Category: business

The hot new idea in writer circles is the author-owned bookstore. According to the Wayback Machine I’ve had my author-owned bookstore since 17 May 2013, so you can imagine I’m fully on board with this. This store now accounts for 35% of my income, more than Amazon, so it’s a critical part of my business.

When folks look at building a store, though, they’re immediately confronted with choosing a platform. There’s two major platforms: Shopify and Woocommerce. Which should you pick? The costs are comparable. The skill level to use either is about the same. They then commit a grievous error and ask me for my opinion.

I will always advise Woocommerce. Always.

When I say this, many authors immediately jump up and say “I tried Woo and it sucked, Shopify works better!” I would reframe that. “The first store I built sucked, the second store I built is much better!” The first book you wrote probably sucked, too. The first iteration of my Woo store also sucked. I look at a lot of author bookstores and immediately say, “Oh sweetie, no, this is not how you do it.” Some of them hired ‘technical’ people to build the store. Technical people are like literary agents: there is no qualifying exam, they act in their own interests according to their own biases, and you can’t afford a good one. Even a disaster is educational, though. Your failed first store taught you how to build a second store containing less suck. (It’s amazing how many writers are willing to spend years noodling over a manuscript, but expect their first store to work perfectly on their first try.)

My motivation for standing up my own bookstore is to declare independence from any outside channel. A decade ago, Amazon was the majority of my income. Making my books available in all channels increased the number of readers I drew while reducing my dependence on Amazon. Adding my own bookstore reduced my dependence on anyone. Yes, I use outside components and services, but every one of those parts can be replaced. Why would I replace a dependency on Amazon with a dependence on Shopify?

Cory Doctorow recently made a big splash with the word enshittifcation. He describes it as the process where an Internet company starts off being useful, becomes powerful, then starts squeezing values out of suppliers and then customers. It’s standard business practice at Internet scale. Ford and General Electric would totally do the same, if federal regulation didn’t prevent it. Amazon exists with very little federal regulation.

I prefer a simpler word: betrayal. It’s harsh, yes, but it fits.

Internet companies betray their user every day. Glassdoor sold itself as a place to anonymously rat out employers. Now the company wants to monetize its users, and is attaching real names to user profiles. While I could laugh and say You idiots trusted an Internet company, what did you expect? this will literally destroy lives and careers. Findaway Voices sold itself as one service, got bought by Spotify, changed its ToS to become an IP-pillaging company, and appeared to back down under protest. People thought it was a victory. It was not. We lost. We lost huge. It was an absolute rout. Compare their current terms of service to the pre-Spotify terms of service. Now consider what a minor update like “we added three carefully-chosen words to the ToS, they’re harmless legal boilerplate, we promise” could do. I guarantee that Findaway’s lawyers knew what words they would add and where they would put them before releasing these “friendly” Terms of Service. In Reddit’s quest to raise money, it trashed the people who create its value. All that’s only in the last year.

Betrayal is the Internet’s business model.

Businesses look out for their own interests. If a business believes it exists solely to maximize shareholder value, and has no legal, regulatory, or competitive barriers, it will become invaluable and then betray you.

What happens if either Shopify or Woo betrays me?

The Shopify software and all hosting thereof is fully controlled by the Shopify company. When folks tell me that they’re lovely people, what I hear is “the company’s current management is lovely, but the owners have decided to not betray their users. Yet.” A third of my income is at risk. If they become a problem I must hurry up and find a new store system, without advance warning, right freaking now.

The Woo software is freely available under a permissive license, and is hosted on a WordPress site I pay for. There is a Woocommerce company, yes, but they make money by selling support and add-ons. The actual software cannot be taken away. Yes, I buy some Woo plugins. There’s a super healthy plugin marketplace. If Woo Inc betrayed me, I’d have time to switch. After all, I have all the code. It’s running on my server. Betrayal would vex me, and I’d feel obliged to rant and rave. Also, Woo is a fork of Jigoshop. If Woo betrays its users, any number of those outside firms would leap up and happily take their place. And Woo knows it. That’s how they replaced Jigoshop. One day they’ll get bought and the new owners will go for a betrayal anyway, though.

When Shopify inevitably betrays me, over a third of my income is at risk.

When Woocommerce inevitably betrays me, I am not at risk. I’m merely pissed off.

Either way, you need to experiment with your store. Polish it. Experiment. Some of those experiments will be complete failures. Some will succeed worrying well. It’s all about what your readers want. Give readers a seamless buying experience, and expect that it’s gonna take a while.

See part 1 and part 2 for context.

Last night Findaway changed their terms of service last night to something mundane, but it doesn’t matter.

I’ve worked with developers for decades. Developers do extra work, but only certain kinds of extra work. They will rearchitect your entire front end in Rust and Pascal for the sheer joy of it. What they won’t do is change the terms of service for the fun of it. That’s boring.

I know several lawyers who have fun drafting proposed contracts. This isn’t that.

Someone came to the Findaway web site developers and said “Add a popup with these new terms of service.”

Were those ToS an error? If they were identical to the Spotify ToS, then I’d accept a copy-and-paste goof. They were not. Someone wrote them.

Additionally, it was pointed out that opting out had a 30 day lag, and the announcement was made 30 days before it would take effect. If you didn’t catch it immediately, Spotify would assimilate your work.

Lawyers are accustomed to negotiating with other lawyers. Everybody starts by asking for everything, they bat it back and forth, either meet in the middle or amicably end negotiations. The initial ask includes things that they know they won’t get, and things that they can discard so they can show they’re being reasonable. It’s a dance.

These online terms of service from tech companies? They start the same way, but they’re negotiating with the public. They wait to see what gets pushback.

They’ve shown us what they want to achieve, and it’s antithetical to our art and our craft.

Spotify has no pointy-clicky way to delete books from their inventory or your account. You can go in and delete the individual MP3s, however. You can change the cover art and description to Removed Because Spotify’s Business Practices are Unacceptable. You can then email support@findawayvoices.com and ask them to delete your account.

Hopefully, I am now done blogging about this.

I hear that Author’s Republic, which imperfect, has viable options. I haven’t read their ToS, though. You should read them for yourself, and ask how they’ll be used against you.

Yesterday I posted about Findaway Voice’s rights grab. Last night I received this email from Findaway Voices.

Earlier today, we shared planned updates to our Findaway Voices by Spotify. Terms of Use that are set to take effect on March 15, 2024. Our goal was to introduce language that would allow us to offer authors innovative features, improve discovery, and provide promotional tools such as share cards while assuring authors that you “retain ownership of your User Content when you post it to the Service.”

In the hours since, we’ve received valuable feedback, and we understand that there is confusion and concern about some aspects of this language. We want you to know that we hear you and are actively working to make clarifying updates to alleviate your concerns.

We are deeply committed to your success on Spotify. In the meantime, please stay tuned for more details.

I’m not going to bother ripping this apart line-by-line, but I will comment on “confusion and concern about some aspects of this language.” We are concerned because there is no confusion. I am not a lawyer, but I am accustomed to reading rights agreements. They haven’t even agreed to delay the implementation of these license terms. Those terms were reviewed by a lawyer and were not mistakenly uploaded by some overworked developer. A press release does not override a legal agreement.

It’s been suggested that this was an example of a lazy lawyer copying from an existing agreement. A person’s motives don’t matter. Only the harm they inflict matter. And if Spotify has this boilerplate lying around to copy from, that’s a really bad indicator.

I have no doubt that they will follow up with something less objectionable, but the problem is: they’ve shown their goals. They have written down and showed us what they want to achieve, and it is hostile to writers making a living.

Many musicians dislike Spotify. I can’t say all of them hate it, because there’s always an exception. Multiple musicians have removed their music from Spotify. Taylor Swift pulled her music from it. It reappeared without explanation, which is business-speak for “after years of discussion we negotiated an acceptable deal that included an NDA.” Good for her.

My first book came out in 1992. I’ve been through the business wringer. When I have a business question these days, I ask myself “what would Taylor Swift do?” (Or WW James Patterson D, depending on the problem).

Corey Doctorow made a splash with his neologism enshittification. It’s short, punchy, and has great emotional impact, but the concept is not new. Every public corporation in the Western world has the goal of permanently binding customers to them. They want to be the sole customer for their suppliers. Every company has tried this, for decades if not centuries. Ubiquitous computing and digital distribution of art has given them a huge new tool.

Remember that you don’t write books. You create and license intellectual property. Read the Copyright Handbook. The new edition is on top of my TBR pile.

My strenuous advice to everyone is: do not become dependent upon any one business partner. Be able to pivot at any time. Do not take bad deals that lock you into a single customer or allow others to pillage your intellectual property. Those Spotify terms? They allow any use of your audiobook. Run it through text-to-speech and then through text-to-video AI. Poof, there’s the movie. It’ll be a bad movie, because film is a distinct art from books, but its mere existence will hurt the value of your film rights.

I set up my own bookstore a decade ago, and spent ten years refining it. I turn down bad deals from publishers.

Writing is a long-term game. A career in creativity is the greatest life I can imagine, but it takes decades. If you need money now, rob a billionaire. My goal is to spend the rest of my life doing work that I enjoy. That means telling the exploiters “no.”

I try to hold down the amount of information on this site. I truly do. I also try to keep the menus at the top no more than one layer deep. But finding individual titles on my web site has become increasingly difficult. People complain that they can’t find titles. Everything is filed logically, but logic is limited. Is “PAM Mastery” a sysadmin tool or an operating system reference? Should “$ git commit murder” be filed under crime novels or software crimes?

I maintain the official title list in my OID, accessible to the world via a trivial SNMP query. That MIB doesn’t have links, though. It never will. I’m not rewriting my OID if I need to reorganize my web site.

Here’s the brand-new comprehensive title index. Tech books, short stories and novels, the Canadian Version of ZFS Mastery, TTRPGs, it’s all there. Sort by title or release date or length or genre, you can find it all and a link to the book’s entry.

Most short stories that were released as standalones were pulled into collections, so those entries link to the collection. The point of the index is so that you can acquire a Thing, whatever the Thing is. Or learn that the Thing is utterly unavailable.

This also served as a double-check of my web site. To my shock, everything I know about has an entry. I’m not saying this is everything–I have no idea what I’ve forgotten. But what I know about, I have claimed.

Why do this now? I had to hire help to accomplish it. No way I was dredging through all this crap.

Terry Pratchett was one of the most brilliant writers of the last hundred years. I own everything he ever published, in print, a worthy investment of several feet of precious shelf space. Tattered SFBC hardcovers from the 1980s with feebly-glued pages covered in faded dust jackets, battered paperbacks smuggled from Canada, spiffy hardcovers from when the world realized his work was amazing. I have it all. (If you’ve never read Pratchett, Wikipedia has a handy flowchart to help you decide where to start.)

HarperCollins launched a Terry Pratchett Discworld ebook Humble Bundle. You can get all the Discworld novels for $18, minus the oddities like “The Science of Discworld.” I’ve been waiting for an ebook bundle like this. I naturally grabbed it.

BUT–getting the actual ebook files is a right pain.

HarperCollins is one of those big publishers that think everything needs DRM, and they came up with a convoluted dance to comply with it. Sort of.

The books are delivered via Kobo. You don’t need a Kobo account, although if you have one that’s dandy. You can download the books, except what you download isn’t the book. You download an Adobe DRM file, usable by Adobe Digital Editions. Open that file in ADE, and Adobe sends you an unencumbered epub.

I had to switch to the Windows machine to do this. ADE is so clunky, halfway through downloading these 38 books I had to reboot the whole computer. Then I passed them through Calibre’s DeDRM_tools plugin to get the actual files.

Pratchett is worth it, of course. But he deserves better. And so do we.

If HC wants to compete with stolen ebooks, they need a better system.

My web store does not do everything I would hope. Ideally, you would give me money and the epub would appear on your device automagically. But at the moment, “give me money and get a link to the epub” is looking pretty dang good.

Don’t know exactly what you want as a gift for Your Chosen Winter Solstice Holiday, but you know you want it to include my ebooks?

Tilted Windmill Press now offers gift cards. There’s no physical card, mind you. It’s a digital code that gets emailed to the recipient. But if Amazon calls this a ‘gift card’ I can too.

Yes, this is another lame excuse to take your money. Except it’s not your money, it’s money from your friends and family.

You might note that the cards are good for two years, rather than forever. People have expressed interest in TWP gift cards, but I don’t know if that will translate to actual purchases. I am buying the gift card plugin –yes, I could code something myself, but that’s specifically against my guidelines. I’m committing to buying this plugin until at least December 2025. If I decide to stop offering the gift card, I’ll buy the plugin for at least two years afterwards.

While business doesn’t bring me joy, I do find delight in trying things like this. Anything the big guys can do, I can also do. Next year, I’ll be offering some things that the big guys refuse to do. In the meantime, I have to get back to making words.

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of November, and the public in December. A buck a month gets you early access and more.

These posts need titles, so I go for alliteration. Alliteration gives me an excuse to grab my primordial Oxford English Dictionary. I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t think folks quite appreciate what a font of wordage it is.

It’s ninety years old and smells like knowledge.

Anyway, it’s been quite a month. The Apocalypse Moi Kickstarter is now completely fulfilled. Just as I was writing this sentence, though, the doorbell rang. UPS dropped off two packages, and—yep. It’s two copies of the book, dropshipped from the printer. They were supposed to go to backers. Instead, they went to me. Did I screw up entering the address? Possible. Did the printer screw up? Very possible. Did the printer’s obtuse web-based ordering system refresh inconveniently and overwrite my meticulously hand-entered shipping address with the default address? Screechingly possible. Each has a shipping slip with an order number, so I get to go through the orders and figure out who got shorted.

Or maybe the printer got carried away and shipped me extra books. That happens, too.

If it wasn’t for the lack of conference calls, I’d call this the worst business ever. But then I’d remember working in the auto industry and realize it’s not nearly that bad.

Anyway. That Kickstarter’s over except for the lingering cruft.

I’m to the bit of Run Your Own Mail Server where I get to talk about filtering and greylisting and SPF and all those fun topics. That’s not a huge topic, but it might take me a little longer than I’d like to get through. Which is the story of this book. October was a crunch month for my family. The crunch ends next Monday and I’ll be free to spew words. I’m learning things about email that I didn’t want to know, and details about workarounds that I didn’t want to know. Here’s yesterday.

Postfix’s postscreen(8) performs sanity checks on incoming email connections. Spambots behave badly, taking full advantage of Jon Postel’s original Robustness Principle. Postscreen identifies those bad actors and prevents them from talking to the SMTP server. Seems fine, right?

Postscreen has optional checks that are intrusive. It does most of the SMTP transaction and, if the client behaves well throughout, adds the client’s address to a temporary allowlist. The problem is, it can’t forward that connection to the mail handler. Instead, it gives the client a 400 error to say “I’m sorry, I can’t finish this right now, please come back later.” That’s a normal part of the email protocol. When the client returns, postscreen sees the address on the allowlist and steers it straight to the SMTP server. Simple enough.

Some of you might recognize that as greylisting. Greylisting is a controversial topic that I’m not gonna get into right now, but it is what it is. How does one get email delivered immediately, while still performing sanity checks? In theory, when a mail client can’t deliver to the primary mail server, it should immediately try the backup. Small sites don’t need a backup mail server.

But you can make a faux backup server.

Add a second IP address to your mail server. List it as the backup MX.

The client goes to the primary MX, passes the intrusive tests, and gets the 400 error. It immediately goes to the second MX. That’s the same host, so it has the same temporary allowlist. The mail is immediately accepted. You need to set up the backup MX address so that SMTP connections that arrive there cannot be added to the allowlist, but that’s included in Postfix.

So I go and set this up. I dig through Vultr’s web interface until I find how to get a second IP address and how to add it to a host. I add a second IPv6 address to that test host. Reboot everything, make sure all the connectivity works. Set up Postfix as a faux backup MX, adjust the DNS records. None of this is advanced work, but it’s tedious and annoying and type-prone. But at last everything looks correct, so I go to my other test host and send an email.

The test host tries the IPv4 address, and gets a 400. Good.

The test host tries the IPv6 address. 400. Good.

And then… it stops.

Postfix doesn’t try the backup MX. Why not?

I go to my old mail server, the one that’s running Sendmail. It gets a 400, immediately tries the backup MX, and sails through. Exactly the way it should. I’ll be trying with gmail today, see what they do. While gmail retries delay-queued mail from different IP addresses, I have no idea if the immediate retries change addresses. It’s an interesting test.

But I worked in IT for decades. I know perfectly well that if someone deployed this in the real world and something went wrong with an incoming message, a manager would ask “Are they on the list?” Because that’s what they ask. That meant I had to figure out how to interrogate the allowlist cache. This is not a public Postfix interface, and Postfix’s developer never intended that people should poke at it. I have no problem telling people “this isn’t meant for you, and it might change in the future, and you shouldn’t rely on any of the other data it reveals, but here’s how you glimpse at it.” But that still leaves me figuring out how to grovel through the stupid cache. Turns out you have to specify the cache format on the command line, a hint which appears nowhere in the documentation because you’re not supposed to go poking at the cache.

Anyway.

That’s a day. Forty words written, and I still don’t know why Postfix didn’t immediately try the backup MX.

The fiction crashed to a halt this month, because of aforementioned family crunch. That’ll restart next month. I owe the world an orc baseball story. I’ve figured out how to make that a short story, finally. One of the rules to making a story short is to limit the number of characters, but a baseball team has nine players, so I’d just like to say oops this was a terrible idea.

Ah well. Live and learn. Learn something that will do you absolutely no good in the future, because part of you already knew it.

I’ve taken sponsorships on the mail book, but I’m pondering doing a Kickstarter for it anyway. Sponsors and Patronizers will get theirs, of course, but there’s a broad pool of folks who want a thing to be ready to produce before they buy it. I’m also pondering stretch goals like “for $25k, I will put the book contents on a public web site.” I’d still have the book in stores, of course. But the ebook won’t be available on Kindle. Heck, the way this book is going the ebook might be $19.99. It’s gonna be freaking huge. Anyway, that Kickstarter and such stretch goals is just idle fancy. Some authors have good results with making their books public. For others, it destroys sales.

Which am I?

Only one way to find out, and the test costs only a year’s work.

That’s it for this month. Thanks for Patronizing me. Onward!

You might have noticed that I’ve stopped publishing my shorter fiction on third-party bookstores like Amazon and Kobo and whatnot. If it’s not credibly a novel by historical standards¹, it’s in my store. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity when someone asks me about my business model, I make a lot of noise about the importance of having your work available on every platform. Why would I break my own rule? Because I’m okay with exclusivity, so long as it’s mine.

My short stories have a publication life cycle. The good ones I publish as stand-alone chapbooks. (The bad ones get thrown in the Pit, where the stronger devour the weaker. It’s not nice, but go ask David Attenborough how nature works.) When I have enough stories on a theme, I gather them into a collection, Kickstart it, and unpublish the chapbooks. Publishing a title on every retailer takes about four to five hours. Unpublishing takes about the same, because while unpublishing requires less information, interfaces optimized for offering something to the world are often anti-optimized for undoing that. I have to expect to make a few hundred bucks to be worth the time.

As I’ve discussed earlier, Amazon penalizes pricing books outside the $2.99-$9.99 range. I’ve been forced to price my short stories at $2.99, even though I think $1.99 is a more fair price. I carried that price across all platforms. For years people bought them at that price, until suddenly they stopped.

I had no idea why they stopped. It’s not like I can reach out to people who buy through Amazon.

But after this had gone on for a while, I asked a couple folks who signed up for my Patronizer program. (It’s Patreon, except you can use either Patreon proper or go direct with me.) Every one of them gave me the same answer: “I used to buy your stories, but now I send you money every month and get them for free.”

Obvious, really. I have successfully disintermediated many of my short fiction readers! Yay me!

That’s old readers, though. But what about discoverability? Having more work in a bookstore prioritizes you in their algorithm. My fiction career is not as strong as my nonfiction career, surely I need all the help I can get. Uh… have you looked at my fiction name over at Amazon? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Supposedly the more titles you have, the more likely it is that the Almighty Algorithm will bless you with virality. I do not chase algorithms, because The Algorithm giveth and The Algorithm taketh away. Yes, this business requires luck–but I prefer relying on the kind of luck that looks a lot like hard work, and relying on goals rather than dreams (a topic I discuss in unreasonable depth in Domesticate Your Badgers.)

Having short stories exclusively on my bookstore lets me price them at $1.99. I think that’s a fair price. After fees I make about $1.60 on each sale, which beats the heck out of Amazon’s ~$0.65 for a $1.99 tale. I no longer lose a full day on the publishing/unpublishing cycle. I’ll still publish full-length books everywhere that offers a reasonable contract, but the short stories will stay with me for now.

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The new story’s on my bookstore. Imagine Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but it’s weird modern fantasy. I have almost enough of these tales to Kickstart a collection, but many of them are sitting in various trad pub channels awaiting rejection.