Category: business

The fact that I don’t support and won’t use environmentally disastrous cryptocurrency and distributed blockchains is not a secret. I’ve also said that I plan to start using Kickstarter more often. Kickstarter has said they have a blockchain strategy. Are my stances contradictory?

Not yet, but they might be in the future.

One of the many annoying things about large companies are the busybodies who don’t really know the company’s business or how the trade works, but have leverage and demand that the firm be buzzword-compliant. These busybodies include but are not limited to investors, brokers, and auditors.

“Blockchain” and “cryptocurrency” are buzzwords. Busybodies are demanding that all their firms have strategies for them.

When a busybody demands you become buzzword-compliant with something that’s irrelevant to your business, what do you do?

The first step is to see if you’re already technically buzzword compliant. Do you have an existing system or product that fits that buzzword?

About ten years ago, systems that let you identify and track intruders were big news. I was in a meeting where an important client asked if we had that ability. My employer had no intrusion detection system. Most of the corporate hosts had to reside on the public Internet, without even an external packet filter. We had invested zero in dedicated intrusion analysis capability.

Nevertheless, I answered “yes.” Truthfully.

I had not installed our flow sensors for the primary purpose of identifying intrusions, but I certainly used them as such. The boss picked up on it and said, “We employ the man who literally wrote the book on the topic.” The client shut up and moved on. Zero-effort buzzword compliance, there.

Suppose you don’t have an existing system that fits the buzzword? Further, suppose that the buzzword is utterly irrelevant to your business but the busybodies demand that you have a strategy for that buzzword? You engage in Performative Buzzword Compliance.

Figure out the minimum amount of effort that you can spend on the buzzword, and the minimum amount of resources you can “invest” in it. Take an employee who is temporarily dysfunctional because they’ve been diagnosed with cancer or have a newborn or care more about their side gig writing than your stupid job. Tell them to spend one hour a week keeping up on the tech and brainstorming what the company might do with it.

This lets you perform Performative Buzzword Compliance. You publicly issue:

1. A press release
2. A FAQ about your efforts.
3. A statement that you have dedicated staff to the task.
4. If the buzzword is actively harmful, all of these must address the harm and state that your approach will negate those harmful effects.
5. A vague lie that it will revolutionize your business.

You tell your busybodies that you have a buzzword strategy.

And you move on.

I am not authoritatively declaring that Kickstarter has done this. I have no inside knowledge.

I will say that Kickstarter’s public statements show all the signs of Performative Buzzword Compliance.

They have a press release and a FAQ. They’ve said folks are working on this. The FAQ says that their blockchain is special, and won’t destroy the planet.

The last point is the most important here. When Kickstarter said that they were starting a blockchain project, the general reaction among users was “why?” Kickstarter’s FAQ lists the problems their blockchain will help with, and most of them are not technical problems with Kickstarter itself. Yes, rewards can be delayed. That sucks. Blockchain won’t help. Yes, spreading the word is hard. Blockchain won’t help with that either. And so on.

Can Kickstarter admit this? No. The first rule of performative compliance is you don’t admit you’re doing it.

But after decades in tech, my nose is highly attuned to performative compliance. This stinks of it.

Every company will have a blockchain strategy. Ford Motor Company has one, Fiat has one, and General Motors has one. Blockchain is wholly irrelevant in automotive, but the busybodies demand a strategy. Amazon’s blockchain strategy is to sell managed blockchain services–they know the tech is not useful to their business, but they’re gonna make money off the suckers and simultaneously satisfy the busybodies.

Don’t dismiss an organization for buzzword compliance.

See what they’re doing with the buzzword.

At this time, I see no sign that Kickstarter is actually doing blockchain. Like many businesses, they are miming blockchain.

Given current knowledge, I intend to run three Kickstarters in 2022. If Kickstarter’s blockchain strategy starts spewing carbon and heat, I will change my plans.

I scheduled an all-Patronizer video hangout for last Saturday, and didn’t show up. This is obviously unacceptable. I’ve already apologized to my Patronizers on the various sites they back me on, but I wanted to blog about dealing with this kind of screwup.

The root cause was pretty simple: my house has been full of workmen for several days, busting concrete and ripping out walls to fix a tiny leak in 70-year-old plumbing. It was either that, or let the bathroom fall into the basement. I am not accustomed to jackhammers under my feet. My nerves were, to put it mildly, frayed. I completely forgot about the video hangout, and decided to go to the dojo to work off some stress. I remembered about the hangout right before parking.

How do I keep this from happening again, and minimize the impact in case I do?

First, I have installed Zoom on my phone. If I forget about a hangout, I can now join from anywhere.

Second, my most consistent attendee now has my phone number. If I’m 15 minutes late to a hangout, he will call me.

Third, I must ensure that when I create the meeting in Zoom, the waiting room is disabled. If I don’t show up for hangout, people can talk to each other while my Designated External Memory calls to poke me. I’m looking for a way to make this the default for all meetings I create, because any process that relies on my brain is doomed to fail.

I have already scheduled a make-up hangout for next Saturday, so that my Patronizers can chide me in person.

When I became a full-time writer, I thought I would leave root cause failure analysis and remediation behind. Silly me.

When you buy ebooks direct from me via tiltedwindmillpress.com, your books will now be delivered via BookFunnel. After a purchase, they’ll send you an email containing your download links.

Why make this change after eight years? In short, customer service.

BookFunnel can help you sideload books onto your weird ereader. I cannot. Bookfunnel can cope with weird network issues more easily than I can. They have an actual support staff and multiple delivery channels, where TWP has me and I’d rather be writing. I should have made this change a few years ago, but the barely adequate is the enemy of the better.

The only personal information BookFunnel collects is your email address, so they can maintain a library of all the books you’ve bought and let you re-download them.

It also means I won’t be firing up tcpdump as you try to download your book, because your telco has a weird proxy server that chokes on zip files. Which is a clear win for everyone.

Warning: publishing business book neepery ahead, as I try to figure out a problem. It includes a bunch of tedious ground-laying. I also round many prices to the nearest dollar.

I am specifically talking about nonfiction here. The fiction business is different. (That’s the problem.)

Amazon’s Payment Model

Amazon’s direct publishing program, KDP, is one of several distribution channels that allows writers to reach audiences without going through a publisher. KDP is the largest such distributor. In any business, the largest distributor uses its power to impose extra rules that benefit it. One of those is the ebook royalty structure, which is dictated by the ebook’s price. Ebooks priced up to $2.98, the author gets paid 35% of cover price for each sale. From $2.99 to $9.99, the author makes 70%. At $10 and up, they make 35% again. (Traditional publishers have a different structure.) Authors also pay delivery fees, so the actual payment is a little less than that. Amazon clearly wants ebooks to be priced between $2.99 and $9.99. Other distributors might have limits at the bottom end, but generally pay 65% to 80% — and nobody else has this artificial $9.99 cap.

Amazon agreements have a Most Favored Nation clause where they can price match any other distributor. If an ebook is $9.99 at Amazon and $4.99 at Apple, Amazon can cut their price to match.

If I price an ebook at $9.99, I make about $7 at any distributor.

If I price that same ebook at $14.99, I make about $10 everywhere but Amazon, and $4.50 at Amazon.

In short, ebook prices of $10-$19.99 are a “dead zone” that benefits nobody but Amazon. I must price my book over $20 to make more per sale than I would by pricing at $9.99.

Novels versus Tech Books

Tech books are fundamentally different from novels. Writing tech books takes a different skill set than novels, and the potential audience is different. Amazon treats the two identically, to tech authors’ detriment.

I can write a mid-size novel in about a month, barring debacle. (Yes, other writers are different, I know.) I spent about a year researching and writing SNMP Mastery and another writing TLS Mastery.

The maximum potential audience for each type of book is very different. A novel’s maximum potential audience is effectively unlimited. It might sell ten copies or fifty thousand copies. A lucky few sell millions. The maximum potential audience for a tech book is far, far smaller. I will be thrilled to unreasoning giggles if SNMP Mastery sells five thousand copies.

Every author knows this going in. $ git commit murder might sell a million copies. It won’t, of course, but it might.

Compare a $5.99 novel ($4 payment) to one of my $9.99 ($7 payment) tech books. Fifty thousand readers for that novel nets about $200,000. My five thousand readers at $7 each is about $35,000. That is not much for a year’s highly skilled work.

Kindle Unlimited

Amazon really pushes authors towards their Kindle Unlimited program. This is a flat rate subscription program, where authors get paid on the number of pages read. Books must be exclusive to Amazon, however. If someone reads a novel, they read every page. If someone grabs a tech book, they might read only one chapter. I design my books to be read from front to back, letting the reader build a comprehensive body of knowledge on the topic, but I know dang well some of you read one chapter and fuddle through without context. The KU program as it is currently structured is hostile to authors and non-Amazon readers alike, and I will not participate. That post is several years old, but the basics haven’t changed.

Additionally, I can destroy the career of any author in KU by setting up my own instance of scam software and aiming it at them. It would cost a couple hundred bucks of cloud computing and a couple days of my time, sure, but any number of the folks I’ve pissed off by insisting that women exist in tech would gleefully pay that to take me out. (As an aside, that’s the same reason my print books are non-returnable despite several bookstores requesting otherwise. I don’t know that enough of my haters are adept enough in the publishing biz to run the Returnable Books Exploit, but I can’t take that risk.)

Finally, consider the word monopsony.

The smaller maximum audience size, combined with techie reading habits, makes Kindle Unlimited absolute death for my tech books.

Mastery Book Goals

Most tech books are huge. I wanted to write shorter tech books that dive deeply into narrow aspects of system administration. I saw a gap that $9.99 ebooks would fill nicely. The books would be about 30,000-45,000 words each, and cover what every sysadmin must know about the material. The argument over whether or not the books achieve that is best had over a drink, but that’s the goal.

Some of my topics were poorly chosen. SNMP Mastery wound up at over 60,000 words. I looked at the completed book and thought: a fair price on this would be $14.99. If I do that, though, I make less on each ebook sale at Amazon. I might figure out how to survive that. I would not survive thinking of Amazon making more off my work for purely arbitrary reasons.

The books must be fairly priced, both for you and for me. I won’t ever get wealthy writing tech books, but if I don’t pay the bills I’ll have to go to work for someone else. They must be a win-win purchase.

Long Term Pricing

Prices increase over time. This is not a surprise.

Consider the cost of tech books through the years. Ebooks should not be priced the same as print books, and booksellers discount print books, but print books have the MSRP on the cover so they’re a decent yardstick for measuring scale of change. My books Absolute BSD, Absolute FreeBSD, and Absolute OpenBSD are all about the same size and have similar audiences.

These books cost $39.95 in the 2000s, and $59.95 in the 2010s. I expect them to hit (ugh) $79.95 in the 2020s.

Amazon is fairly rare among dot-coms in that it started off thinking very long-term. Its long term goal is to make books inexpensive, just like they make everything inexpensive. They’re not looking at 2021, they’re looking at 2030 and 2050.

Why would they ever eliminate the dead zone? Keeping it fits their long term goals. I would like to be wrong, but I’m pretty confident the $9.99 hurdle is perpetual.

The Future
Writers might not need pants, but we do need health care and gelato and caffeine. The price of the Mastery ebooks must eventually increase, along with everything else. This change is not imminent, but I can see the day approaching and am considering strategies against it.

My main options for “price increases above $9.99” seem to be:

1. Drop Amazon Kindle for all new books. Amazon’s print book description would have near the top: “Due to Amazon’s discriminatory treatment of technology authors, ebook versions are available everywhere except Amazon.” I don’t know how long that note would survive, but I would take great satisfaction in posting it. It might alienate Kindle fans, though.
2. Increase prices into the $10-$19.99 dead zone, and hope that my proceeds on other distributors overcome my Amazon losses. Theoretically possible, but rewards Amazon for discriminating against tech book authors.
3. Artificially increase the price above $20 on all platforms. If I need to make $10 on each ebook sold at Amazon, I could increase the ebook price to $30. Thanks to the Most Favored Nation clause, the price must be identical on all platforms. I think $30 is an unfairly high price for SSH Mastery or even the overly long SNMP Mastery. Not a win-win, I won’t do it.

Other options do exist, like release windows, but these are the primary strategies. Of them, numbers two and three are unacceptable.

Decision Factors

If you look at my 2020 income, Amazon is my single biggest source, at 36%. My Amazon sales are pretty evenly split between print and ebook. Let’s call it 18% each. Taking an 18% pay cut would suck. Some of those readers would buy elsewhere, sure, but businesses must be pessimistic. For my calculations, and my laziness, let’s say Kindle is 20%.

(Dear tech author friends: don’t use my numbers. What percent of your sales are on Kindle? Do you know? And yes, I’m a freaking unicorn, I get it.)

Let’s say I write another tech book that should be priced fairly at $15, and examine it in three scenarios based on a baseline 1000 ebook sales.

Scenario 1: I price this book at $9.99, and sell 1000 ebooks across all platforms. I make $7 per book, and make $7000.

Scenario 2: I drop Kindle. I make $10 on each sale through every platform except Amazon, but sell only 800 books. I make $8000.

Scenario 3: I keep Kindle, but price at $14.99. I make $8900, at the price of feeding Amazon’s anti-tech-author discrimination. Plus, they make about $2000.

Is my annoyance at Amazon’s bottleneck practices worth $900? Is reader convenience worth $900? How about the two of them combined, against an “I win, you win, Amazon WINS BIG” situation? Good questions.

So what’s my actionable plan?

• Write shorter tech books that can be fairly priced at $9.99. (We all know how I will fail, but it’s a goal.)
• Watch inflation.
• Continue disintermediating readers.
• Steer readers that cannot be disintermediated to distributors other than Amazon.

I wrote this post to try to figure out the Kindle exit conditions. I guess I’ve already hit them. Or, I sell out for a few hundred bucks. Those folks who know the technologies I write about will understand that ethics matter to me, though.

This might get interesting…