Category: business

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of May, and to the world at the beginning of June. Not a Patronizer? Sign up at https://patronizemwl.com.)

This month was better than last month. If you look at April’s Sausage post, you’ll see that is a terribly low bar to clear, but I’ll take it.

The “exciting” news on this is that I’ve set a up the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter. I’m not excited for the Kickstarter itself, but I’m curious how well it will work out and that curiosity carries its own excitement. RYOMS is the most heavily-sponsored book I’ve written. I suspect this is less about the topic, and more because the sponsorships were open longer than any other book. (You can thank me catching covid for that.) In theory, the groups of “people willing to advance me money to write this book” is not the same as “people willing to preorder directly from the author.” Perhaps I already pillaged my public support and this Kickstarter will fail. Well, no, it’s not going to fail. I’ve set a goal of $500. I had many sponsors for OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems, and got a few dozen pre-orders even though that book had sponsors.

Wait–I keep ranting about the importance of disintermediation, and I’m switching from direct pre-orders to Kickstarter? What gives?

Processing fees on Paypal and Stripe are about 3%. (Yes, it’s more complex than that, but it’s close enough for this discussion, so hush.) Kickstarter fees are 5% plus processing fees, or basically 8%. The question is: will the social aspect of Kickstarter make up for that 5% fee? There’s only one way to know, and that’s to try it. I love experimenting. I love trying new things in my art, my craft, and my trade. So that’s exciting.

The curious among you are welcome to look at the campaign preview.

One thing about this campaign pleases me. I started the 60 Seconds of WIP podcast to better learn to speak on microphone. Recording this Kickstarter video took only eight takes where it would have previously required fifteen or more.

RYOMS is the longest Mastery title, twice as long as Networking for Systems Administrators and 125% the length of SNMP Mastery. I think I’m going to price the ebook at $14.99. This means the Kindle version won’t be available on Amazon, just like OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. The OpenBSD people have no problem with avoiding Amazon, but this book is for a wider audience. I’m curious to see how that works out as well. I can imagine someone uploading pirated versions to Amazon, but I’m ready with my complaint letters and DMCA takedown notices, as always. Yes, my publishing checklist includes “prepare a template DMCA takedown” for the book. Always preload your pain.

RYOMS is also back from tech edits. If you haven’t sent me your comments, it’s too late. I’m churning through the manuscript to get everything updated, so I can get it to copyedit before the Kickstarter opens on 20 May. I’m also preparing a four-hour course based on RYOMS for BSDCan. Four hours is not enough to go deep into the entire book, but nobody wants to sit through eight hours of config files, so I’m focusing on knowledge integration. That, plus setting up the new BSDCan mail server, is forcing me to go through the manuscript one last time.

I’m also converting TLS Mastery into a four hour course, but I can finish that after RYOMS goes to copyedit.

All of this is taking longer than I expected, forcing me to face something rather unpleasant. Covid dented me. I’m not one of those poor bastards with crippling long covid, but my energy is certainly not what it once was. I’m clearly functioning at about eighty percent, though, and that seems fairly constant. I clearly can’t afford to catch covid again, and am no longer waffling about my conference mask policy. Masks do not protect you, but they protect the people around you. The people most likely to spread covid are the least likely to wear a mask. EuroBSDCan in freaking Dublin seriously tempted me, but I have too many books left to write to catch this crap again.

That’s the thought dragging me through these tech edits: when I finish, I get to write again!

But writing the tutorial is making me double-check everything. The book will be better for it, but I still hate it.

Whenever I release a tech book, I create a file for keeping notes about stuff I missed. This helps me decide if a book needs a second edition. I’m at the point where Networking for Systems Administrators has accumulated a few critical gaps. The appearance of Let’s Encrypt means the book needs TLS coverage. I should discuss special address ranges like 100.64.0.0/10. It talks network sockets, but I should add some comments about local sockets and their evil twin, Windows pipes. Speaking of Windows, I need to confirm all of the PowerShell commands are actually PowerShell. A faint breath of nmap. Other detritus. And the cover needs updating.

Some of this I’ll need for my next big Unix book as well.

I’m contemplating a crash revision. These are all simple topics. I could kick off a two-week sponsorship window after BSDCan, while RYOMS is still in copyedit. Disconnect the Internet and spend eight hours a day revising the book. Another round of tech reviews would be the longest part. Once I get the book to copyedit, I’d do either a ten-day Kickstarter or a preorder on my web site. I haven’t done a crash book like that since you maniacs sponsored Ed Mastery. It would be fun.

But then there’s that “I’m running at 80%” factor.

We’ll see.

(Quick note, because very busy day.)

Vultr had a rights grab in their ToS. They just took it out, after community outrage.

So, is everything fine?

Nope.

This is exactly what Findaway tried. I’ve read the whole ToS. There is no misunderstanding.

The CEO has said that users are not lawyers. I am not a lawyer, true. But I deal with a lot of intellectual property contracts. My books are intellectual property, and I have to read ToS and contracts for every one of them. When reading a contract, you have to assume that the other party will be sold to a complete bastard who will exploit the contract as far as possible.

It’s highly unlikely that Constant Contact (Vultr’s parent firm) would use a book stored on my site to make a film. But suppose their parent company did so. A film I didn’t want made would come out, destroying the value of any film I might have made. I could sue, spending my money to fight a much larger firm. This is a losing proposition.

Perhaps Vultr’s lawyers are merely incompetent.

But their parent firm is a content company. And many content companies are doing rights grabs.

Rights grabs are becoming more common, though. I believe that the only way to stop them is to stop doing business with any company that attempts one. Backing down from a rights grab is too late.

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.