into the publishing ecosystem. I must dedicate time to examining each page, even though looking at the text triggers mental torment.
The hardcover proof is en route, because the printer screwed up shipping. The interior is exactly the same as the paperback, so I only need to review the cover and binding.
What exactly does “good enough” mean? Minor problems can be fixed by changing a word or adding a vowel mean I need to send the printer a new PDF, but I won’t order a new print proof. If I must redo the interior layout, including shifting content from one page to another or adjusting the cover text, I must order a new proof.
Between print sponsors and Kickstarter backers I must mail hundreds of these dang things. It’s especially important I get this one as correct as possible.
Once I can check the hardcovers, I’ll start those orders.
The art for the backers-only special edition has arrived. The special edition uses the hardcover as a base. Once I approve the regular hardcovers I can start on the special edition.
The ebook is based on the paperback. Once I finalize the paperback I can start on the ebook. Maybe this week?
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.
Making it the biggest Mastery book I’ve ever written. I was right to make the ebook $15, and I suspect the print version will wind up being $35. Won’t know until I feed it to the printer.
Now I go through the manuscript page-by-page with my red pen and highlighters, looking for layout errors. And content errors. Yes, I’ve caught content errors at this stage before. The best way to perceive an error in a manuscript is to change the form.
With luck I’ll have a clean interior to submit to the printer in a couple days, and a print proof will arrive the week after. I check the proof repeatedly for a few days. If that works, I’ll be ordering the regular books. (The only blocker for the special edition is the art, which arrives about 15 August. I’ll order that proof right away.)
It’s been over a year since I did this kind of check, and it seems that all of my highlighters except the blue and pink have dried out. I fear that this will turn into some sort of gender reveal disaster… but I knew the risks when I got into this business.
A few years ago I switched from delivering books via WordPress downloads to Bookfunnel. Now and then, folks ask why. “Because it reduces my pain without escalating yours” is trite, but true. Here’s the full explanation.
When I first opened tiltedwindmillpress.com, I provided files at obfuscated filenames. By the third direct sale, someone had shared the link to eleven thousand of their closest friends. Pirating my books is a jerk move, but pirating them off my own server is downright insulting.
Woocommerce provides access controls for downloads, letting me limit the number of downloads. I set it to ten and moved on.
That eventually caused problems, though. Now and then someone would need to redownload their books more than ten times. People want help loading their files onto devices. Woocommerce’s download management is clunky, probably because they didn’t anticipate my use case. Bundles like The Full Michael took hours of painstaking labor to update. (I don’t remember if I actually launched TFM before Bookfunnel, but the thought of doing it the old way causes keyboard-trashing shudders, so my body certainly remembers.)
Bookfunnel lets me provide epub, mobi, and PDF, all easily labeled. If you create an account at https://my.bookfunnel.com, they’ll let you redownload your books as many times as you like. When I update a book, updates actually propagate across the accounts. They can help you load your ebooks onto whatever weird ereader you own. I pay them for this service specifically so they leave my customers the heck alone.
Yes, having my readers’ email addresses in the hands of an exploitative firm would suck. I am highly confident that exploitative firms already have that information, however. Many of you use disposable or filterable addresses for exactly that reason. I would take the money I spend on Bookfunnel and give it to a WordPress contractor to have them manage the files, or to even write a Woo-compatible WordPress plugin for ebook management.
So: ease of management, ease of re-downloads, and help loading books on your devices. That’s why.
Yesterday, the copyedits on Run Your Own Mail Server returned. This means that today I’ll be setting up a Discord and integrating into my Patronizer systems to replace the Video Hangout level, writing the next column for the FreeBSD Journal and, coincidentally, the last column for Dear Abyss. I asked Simon Travaglia if he’d be interested in doing a foreword but he sensibly declined, so I guess I better write something to introduce that travesty. (I’m open on suggestions for people to approach, mind you.)
Anyway.
Once I complete the copyedits, I start on the page layout.
Once I complete page layout, I order print proofs and make the ebook.
The print proof is my absolute last chance to fix errors. At that point, I turn off preorders and order sponsor, Patronizer, Kickstarter, and preorder copies.
I have no date for this. Depends on if the copyeditor can cause me as much pain as I caused her.
(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of June, and the public at the beginning of July.)
“The deck is clear, projects are ready to go, I’m ready to WRITE!”
One lovely Friday night in May, She Who Must Be Obeyed finished teaching for the summer. The following Sunday, at five AM, she broke her leg.
You look alarmed, so I’ll say now: she will fully recover.
The next couple weeks were a blur. The third week, where she could take care of herself enough that I could do some work, are also a blur–but mostly because I was doing tech edits on Run Your Own Mail Server. The Kickstarter was scheduled to start on 20 May, and I had invested a bunch of energy in shilling it, so I didn’t want to push it back, but my stupid conscience demanded I have the book in copyedit before launching the Kickstarter. Why would I launch a Kickstarter on a book I’m not ready to deliver? I also had to finish writing two four-hour courses, one on email and one on TLS, for BSDCan. So, I launched the Kickstarter and got ready for BSDCan.
You remember my last Sausage post? Where I said I thought that the direct market for RYOMS was exhausted? I hoped I might gross seven, maybe ten thousand?
I was wrong.
So very wrong.
This is insane
And the dang thing isn’t over! I’m going to be shipping over 500 books. I might need to buy help doing that, particularly for the drop-shipped copies. Despite that complaint, you’d be helping me out if you’d share the campaign.
Part of the reason I set the Kickstarter to run over BSDCan was that I was teaching about email, and wanted to mention that the Kickstarter existed. I thought it might sell a couple more books. Also, I thought that if I was busy being the BSDCan con chair, I couldn’t spend my days obsessively reloading the Kickstarter page to see if anyone bid. The con chair role mainly consisted of pointing at volunteers and saying “You. You are empowered to make this Thing happen. Go. Do.” Plus, I’d deal with any last-minute disasters.
You ever start a week-long con exhausted? Because I sure did. It was a loooong week. Fortunately, SWMBO was more able to care for herself, so I was able to go at all. (If I hadn’t been chair, I would have canceled.)
So, yeah. Very few new words this month, and those all on polishing RYOMS. I hope to change that this month.
The eight hour drive home from BSDCan gave me time to ponder the world and my place in it. One thing I’ve been contemplating is my Patronizer rewards. The video hangout tier was popular during the covid lockdown. We still have covid, but we’re not in lockdown. I often start the video hangout and nobody shows up.
I’m contemplating dropping the monthly video hangout, replacing it with a quarterly all-Patronizer hangout: two in my morning, and two in my evening. That would give everyone a chance to show up.
I would replace the Monthly Video Hangout tier with a private chat. I would check the chat at least 2-3 times a week. The question is, what platform? Signal would be preferable, but its anonymity means it doesn’t integrate well with Patreon or Woocommerce. I’m familiar with Slack. Matrix and Discord annoy me. The catch would be, I’d demand that such a chat be family-friendly. Perhaps Addams Family friendly, but family friendly. That means moderation. I don’t know if I want to do that labor.
So, pondering. Video hangout subscribers, I’m open to your thoughts.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for RYOMS to return from copyedit. While books like SNMP Mastery covered complex material, that material could easily be chunked. It’s the most complex and interrelated book I’ve ever written. It does not break into chunks. Everything depends on everything. That meant painstaking interleaving of information, in a weird order that looks clunky but is the only way to approach the material. There’s reasons nobody else wrote this book. I have several outstanding anthology invitations, so I’m gonna break up my mental logjam and write some short fiction for a little bit. My brain is tired after the last few months.
I’m looking at the RYOMS Kickstarter and thinking I should do that revision of Networking for System Administrators I’ve been pondering. The cover art will need mushrooms, however.
Before then, though, I’ll launch Dear Abyss. Which might make two grand, if I’m very lucky. A collection of previously published honest advice columns is of much less interest than running a mail server. Even if “honest” means “bitter and cynical.” We’re talking sysadmin stuff, after all.
Sorry for the dearth of news, but it’s been a crap month. Do let me know what you think about the chat thing, however.
The “We Get Letters” column of the FreeBSD Journal is my opportunity to subtweet the Sysadmin Discourse of the Day. There’s far more than one Discourse between issues but let’s be real, most of the discourse isn’t worthy of discussion.
Anyway, I talk configuration management in the newest issue. My column appears first in the magazine, which I’m certain means something. Probably that the editor has been kidnapped and he’s asking his friends to rescue him, but that specifically excludes me so it’s not my problem.
If you like the column, you might grab the Letters to Ed(1) collection, containing the first three years of these columns. It will go out of print soon, because I’ll be publishing the Dear Abyss collection of years 1-6. But hey! Letters to Ed(1) will become a collectors item!
This bundle is full of great stuff. Gleason, Pope, and Carriger and titans of steampunk. I read Kilgore and Sawyer quite regularly. Rusch’s magnificent Fey series is early steampunk. The other authors and editors, well, given by the company they’re in, I have high expectations for them all.
If Tolkien’s elves went West to America, then eventually, the orcs would follow.
Michael takes that silly idea and weaves a sometimes funny, sometimes touching tale of how those poor orcs could survive in Detroit of the 1920s.
Being big and strong, they get manual labor jobs. Dirty work that nobody else wants to do.
And, given half a chance, they become what the Purple Gang only dreamed about- the best rum-runners in the mid-west.
The plots get complex. Unlike most fantasy stories, these orcs have real motivations, consistent behavior, and rich lives as they adapt to a world they never imagined.
And the orcs are likeable characters. Maybe not your first choice for a dinner companion, but characters you fall in love with and want to see succeed.
And they do succeed, but not the way you expect.
A couple folks have told me that Prohibition Orcs is not steampunk, but dieselpunk. They’re too early for dieselpunk. They’re too late for steampunk. There won’t be a ProhibitionPunk, however, because anyone who understands punk knows that Prohibition was arguably the most punk era of American history. The system failed people, so they did it themselves. There’s literal steam in the orc books, what with boilers and repurposed steam locomotives powering factories, along with giant mechanical systems and the general cleverness of steampunk, so I’m going to say they belong in steampunk as much as they belong anywhere. Perhaps with a bit more emphasis on the punk than the steam, however.
So grab the Storybundle while you can. A chunk of your purchase goes to help Girls On The Run.
