Category: business

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.

“Hey Lucas, what all do you offer on your web store?”

I have had to answer this question three times, mostly from other authors looking to build their own web stores. A couple of the big ebook-selling platforms are clearly embracing enshittification, and interest in disintermediation among creators is greater than I’ve ever seen it. I don’t mind sharing the information, but I do mind writing out the answer more than thrice.

I had some rules in building a web store.

1. NO CUSTOM CODE. I can write code. It has been called “comically evil,” but I can write code. I can hire people to write competent code. Both are bad choices for a teeny-tiny business. I will merrily discuss why in meatspace, but not online.
2. STANDARD PARTS. I will not build a business on an obfuscated WordPress module. I’ll use such modules for side details, but I won’t base the business on them. I want the source code to be readily available and readable. If Woocommerce or WordPress folds, another company will step in to provide maintenance. Same for themes. I’m even using the standard Woocommerce “Storefront” We-Will-Always-Have-This Minimum Viable Theme.
3. HANDOVER READY. It must be simple enough that if one of my books becomes popular and I get to spend all my time writing¹, I can hire a WordPress flunky² and the design won’t shock them. See the two points above.
4. BOOKFUNNEL. WordPress can deliver book files to readers. Life is too short to help people load files on their Kindles, let alone their weird limited-production-run-of-50 hybrid-endian built-into-a-self-cooling-beer-stein devices. Pay someone to do that for you.

According to the Wayback Machine I started the store in May 2013, more than ten years ago. I added these features one at a time. Don’t whinge at me that you can’t do all this or that I’m special. Neither could I, and I’m not. Running your own web store on any platform, Woocommerce or Shopify or whatever, requires competence. You gotta spend the time and learn. Yes, I write books on how to build your own network and run servers, but my Internet skills have no pictures, no sound, and especially no video. When I design web sites, you get my 2012 site. There are reasons I sucked it up and learned stupid WordPress and stupid Woocommerce.

Anyway. The features. With a great big helping of “YMMV” and “who knows why this business works?” What works for me might not for you, and the reverse.

• The most vital feature I have is “Name Your Price.” It lets people overpay. About half my customers throw a little extra in my kibble bowl. Sometimes they throw a lot.
• “Treat the Rats” is the tip jar. Before Name Your Price, it was a couple grand a year. Now it’s a couple hundred a year but, hey, the rats gotta eat.
• Bundles like All the Fiction, All the Tech Books, This Entire Series. “The Full Michael” is everything I publish indie. (I even had a photo of me to play off The Full Monty.)
• Bundle Exclusives. The orc kickstarter had a stretch goal of a tiny 6-recipe orcish cookbook, because a friend of mine wanted to do it. That book is only available if you buy the orc bundle direct from me. It lures people in. I intend to do more of these. Also, multiple people have reported that “Beans With Found Meat” is delicious. Weirdly, nobody has reported back after trying the “Longest Dark” orcish holiday punch.
• Sponsorships. “I’m writing this book, and for $30 you get your name in the back of the ebook. For $100 you go in the back of the print and the ebook.” Sponsorship is the only way you can get a personalized signed copy of a book without meeting me in person. Signed Kickstarter books, I just write my name. Unless I know you and want to engage in recreational trolling, of course.
• My loss leader freebies are all in my store. A few people grab them. Those readers have indicated a willingness to go direct immediately and I gleefully welcome them.
• My Patreon work-alike. It’s the exact same benefits as Patreon, but the money goes straight to me. The downside is, I spend a thousand bucks a year on the WordPress plugins to do that. (The free options all annoyed me or didn’t work as I needed.) I have a sufficient number of direct Patronizers to keep that up. Plus, it lets me offer weird things like a special “29 February” option in 2024. (Pay four years of the highest level in advance, save 10%!)
• Standalone short stories are now exclusive to my store. Once upon a time I made a few hundred bucks per indie story at outside retailers, but once I started the Patronizer program and said “$5/month gives you everything I release indie,” that dried up. Turns out all the short story buyers are now Patronizers. Ah, well. I still make out okay. If I hire my own publisher, I might reverse this decision.
• Mechandise. Shirts and stickers and such, via Redbubble. Failed experiment. Print on demand is expensive. Very few folks buy these, so I’ve stopped adding new things except by request.
• The Audiobook. Yes, I have one. Consider yourself warned.

I still haven’t figured out how to hook the checkout process into my mailing list signup, so folks can click a box during check-out to sign up. There’s a plugin for that. It bit me. In its defense, I have three mailing lists and they’re all stupid.

That’s it. You can do all this too. With a willingness to spend time, to learn, and to get back up after you fail. Just like the rest of being a writer.

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I awakened today ready to make words on Run Your Own Mail Server only to discover that half the world wanted to be sure I knew about the search engine for Meta’s Books3 LLM training data, aka “AI.”

Yes, I know.

The search engine was created by The Atlantic, and I thank them for this public service.

Authors and publishers have already filed lawsuits against Meta and their partners. I do not have the cash to sue Meta. I must ride on the coattails of other people’s lawsuits.

For the record, most of my books are legitimately available for digestion by AI. Just as I offer my Tilted Windmill Press books for teams and groups and large corporations, I offer the entirety of those books as AI fodder for a modest annual fee and under friendly licensing terms. The default listing is for personal use because I sell many more personal licenses than AI licenses, but: a legal option exists for Meta to use my books

Now to figure out how to send Meta an invoice.

The subject says it all, I guess?

Patreon appears to have sorted out their latest kerfuffle. I lost a few Patronizers, but I’m nowhere near as badly impacted as some creators.

Blaze Ward’s latest Milestone Publishing Newsletter talks about the importance of owning your platform, as greatly as possible. I mostly agree with it, except for the part about moving to Shopify. They’re an external vendor, they will enshittify. I can do everything with Woocommerce and Bookfunnel that Shopify can do, and Woo’s open code makes it enshittification-resistant. I can replace Bookfunnel if need be.

Anyway, own your platform. Have multiple streams of revenue, even if some seem redundant.

And if Patreon unsubscribed you from me, I can promise that my platform won’t do the same. Or, if something goes wrong and it does, I’ll have the data to fix it.

Patreon has failed to pay me for August, as part of their latest implosion.

If you’re one of my beloved Patronizers who backs me through Patreon, check to see if you’ve been charged. Because I haven’t got it.

If you’re flexible on where you back me, I built my own Patreon at https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product-category/patronizer/. I usually do a soft sell on the whole “ditch the middleman” thing because lots of you have reasons for using Patreon, but this latest mess impels me to bring it up.

Tilted Windmill Press now offers group and enterprise licensing for ebooks.

I deferred implementing this for years, despite the occasional request. Then I saw Julia Evans’ income graphs, where enterprise licensing is a big chunk of her income. Somewhat amusingly, my annual income reports inspired her to post this. Be generous with information about how you run your creative business, people will build on it and you can stealborrow their improvements.

The enterprise licensing also applies to bundles.

I’ve also implemented a very special option for select users. If you want to have your computer auto-complete a book in my style, you may license my entire TWP ouvre for AI/machine learning. This option is available exclusively through my bookstore, and allows you to derive documents from my work for one year.

My ebookstore has an item where folks can buy our rats treats and supplies. A few folks wanted to know how the money would be spent, so I’ve added options where you can buy specific items.

I decided to not include the $300 “Whole Roast Pig” item, because while a video of Croghan doing his magnificent “Alien chestburster” imitation would be adorable, some of you maniacs would actually get together and buy one. Besides, I firmly believe that nobody should eat anything bigger than their own head.

Today, in “minor tasks completed:” The front page of tiltedwindmillpress.com now has a link to get notifications of new products via RSS. This will show you everything. Sponsorships. Tech books. Short stories. If I must destroy and recreate a product, it’ll appear. When I release something new that requires me to destroy and recreate a bundle, like adding a title to Total Mastery, you’ll see the new bundle.

But it’s a guaranteed way to not miss anything. On your own head be it.

You can subscribe to the feed here.

It’s taken a while, but I finally have all (I think) of my (supposed-to-be) free stuff organized (ish) on a single page.

I use freebies the same way Costco does, in the hope that you’ll try a taste and return for more. You can get a few free titles from my e-bookstore or other, lesser retailers. If you sign up for my nonfiction mailing list, I’ll offer you a free copy of Tarsnap Mastery. The fiction list gets you seven free stories over six weeks. The email marketers call that an “onboarding sequence.” I call it “Seven stories is a lot, let’s break that up into something manageable.”

Anyway. Free stuff.

Organizing freebies isn’t just about luring people into my literary clutches, though. I’m looking at Kickstarting another short story collection this summer, in part to make some dough but mostly so I can unpublish a bunch of chapbooks. I’m seriously thinking that from now on, my short stories will be exclusive to my store. I want to publish them–one, so folks can get them, but two, so I can experiment with book design. But the maintenance overhead of publishing them on all the different stores is dreadful.

But the mental load of publicizing a short-term deal like a Kickstarter is also dreadful. I loathe asking for money. No, not hate. As Terry Pratchett said, “hate is an attracting force, just like love.” I loathe it. I don’t want anything to do with it. Promotion destabilizes my creative energy. This time around, I’m planning to end each promo piece with a link to my freebies page and a note along the lines of “If you don’t want to give me dough, please grab something for free.” I’m hoping that it let me feel better about pulling a filthy capitalism twice daily.

The pedantic will note that these books aren’t truly free. You must make an account somewhere to get them. And–yes, that’s true. I’m a business. Giving me money requires making an account somewhere. Meet me in a dark alley and slip me $20 and I’ll hand over a brown paper bag containing a book, sure, but online commerce requires accounts. For what it’s worth, my store’s privacy policy is the one I would like other retailers to use, and you can delete accounts in my store.

Anyway. Freebies. Look for the Apocalypse Moi Kickstarter later this summer.

Each month, I write a blog post for my Patronizers. I want to say it provides unique insight into my process and business, but “See the Sausage Being Made” has turned into more of a monthly summary combined with my usual on-brand ranting. With my Patronizers’ kind permission, a month after they see the posts I’ll be sharing them here. If you find this of any interest, please check out my Patronizer benefits.

Greetings and felicitations to my esteemed Patronizers.

Been working solely on “Run Your Own Mail Server.” I think I finally have an order for the content, which makes the actual writing possible. I’ll have cycle back and backfill facts, but the skeleton should hold.

This part of the process always surprises me. Who thought I would need to explain the message-id header before installing Postfix? Not me, until now.

My muse smacked me with a special edition of this book. Not as special as the Networknomicon, but nothing is. Fortunately. I can’t afford to do that again. It’ll need some special art and a bit of writing, but my focus group laughed themselves silly so I think it’ll work. It’ll only be in print, and only for print-level Patronizers, print sponsors, and high-level Kickstarter backers. I’m contemplating making the Kickstarter version maybe $120, so that the sponsors feel like they got a deal. Print-level Patronizers already know they’re getting a bad deal.

I can promise that the special edition is not a silly Mail/Male pun, however.

Fortunately, my covid aftereffects are minimal. A brush of fatigue and a touch of vertigo. I’m back at the dojo two nights a week, with occasional forms at home. I’m pretty darn sure I escaped long covid this time, but am being cautious in restarting.

A few months ago, I proposed making these posts public on my blog a few weeks after you see them. I received no negative comments and a few positive ones, so I’ll be doing that. When I remember.

Since recovering, I’ve spent a bunch of time on the book manuscript and a little organizing the free stuff on my web site and adding most of it to my e-bookstore. I didn’t bother with the freebies on my store for years, until I was working on my publishing talk for Penguicon. My first Patronizer tier says you will “See the Sausage Being Made,” so here’s a particularly solid chunk of sausage.

My goal is to spend my life doing work I enjoy. That means I’ve had to learn some things I would rather remain ignorant of, and apply them to my trade. Disintermediation is one of those concepts. I want you to pay for my books with as few middlemen as possible. How do I accomplish this? Marketing experts have a Customer Acquisition Funnel, and 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
4. Sign up for my mailing list
5. Buy books directly from me
6. Kickstarter
7. Sponsor
8. Regular monthly contributor (you folks!)
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 reasonably possible. 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. Nonfiction is less blatant, but that’s why you’ll see articles in places like the FreeBSD Journal. I also give mailing list subscribers a copy of Tarsnap Mastery to give them a taste of what my books are like.

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 back me the way you folks do 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 writing.

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 you wonderful people do. At each stage, I gently make them aware of the next level.

I was spelling this out for my Penguicon publishing talk when it hit me: 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.

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

I leave for BSDCan in a few days. I enjoy BSDCan, but the reason I’m attending is one, we have a fierce mask policy, and two, I can drive. The pandemic’s still on. If you’re there, do say hello. If you’re not there, see if you’ve read my free stuff. It would be a shame if you folks down in Malebolge never visited Limbo.

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! This mail book needs finishing!