No, not the book this time. The product. Previously you picked a format, print or ebook. If you sponsored for print, Woocommerce used your address to calculate shipping. Cool. It took me a couple iterations to get that working, but it’s the way the rest of the world works.
Then I added print books via BookVault.
Turns out that Woocommerce does not like multiple shipping systems. It says it’s fine. It is not. After months of fighting with this, I realized that my attachment to sponsor shipping autocalculation was causing pain. I have restructured the product so that you choose a destination and pay accordingly.
The total price has not changed. The list price is now shipping-inclusive to avoid Woo’s clunky shipping system, that’s all. While sponsorship is an especially terrible deal for my Australian backers, it is no more terrible than before.
I’m still pushing to get the first draft of this book finished by the end of the month.
Also: attachment is the source of all pain. Well, that and blunt instruments. Those hurt, too.
titles available in print on tiltedwindmillpress.com, 21 April 2025
I have other books in the system, but am waiting for the print proofs to arrive. They come from a new printer (BookVault). Before I tell you to buy a book, I need to know that BV can produce the book as intended. They’re competent, but everyone handles PDFs slightly different. I’ve caught a couple weird color things and a skewed margin. So, despite my efforts to trim down in-house stock, I’m accumulating books. Dammit.
The thing I’m super excited about? Bundles.
It’s about eight years too late, but I now sell the FreeBSD Storage bundle in print. If you buy it from me, I can afford to knock 20% off. Even with shipping, that makes it a better deal for you than buying from Amazon.
My hope is that the kind of people who want to, for example, run their own mail servers will also want to buy directly from the author. That would help make up for the current, unforced and wholly unnecessary, economic implosion in the US.
It funded. My gratitude to everyone who backed, spread the word, or called me mad.
My goal on book Kickstarters is deliberately set below actual production cost. I want it to fund. I’m going to publish it anyway, and I’d rather get $500 to production cost than set a goal of the actual price and fail to fund.
Every campaign funding has this shape. There’s an initial surge, a steady upward slope, and a final surge. Here’s Laserblasted.
That three-day dead spot in the middle is where the tariffs were announced. After that initial shock I did attract more backers, but other backers canceled their pledges or switched from hardcovers to ebooks. Again, I don’t blame them. But without that economic shock, the graph would have looked very different.
The good news? In absolute dollars, Laserblasted raised more than Apocalypse Moi. That’s cool. The bad news is that Laserblasted is wholly original, not a collection, and so expenses are much higher.
Laserblasted will be the first new release offered in print and ebook exclusively through my web store for a few weeks. It will trickle out to other stores.
Again, I don’t blame folks for not backing. When the plane loses pressure, put on your own air mask before helping others. This post is simply to tell others that they are not alone.
Let me say up front: the whole Laserblasted project is daft. Yes, it’s a real novel. No, you don’t need to see the movie to understand it. (You don’t need to see the movie, period.) My alpha readers say it’s worthy. It’s not a novelization of the film. The marketing wrote itself.
But it’s daft.
This post is not a complaint, merely an observation. This is my career, and I knew the risks when I got into it. I am grateful for any support folks offer me, and I do not blame anyone for protecting themselves or their families.
By now I have a decent idea how much a Kickstarter will raise. I suspected that Laserblasted would bring in about $5,000, plus or minus a thousand, more or less. After fulfillment, that would net more than a trad deal with a reputable medium-sized publisher. It was on track to match or exceed that prediction.
Kickstarter provides a handy graph of backer support each day. What’s the campaign actually doing?
Huh. It’s like something happened last week. Something that took a few days to ripple through the economy, until it hit folks that this was real and they needed to prepare for financial disaster. When the plane loses cabin pressure, you must put on your own air mask before helping others.
I see the names of my backers. I recognize many of them. Folks who previously bought $200 omnibuses are now backing for $6 ebooks. Again, no blame on them. Put your own mask on first.
I’ve gotten notes from long-term backers and Patronizers, apologizing. These are awesome because I know they dearly want to support me. They’re heartbreaking because folks feel they’re letting me down. No, you’re not letting me down. I appreciate every one of you but again, put your own mask on first.
If you’re doing crowdfunding right now and everything imploded last week, know you’re not alone.
If you want to support my books but can’t, know that I don’t hold it against you. I know who to blame, and they never liked my books anyway.
I’ll keep shilling the campaign, and will raise what I can. I’m just glad I didn’t do the $200 Laserblasted 12″ Action Figure with Real Fake Lasergun Arm.
(This post went to Patronizers in March, and to the public in April. Not a Patronizer? You could be.)
The business world is upended. Companies are bracing for survival. Jobs are being cut. It’s almost as if people realized that the ship of state has not only been overtaken by a great white whale, but the whale has climbed onto the deck and is thrashing about shrieking “Respect me! RESPECT ME.”
As if that could ever happen. But anyway.
There’s really only one reaction my family can have: tighten our belts, and slash spending to the bone. At the business level I’m focusing on disintermediation. Speaking of which, I have successfully disintermediated print sales for Run Your Own Mail Server, SSH Mastery, and Dear Abyss. And they’re selling. 11 copies isn’t fantastic, but these are all backlist titles more than 30 days old. Yes, RYOMS is my most recent title, but after the sponsorships and Kickstarter and my 30-day post-release marketing push, it’s now a backlist title. I hope to sell a couple dozen copies a month, if I’m lucky. Same for SSH Mastery. Dear Abyss, of course, I expect to sell zero of. Those of you daft enough to buy it have already done so. (How do I make a living by selling a couple dozen copies a month of a title? By having a lot of titles., and by offering crowdfunding. That’s you lovely Patronizers.)
Mind you, I have no ability to count how many copies of a title I sell. The dozens of sales channels I offer ebooks through all have incompatible reporting systems. No way to aggregate them. I just write the best books I can, wish them luck, kiss them goodbye, and indifferently fling them into the hungry void. What happens next is up to them.
Me launching books. “Good luck kid, you’re on your own. Hope you make it!”
I control what I can, and stop worrying about the rest. If there’s a giant white whale flopping around on deck, I stay below and do my job. Occasionally holding up my SLAY THE WHALES sign, offering support to whale-fighters, and reducing the amount of stuff my family owns until we can carry it all to the lifeboats.
How does the print disintermediation work?
Bookvault (BV) prints the books for me. They offer an API for ordering books and a WordPress plugin for it.
When you order a print book from me, WordPress confirms that the book is printable and what shipping options are available to your address. When you complete your order, WordPress takes your money. It then tells BV to print and ship the book, and tells BookFunnel to send you an ebook. BV will send you a notice that they’ve accepted the order, as well as when they ship from their plants in the US, UK, or Australia. The annoying thing is that BV’s receipt tells you how much I paid for the book. It’s not that I care that you know printing RYOMS costs $8. You could figure that out if you cared. But it might confuse buyers.
The catch with BookVault is that while they are a third printer. I currently print through IngramSpark and Amazon. Each requires PDF files created with very specific requirements and settings. If you’ve lived your life as a decent, wholesome person and have therefore never needed to delve into the bleak innards of the Portable Document Format, all you need to know is that there are many versions of the PDF standard, and each has many options. These settings can be saved through .joboptions files. As a printer, providing your customers with a config file is the surest way to guarantee that the PDF files you receive use the correct settings. Between all of the big POD printers, can you guess which ones provide .joboptions files?
Lulu.
Which POD printer does not appear in the list of printers I use?
Lulu!
(Why do I not use Lulu? That’s another discussion. They’re probably fine for you, but I’m a madman.)
BV can use the same interior file as Amazon and IngramSpark, but provides their own cover template. I must recreate the cover for each book. About an hour of work for each title. Then I must order a proof, wait for it to arrive, check my work, and activate it on the store. Not onerous, but definitely tedious. With the number of titles I’ve published, getting everything on BV will require time. If I can reproduce the success of the RYOMS Kickstarter, I was contemplating hiring someone for exactly this sort of work. Sadly, the flopping whale means that’s unlikely. Once I finish the current books, I need to book a couple weeks of nothing but cover recreation and get everything into BV and thus onto TWP.
Why did this take so long? As I said last month, I had to hire an outside WordPress consultant to figure out why the shipping options for sponsors and print orders were being comingled. Sleeping Giant delved into my store and came back with, “Because WooCommerce shipping is poo.” Authors who don’t do sponsorships would have no problem, but noooo, I’m a madman and have multiple shippable products that use different shipping mechanisms. Woo has many shipping options because the poo needs shoveling. It’s both a relief to know that I did nothing wrong, and that I spent nearly a year on a problem that I could not have solved because the underlying technology is flawed. Figures.
This will be left alone couple months. If there are problems, if BV can’t actually execute or shipping is awful or the flopping whale disables my ability to do business with British firms like BV, I’ll have to find another way.
I’m also waiting for someone to say “You charged $30 for a book that costs you $8? What the hell, dude?” That’s a fair question. My print books are priced to accommodate sales through bookstores, including the Dread Bezos-Beast. I sure don’t see $22 when you buy it through retail channels. I freely admit that the increased margin on direct sales is why I’ve been so desperate to disintermediate print. I can’t offer a reduced price on print books sold directly, because Amazon will match any price I set. Once I know that everything works as I hope, I might offer a coupon to help cover shipping.
Other things I’ve done this month?
I try to make all relevant information available on my web site. Between the FAQ, the books, podcast, blog, videos of talks, it’s a lot. More than one person has told me that my web site is overwhelming. I took a couple hours and set up https://mwl.link/ as a handy index of everything. What happens? If I tell folks that’s my web site, they say I need a better web site. Please imagine I’ve put one of those “exhausted crying baby” GIFs here.
Writing progress?
Five scenes remain on ProjectIDGAF, and one of them is super short. It should be complete this week. I’ll then shift into high gear on N4SA2e.
Hard to type with a whale rocking the whole dang ship, though. I get seasick.
Delivering books to Canada has long been a pain in my butt. I live in Detroit, Michigan. Canada’s right there! I can walk a mile to the shore, throw a rock, and hit a poutine wagon. But no matter how I stretch, I can’t get tiger tail and I can’t cheaply mail books there. It’s cheaper for me to ship to some parts of Europe and Asia than it is to ship to Toronto.
I just discovered that my direct print sales fulfillment printer, BookVault, now prints from Canada. I hit the button to enable that so fast, you’d think it was offering tiger tail delivery. The books will be printed in Winnipeg, and shipped within Canada via their postal system. I have not tested BV’s Canadian printer. I can’t; if I order a book here, they’ll print it in the US.
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.
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.
Read my free or discounted samples (articles in magazines, free first in series, sample pages in bookstore, library check-out)
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.
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!
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.
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.
(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.)
