business – Page 4 – Michael W Lucas

April 27, 2023

Quarterly and Annual Patronizing

As frequently requested, I’ve enabled options for Patronizers using tiltedwindmillpress.com to pay quarterly and yearly. If you want to switch away from monthly, you’ll need to unsubscribe and resubscribe. This only applies to my site; I have no control of how Patreon handles payments.

Do I care what option you pick? Not really. The “See the Sausage Being Made” and “Digital Reader” tiers were already annual and quarterly to reduce fees to acceptable levels. If you want to pay quarterly or yearly and save me a few cents I’m down with that, but I’m not going to sweat them.

Everything should auto-renew so long as you pay with a credit card. Please let me know if you have problems. I have double-checked everything, but that only means I’ve looked at my errors twice.

April 13, 2023

More Stuff In My Ebook Store, and a mega-deal on Absolutely Everything

You can now get my in-print short stories and novellas (aka “chapbooks”) at https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/. The coupon code ZONLESS will get you $1 off each of the short stories. Yes, it works multiple times. Buy 5 shorts, get $5 off. There’s also a bundle with all of them. I’ll have a blog post in a day or two about the economics of this. The math is ugly, but putting them on my store makes it less ugly.

You can also get the Absolutely Everything bundle. It contains Absolutely Everything on the site, for over $50 off. Tech books. Novels. Audiobooks–er, audiobook. Everything.

As a special offer for my previous customers: if you have previously purchased the current editions of items in the Absolutely Everything bundle, or smaller bundles like Total Mastery or All the Novels and Collections, and would like to upgrade to Absolutely Everything, email me at mwl at mwl dot io from the email address used in your account. Use the subject “Absolutely Everything.” I will give you a coupon code for the value of current editions of what you’ve bought from the store, valid for your account, good until the end of May 2023. If you bought the newest SSH Mastery and Sudo Mastery direct from me for $9.99 each, and want the whole thing? I’ll give you a coupon for $19.98.

This offer expires at the end of May 2023. (I would like to offer this permanently, but I need a way to automate it.)

For the record, I would like to be wrong about the Absolutely Everything bundle.

When I first put up the Total Mastery bundle I thought This is stupid. Nobody unfamiliar with my work is going to come in here and buy all my tech books in one lump. People keep suggesting it, so I’ll try it just to shut them up.

I was wrong.

I sell a few each month. Someone comes to my store searching for, say, SSH Mastery, sees the bundle, and decides to splurge/invest/binge.

People also suggested that I put up a bundle of fiction. Fine, the novels are in the store, I’ll bundle those too. I was confident nobody would buy them.

Again, I was wrong. A few each month.

I am confident that nobody will buy Absolutely Everything. Being wrong would delight me.

March 9, 2023

Order Books for BSDCan Delivery

BSDCan 2023 is happening in meatspace.

Folks like getting books from me personally, so normally I bring a few copies of each old title and about ten copies of each book released since the previous con. I’ve released eighteen books since the last meatspace BSDCan, plus innumerable chapbooks and collections and anthologies and who knows what all. 18 titles, ten of each? I am fifty-six years old and am not lugging one hundred eighty books into a con knowing full well that most won’t sell and I must lug them back to the car and unload them at home and let them collect dust. Nope. Ain’t gonna. Can’t make me.

Plus, there’s this.

One copy of every edition of everything I’ve written, 2023 February

I have written too many books to drag “a couple copies” of everything anywhere, let alone to BSDCan. Also, I haven’t done cons for years and have methodically reduced inventory. Other than the copies on this brag shelf I own very few copies of anything. I can buy more from the printer, but I’m not going to buy 180 ~~dust collectors~~ books.

The obvious answer is to let y’all preorder for delivery at BSDCan. I can get exactly what I need, plus a couple extras here and there.

To order a book for delivery at BSDCan, check my meatspace catalog for titles of interest. All prices are USD. Send your list to mwl at mwl dot io on or before before 1 April 2023, specifying paperback or hardcover when there’s a choice. Use the subject “BSDCan Preorder.” I will confirm the total price.

Payment? If you want one or two books, you can pay me cash at BSDCan. Three or more books, I need payment before 3 April. (Otherwise, some jerk who isn’t even attending BSDCan will order thousands of dollars worth of crap just to screw me and call it a joke.) I’ll use my tip jar for prepayments because it takes credit cards or paypal, or you can paypal to accounts at tiltedwindmillpress dot com.

I will place my order on 2 April. I must have prepayments by then.

I will deliver at BSDCan, 19-20 May 2023. Folks who haven’t prepaid should pick up on the 19th (or tell me why not), otherwise I’ll assume you’ve changed your mind and try to get rid of them on the 20th.

Will I bring books for people who don’t preorder? Yep. A few. Not many. You’re better off preordering. Price increases on print books are coming this month, but I will honor these prices for these preorders.

While the meatspace catalog includes everything I can get, here’s what’s come out since the last BSDCan.

Tech books since BSDCan 2019

Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition
SNMP Mastery
The Networknomicon
TLS Mastery (Beastie Edition, Tux Edition, and combined hardcover available, be specific, although I’m sure you fine folks will all want Beastie or the hardcover)
DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd edition
OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems

Other Nonfiction since BSDCan 2019

Cash Flow for Creators
Only Footnotes
Domesticate Your Badgers
Letters from ed(1): The FreeBSD Journal Letters column, years 1-3

Fiction Since BSDCan 2019

Drinking Heavy Water (Montague Portal)
Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2)
Aidan Redding Against the Universes (Montague Portal all-inclusive omnibus)
$ git sync murder ($ git commit murder #2)
Prohibition Orcs (collection)
Frozen Talons (Prohibition Orcs #2)
Devotion and Corrosion (collection)

Huh. I feel like I’ve been slow during the pandemic, but this is a modestly respectable number of books. The years know things that the hours and days cannot.

Anyway. Check the meatspace catalog for what you want. Send me a list. Specify paperback or hardcover. I will verify price. Three or more, pay me beforehand. Pick up at BSDCan.

Otherwise, take your chances that I’ll bother to bring the book you want and won’t sell it before you can grab it.

March 1, 2023

Selling Direct and Customer Support

I have my ebookshop at tiltedwindmillpress.com, and it’s a great defense against online retailers deciding that they don’t want my business. But sometimes it comes back to bite me.

I don’t want your personal information, unless things go wrong. But when it goes wrong, I have no way to contact you.

I got an email today from antonio@z*****.com, saying they hadn’t gotten the BookFunnel email for their purchase. They had received the receipt from me. It happens. I replied, and my maillog spat out:

Mar 1 12:00:54 mail sm-mta[17756]: 321H0qc5053731: to=, ctladdr= (1001/1001), delay=00:00:02, xdelay=00:00:02, mailer=esmtp, pri=31211, relay=mx1.privateemail.com. [198.54.122.240], dsn=5.7.1, reply=554 5.7.1 : Relay access denied, stat=Service unavailable

In between them getting the receipts and BookFunnel sending the email, their mail server broke.

I have no other information by which to reach this reader. They did provide an address, which is nice. I could send a postcard. To another country. Assuming that address is even correct, which is dubious given the privacy habits of y’all. (Yes, I collect addresses, this is why.)

So, what do I do here?

Nothing.

Presumably, the customer will notice that they aren’t getting any email and reach out again.

Although I do see that the customer has four MXs, and they’re all the same priority. It might be one of them is misconfigured. I’ll send another message, see what happens. Or, maybe the customer will see this blog or my fedi post and see that they have email trouble.

If I demanded phone numbers for ebook purchase I could text them, but that would require I collect phone numbers and I want to not have that information.

February 21, 2023

Comparing Kickstarters

Comparing how two different books sell is foolish. Books are not fungible. Comparing how two different marketing campaigns do is likewise foolish. Neither marketing, nor readers, nor economic conditions are interchangeable.

But bear with me for a moment while I do it anyway.

The Kickstarter campaign for the Prohibition Orcs duology brought in about $11,000. Which, while not Brandon Sanderson’s millions, was way cool.

I intended to use the Devotion and Corrosion campaign to compare “Kickstarter with Twitter” to “Kickstarter without Twitter.” That seemed sensible, right? The videos are comparable, the campaigns are comparable. The story for the orcs is stronger, because “Orcs in Prohibition” is a solid hook, but still, it’d do something, right?

But then Kickstarter did not give D&C the “Projects We Love” button, which meant that they won’t promote it for me. My attempted comparison fails. I suspect this is because D&C has less Big Idea and more gentle philosophical ambiance. We don’t like to think, we want orcish face-punching.

The campaign funded anyway, which is great. But I can’t do even my lame, heavily-caveated comparison. Facebook spreads my posts to a few of people I know and a couple of the folks who follow my fan page. While the Fediverse shares my posts more broadly, it’s definitely a less commercial space.

I had hoped D&C would hit $4,000. My marketing has saturated the people I know, however, and now I’m hoping it breaks $3000.

Disappointing? Not really. Thinking about it in pure financial terms is wrong.

D&C is doing “well enough.” A bunch of people, wonderful people, will get ebooks and paperbacks. A handful of folks (those with disposable income as well as exquisite taste) will get fancy leather-cased books covered in rats and brains and knives. I will cover expenses and most of a mortgage payment.

And I can be confident that my readers who follow me on the fediverse or my mailing lists or my blog or even on Facebook will at least consider at my next project, no matter what any CEO or billionaire has to say about it. Eventually, a fiction book from this no-name nobody will pretty reliably cover a mortgage payment.

I have what Twitter’s owner can never have.

Enough.

But if you want that fancy leather-cased book, you better grab one quick. Once the campaign is fulfilled, I’m not getting Studio 42 to make any more. In fact, let me post that picture, because it really is spectacular.

Comparing one book to another, or one Kickstarter to another, is foolish, but I can guarantee that you won’t find that many rats on any other leather-cased book.

January 20, 2023

Shipping OMF

I spent today dealing with the “OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” sponsor, Patronizer, and pre-order shipments.

The first lesson I’ve learned is, I was too flexible for someone so easily perplexed. If I do pre-orders again folks will get the option to buy just the one book, in paperback or hardcover. That’s it. Checking and double-checking all the possible option takes up a lot of brain space.

More annoyingly, I’ve had to delay a full third of my non-US #omfilesystems preorders, and a few of the US ones, because folks didn’t include a recipient phone number in their order info.

Data is like medical radioactives in the oncology ward; necessary, but I want as little of it as possible and must dispose of it safely. I have no desire for phone numbers.

For some destinations, however, I must provide the carrier a recipient phone number before they’ll sell me postage. I have no way to tell if I’ll need a phone number until I try to buy postage.

I don’t want to demand phone numbers for everyone. I actively want to not require that information.

But I’ve spent hours today chasing folks for phone numbers, interrupting my flow of packaging because someone kindly got back to me ASAP and I really do want to get these out of my house and in your paws.

I fear I’ll need to make the hard choice next time I open sponsorships. Ah, well.

But I have all the sponsor, Patronizer, and multi-book pre-orders packed and either picked up or ready for pickup. What remains is single-book shipments, plus all the folks who owe me phone numbers. I’m calling it for the day.

January 19, 2023

“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” hardcovers are here

By “here,” I mean “in my living room.

64 of them. A nice even number!

I’ll be packing Patronizer and sponsor books first, then complicated preorders, then single-copy preorders. I don’t know if I’ll have them all done today. I might. Paperbacks arrive tomorrow, so I hope so.

You know, maybe one of these days I can do some writing? Sigh…

January 18, 2023

Updates to Print Bookstore and FAQ

I’ve sold print books via Aerio for a few years, but they are shutting down at the end of February. I just overhauled every single book entry on my site to point print sales at my new bookshop.org bookstore. Sales through this store pay me a larger cut than sales through other print bookstores, even though I don’t ever touch the books. You’ll pay shipping charges, however, so anything bought there is a pure Lucas Charity Purchase. Some folks buy under those terms, though, and I appreciate them, so it was worth switching.

Auditing my web site for references to Aerio led me to review my FAQ. I’ve made some updates for the pandemic age, updated and clarified a few Q&As, and puttered with the text.

January 17, 2023

The One Lone Audiobook now exclusive on my store

I started work on the Savaged by Systemd audiobook in the summer of 2019, thinking it was short enough to be affordable, long enough to be a legit audiobook, and the right length to listen to on a commute. As an SbS audiobook is completely ridiculous, I planned to release it on 1 April 2020. I had no idea that commuting would no longer be a thing in 2020. Ah, well. I uploaded it to the various stores and forgot about it.

The audiobook was available in every store I could reach, but the biggest retailer is Audible. I supposedly get 25% of cover price on every sale. This is atrocious. They claim to have sold 48 copies, which should get me about $119.

A quick check shows I’ve received less than half of that, because Audible’s policies make the 25% payment optional.

Most of the other stores pay about 40% of cover price, but their sales are negligible.

I have pulled the audiobook from all retailers, effective today. Some stores might still have copies, but as the databases churn they should disappear. Audible in particular is being difficult, because they can’t imagine anyone deciding to stop doing business with them so they don’t provide an “unpublish” option. (I contacted their helpdesk, which gave me the secret email address to contact, who will send me questing to collect three tokens from the Fallen Angels of… well, you get the idea.)

Instead, it’s now exclusively on my bookstore. You can listen in the BookFunnel app, a browser, or download DRM-free MP3.

It’s not that I expected this audiobook to sell millions. It was an investment in exploring audiobook technology. J Daniel Sawyer charged very reasonable rates to record and produce it. I am pleased with the end product. It would be nice if the audiobook would sell enough to repay that investment. That’s impossible if the main sales channel is Audible.

BookFunnel, my ebook distributor, recently opened an audiobook beta. It’s free while in beta, but will cost $10/month when it enters production. That’s enough time for me to test passive sales through my site. Selling 13 audiobooks in a year will let me start to pay back the investment.

Will I do more audiobooks in the future? Unlikely. I’m a fringe author. My books don’t sell enough to justify audiobooks. I could save a bunch of money by using AI narration, but you might as well use your ereader’s text-to-speech feature. Voice actors, real live humans with emotions and inflection and character, are the whole point of audiobooks.

I’ll post a follow-up in a few months.

Also: 1 April pranks should have meat on them. This one generated so many agonized groans that I heard them echo in from all around the world. Worth it.

January 6, 2023January 18, 2023

2022 Income Sources

Here’s where my money came from in 2022. (For those seeing these for the first time, I did similar posts in 2019, 2020, and 2021.)

I’m a writer. My income comes from writing books and making them available. I publish both independently and through publishers. I don’t consult. I don’t seek out speaking fees. I desire to make my living as an author, creating and licensing intellectual property. I make my books available in every channel that offers reasonable terms.

How did 2022 look?

First off, my income is down about 20% since 2021. This is not a surprise. In 2020 and 2021, lots of folks stayed home and read. In 2022, pandemic or not, people sick of the isolation burst out into the world and read less. But the percentages might interest you.

Here’s the detail.

Here’s my rough conclusions.

First and foremost, I want to draw attention to income through my web site. Direct sales, 18.57%. Direct Patronizers, 6.34%. Sponsorships, 5.33%, and direct preorders, 2.38%. Taken all together, 32.62% of my income coming from sales through my web site.

Amazon provides 31.35%.

Amazon is no longer my biggest income source. I’m gonna say that again.

AMAZON IS NO LONGER MY BIGGEST INCOME SOURCE.

My biggest source of income is now my web site. People paying me directly. My goal of disintermediation works.

Yes, they’re only 1.27% apart. It’s a win by a nose. But I’ll take it.

This is personally important right now because I’m cutting Amazon off as a distributor of my new tech ebooks. OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems will not be available on Amazon’s Kindle store. You can get Kindle copies everywhere but Amazon. Achieving this right now means it’s a fair comparison.

Mind you, it’s not entirely fair.

I have a Patreon, but I also host a Patreon-like program on my web site. To be a sincerely fair comparison, I would have to combine the Amazon and Patreon income. I haven’t done that math, because I have the answer I want. My web site brings in more than Amazon, I’m content.

For the record, I neither hate nor love Amazon. They are a retailer. They offer a variety of no-negotiation deals. I accept some. I reject others. I must not become dependent on, nor vulnerable to, any one business partner. Losing Amazon would hurt. I’d survive.

Kickstarter income for Prohibition Orcs is number three, but that’s deceptive. Kickstarters have fulfillment costs. I’ll post details on those once the campaign closes, but here’s a taste.

Between Kickstarter backers and Patronizers, that’s fifty Orcibuses I must mail. (Which reminds me, I must add the Orcibus to my web site. It’s a backer exclusive and not commercially available, but I should acknowledge it.) They cost over $600 to print, let alone mail. Most of these will get orc-leather covers.

So, yeah. Kickstarter is great, except for the ratio of income to expenses. The discoverability is delightful, though.

Traditional publishing income isn’t very large but to be fair, I haven’t published anything traditionally for a few years. I’m in discussions to do so, however.

IngramSpark is “print paperback sales outside of Amazon, and all hardcovers.” Definitely worth doing. I use Amazon’s print program for paperbacks sold within Amazon.

After that, we have the smaller players. Gumroad, Apple, Kobo, Draft2Digital, and so on are ebook retailers. Are these tiny places worth selling through? Absolutely. Those nickels spend. If you bought the best ereader on the market and shop the Kobo store, I want you to buy my books.

The last item here, Findaway? That’s for audiobooks. Audiobook, really. I only have one. This math has made up my mind, however. Authors have reported problems with audiobook accounting for years now, and I believe I’ve sold more than one audiobook in the last year. I’ll be pulling the Savaged by Systemd audiobook from Audible and all other retail channels and making it an exclusive on my web site.

I’ve done these analyses for four years. That’s a little early to start looking for trends, but graphs are easy to create so let’s try it.

Here are the trends over the last four years. For legibility, I have excluded all the sub-1% channels.

It’s a bit much to call any of these entries “trends.” Kickstarter, direct Patronizers, and direct preorders have squeezed other channels down. But if I aggregate all of the items I offer through my web site, there’s something slightly interesting.

Each year I add options to my web store, like offering bundles of all the tech books and all the novels and collections. I thought nobody would buy either, and that maintaining them would be more work than they were worth. I was wrong. The more different types of stuff I offer for direct sale, the bigger share of my income comes from my web site. Imagine that.

One could argue that Kickstarter and standard Patreon should count as disintermediated. Both offer far better deals than I get from any standard book retailer, and Kickstarter seems great for discovery. Both are external web sites, external dependencies, so they are absolutely not disintermediated.

I could count those as “non-retailer” income, however. (My web site is a retailer from where you sit, but my business does not consider it as such.) Let’s see what that does to the graph.

This looks like… a trend?

Non-retailer income is now 47%. Almost half. And consistently increasing. Yes, these sales cannibalize my retailer sales, but Amazon pays me about 70% of cover price and my store pays me about 95% so I can’t complain.

I am stunned. This is incredibly cool. I can’t walk away from retail, but perhaps one day I can somehow deprioritize it.

The truth is, I can take no credit for this trend. My readers looked at their options and said “Yeah, let’s give him our cash directly.” I built it. You came. Thank you.

Part of me still wants to shout “GAZE UPON MY WORKS, YE BEZOS, AND DESPAIR.” Who am I kidding, though? Amazon does not care. I am not worth an hour of a helpdesk tech’s time.

But I care. A lot. Thank you all.

(PS: Someone always asks, “Why don’t you share actual dollar figures?” Declaring my income inevitably leads to people telling me that I can’t possibly be making that much, other people telling me I don’t deserve to make that much, and still other people trying to get “the secret” out of me. It not only steals my time, it increases my annoyance. Not worth it. I will say that I make less than I would in any tech position, but more than most authors.)