Get My Books Cheap

A novel and a story, at least.

I was recently invited into two different book bundles, where you can get a whole bunch of books by different authors at a cheap price. A bundle is pretty much a sampler pack of similar stuff.

If you’ve read my fiction and liked it, here’s your chance to discover a bunch of new authors in my genres.

If you haven’t read my fiction, here’s a chance to inexpensively try it and a bunch of other stuff.

First up is the Sci-Fi July bundle.

Sci-fi July Fever Fun

It’s eleven novels, including my Montague Portal novel Hydrogen Sleets. The heroine, Aidan Redding, is a redshirt who keeps getting stuck in situations that should slaughter redshirts. No matter how I try, though, I just can’t kill that woman. She’s tough, yes, but better still: she’s smart. Smarter than I am, at least.

Second we have the Crimes, Capers, and Rule-Breakers bundle, that includes my story Butterfly Stomp. It’s on pre-order now for only $0.99.

Crimes, Capers, & Rule-Breakers

I love crime. Well, reading about crime. Fictional crime, not Oracle. As a writer, Beaks is one of those characters that wandered in off the street and said “I’m a horrible person. But you can’t help loving me.” Yes, she’ll shoot you in the head if you’re inconvenient, but she’ll feel really bad about it, so that’s okay. And if you like the Butterfly Stomp short, the story continues in the novel Butterfly Stomp Waltz.

Between the two, you’ll have enough fun reading to round out your summer nicely. Enjoy!

Self-Imposed Split Personality

Pardon the long post, but this might both save me some time and help other authors in a similar position. (I’m not aware of any others in my position, but I’m sure they exist.) Also, I try to make data-driven decisions rather than jumping on the Latest Bandwagon, which is notoriously difficult in a business like publishing that provides very little data.

I’ve been writing under the name Michael W Lucas for decades now. I used that name on the very first book that I published. For my first tech book I used Michael Lucas, but changed it immediately afterwards because I couldn’t compete.

A few years ago, I split into Michael W Lucas (tech) and Michael Warren Lucas (fiction). Publishing in two wildly different fields confused both readers and Amazon’s recommendation engine. While my long-term plan involves reducing Amazon’s importance as a sales channel, other sites use similar algorithms. And I doubt I’ll ever eliminate outside sales channels–even James Patterson can’t swing that.

So I have to ride the algorithms.

I’ll use Amazon as an example because the public can easily extract data from them. Amazon says “Hey, enough people who bought X also bought Y, so we’ll point that out and try to sell them more stuff.” Observe Amazon’s algorithms in action by using Yasiv’s Also Bought visualization tool. Here’s my Kindle Also Boughts for my nonfiction. Amazon has also noticed that people who buy books on TLS, PGP, ZFS, and PF have bought SSH Mastery.

When someone looks at the entry for, say, Bulletproof SSL and TLS, Amazon shows them an ad for SSH Mastery.

These ads are critical for expanding my readership. Books with incoming links are my best-sellers. While correlation is not causation, from talking to readers and observing my own behavior I’d say they clearly work.

Yasiv also shows that people who buy one of my books have also bought a bunch more of my books. This shows that my writing appeals to a certain group of people. Folks who try one of my books get hooked. Amazon is validating my writer skills here, in graphical form.

Note that the Also Bought recommendation engine clearly splits books by genre. I’m highly confident that my readership includes a bunch of folks who read, say, Peter F Hamilton, John Scalzi, Heinlein, Asimov, and so on. But the recommendation engine mostly chops those things off. You have to sell a whole bunch of stuff to get the recommendation engine to cross genres. My Kindle nonfiction Yasiv graph shows that folks who bought my DNSSEC and Tarsnap books also bought git commit murder, but it’s very much an outlier. It’s even graphed as an outlier.

Now let’s hit the clutch, and look at fiction. My fiction is gaining popularity. Measured in dollars, the sales each month are usually a little better than those beforehand. I write crime thrillers, science fiction, and mystery.

So let’s consider Amazon’s Kindle Also Boughts for my fiction.

This really isn’t good.

My fiction exists as a little island. My books all connect to each other. People who like my books tend to buy several. Once my audience finds me, they stay. My readers also like Octavia Butler and Charlie Stross, though, so I’m reasonably confident in the writing itself. Those links are one-way, however: people leave my island for Stross, but never return.

(Note that not all of my books are here. If I wanted to be really depressed, I’d check out the Also Boughts for the latest Montague Portal novel… but I don’t want to be really depressed, so I won’t. Plus, reader reaction to that book was excellent, so Amazon’s recommendation engine can go jump off a bridge.)

Without those incoming Also Boughts, there’s no career here.

I’ve been doing a bunch of reading on how Also Boughts work. Amazon divides the Also Boughts by consistency of readership. I write in multiple genres. An author name with fewer sales and fewer titles but greater consistency of readership gets recommended to other readers. An author name with more titles but inconsistent readership… does not.

Some writers have recommended concentrating on one genre. I understand their reasons for that recommendation, but in my case that’s not likely to happen. The stories I want to write do not respect genre. The book I’m writing now deals with today’s human trafficking, and I don’t care to thinly disguise the topic to write it as science fiction. And there’s no way to write my SF as crime novels.

Fiction readers rarely cross genres. A few do–I have a few loyal fans who read damn near everything I write. (Hi, Meg and Kurt!) I love those readers. But they’re the exception.

So it seems I need to split my name again.

I’m not looking forward to self-imposed multiple personality disorder. It’s a bunch of work. There’s a whole mess of covers to redo, not to mention a whole mess of ebook reformatting. I’m equipped to do it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s tedious grunt labor that I’d rather not repeat.

Which means I only want to do it once.

Rather than going with my gut, I’m requesting input from other writers who’ve been here.

The obvious split seems to be mystery & crime thrillers under one name, and the SF under another name.

I can also argue against that, though. The Immortal Clay books have very little cross-readership with the Montague Portal stories. This is not surprising: the Immortal Clay books are post-apocalyptic “Carpenter’s The Thing, but after we lose”, while the Montague Portal tales are comparatively lighthearted “let’s explore the multiverse!” romps. Similarly, git commit murder is a cozy mystery, while Butterfly Stomp Waltz and the forthcoming sequel (Terrapin Sky Tango) are crime thrillers–technically mysteries, yes, but mysteries full of blood and booms and bad language. Decidedly not cozy, if you get my drift.

But splitting into four names? Oh, come on now. Each name imposes overhead. Never mind that if my fiction takes off, I plan to write an urban theological fantasy series. (Working title: you should have learned. A couple of you probably got a funny look right there, so for you few: yes, it means exactly what you think it means.)

So I think it’s two names, plus a possible third later on.

The SF would stay under my name. The biggest reason being that it’s a suitable SF author name, while modern thriller authors who have started writing recently have shorter, punchier names. Yes, James Patterson is a long name–but he’s been around for decades. Today’s perfect thriller author name is something like, say, Brad Thor, Lee Child, Ben Coes, or Dale Brown. Single-syllable names. (Of these, I’d say Brad Thor is the best–a metal rivet and a Norse god? How much tougher do you want?) Slightly longer names like Tom Clancy and Stuart Woods also do pretty well. No, I’m not saying that these authors did well because of their names. But the names of the authors of these kinds of books in the trad published world fit into a type, and if I’m going to switch my name I want it to fit that type as well as possible.

git commit murder is something of an odd duck. The target audience is people who read my nonfiction. It’s probably going to stay under the Michael Warren Lucas brand, simply for the name recognition of “he’s in our tribe.” That book will never appeal to the Traditional Cozy Reader, and that’s okay.

I’d like to continue using https://mwl.io as a generic author landing page that branches out to specific sites for all of my names. Middle initials are not punchy. So let’s go with initials of M and L.

But what name? The first names Mack and Mick appeal to me. A surname, though? I could go for a variant on my name, like Luck. Perhaps something ominous, such as Last?

So, for those author sorts still reading this:

1) Is splitting my name a waste of time?
2) Should I split the names a different way?
3) Suggestions for a good M.L. thriller pseudonym?

Experimental Price Cuts

I spent last weekend at Penguicon, doing a whole bunch of panels and presentations as well as talking with readers and hobnobbing with my fellow ink-stained wretches authors. As a result of those discussions, I’m trying something new (to me). I’m slashing my fiction prices.

Novels are down to $2.99. Yes, even the brand new git commit murder. Immortal Clay is down to $0.99, because it’s the first in a series.

Novellas are down to $1.99.

Short stories are all 99 cents.

US Kindle users can check my Amazon listing, while others can hit my fiction web site.

How long will this last?

I don’t know. It’s an experiment. Overwhelmingly, the authors I spoke with told me I would make it up on volume. I expect this stunt to slash my fiction income. Much as with my initial experiment in self-publishing, I would be delighted to be proven wrong. I’ll give this not less than 30 days.

Am I likely to try this with my nonfiction? No. The maximum potential audience for a book on PAM or a BSD is much, much, MUCH lower than that for a novel, even a novel in a low-selling genre such as SF.

Penguicon 2017 Schedule

Next weekend, April 28-30 2017, I’ll be at Penguicon. Two weekends after that (12-14 May), I’ll be at Kansas LinuxFest. But we’re on Penguicon right now.

Here’s my events and the description for each. Each is 1 hour unless specified otherwise. And I’m asking your help for some of these events. (Updated to add the LN2 events, which I’m not running but a guy has to eat sometime.)

Friday:
8PM: LN2 Ice Cream
9PM: The OpenBSD Web Stack – OpenBSD is best known for security and networking. But they also have a highly secure web server and load balancer. This talk will take you through the OpenBSD web stack, presenting its strengths and disadvantages. We’ll cover the httpd web server, free globally valid SSL certificates through ACME, the Common Address Redundancy Protocol for two-server clusters, and the relayd load balancer. Many of the security issues common on web servers are simply not an issue on OpenBSD. Come find out why!

Saturday:
9 AM: Writers and Traditional Publishing – So you want to sell a book to a publisher. How do you do that? What should you expect? How do you optimize your chances of getting not just a deal, but the deal you want? What gets some people into traditional publishing, and keeps others out? Come hear authors discuss the good and bad of the publishing biz!

10-11:45AM: Author Meet & Read, Vol. 1 – A big room with Clif Flynt, Mary Lynne Gibbs, Jen Haeger, Christian Klaver, James Frederick Leach, David Erik Nelson, John Scalzi, Clarence Young, and myself, all showing off our books, talking to our readers, and signing books. I will have my books still in print for sale. I’m expecting that the others will all have long lines and I’ll be there alone, so this is your chance to heckle me in person.

10:54-11:03AM: reading from git commit murder – Readings are tightly scheduled, so I expect this to begin and end sharply on time.

1PM: self publishing in 2017 – Self-publishing is an increasingly important channel for authors to reach their readers. It also changes constantly, with new tools and distributors opening daily and existing platforms changing. This panel brings together veteran self-publishers to share their experiences, discuss the changes of the last year, and give new authors an edge in the business.

2PM: 90 second reads – Join a handful of Penguicon authors as they read 90-second passages from their novels. The selections will be thematically linked based on keywords, such as sorrow, fury, funny, love, etc. Timing is crucial! After, there will be a Q&A with the authors.

3PM: LN2 ice cream

5PM: Writing High-Performance Nonfiction – Writing nonfiction is not merely reciting facts. It’s a specialized form of storytelling, very different from your college essays and book reports. Whether you’re writing memoirs or computer texts, using storytelling techniques transforms your work for the better. This talk takes you through making your nonfiction not only readable, but memorable.

7PM: BSD Operating Systems in 2017 – I’ll be discussing the current options in BSD-based operating systems, the big news from recent projects, new developments, and where we’re going from here.

8-10PM: LN2 ice cream

Sunday:

10AM: breakfast – LN2 ice cream

11AM: Senior Sysadmin Panel – Storage – The years know things that the days and weeks never know. We’ve gathered half a dozen people who’ve been sysadmins for over 20 years to talk about the one of the most dreaded and annoying topics in computing: storage.

12PM: Self-Promotion for Creatives – Independent creators are their own PR departments. We have to not only make all the things, we have to spread the word about all the things. Here we have a bunch of artists and writer types who successfully spread their work across the world. What works? What doesn’t? How can you be shamelessly self-promoting without being a jerk? Come find out!

Where could I use help?

In the 90 second reads panel, I get a few 90 second periods to read a selection from my fiction. Each read should have a theme. Our group has four themes: Betrayal, Heartbreaking, Scary, Funny.

For those of you who have read my fiction: I could use suggestions for parts of my books that you thought fit these themes. I have a few thoughts, but what I think fits a theme is probably not what struck you lot as fitting that theme.

So: if you’ve read my fiction, what of mine would you suggest for a brief reading in any or all of those themes?

New novel: “git commit murder”

If you follow me on social media you’ll have known this already, but now that the print is out here’s the formal announcement.

My new novel, git commit murder, is out. It’s pretty much “if Agatha Christie ran Unix cons.”

The BSD North conference draws some of the smartest people in the world. These few days will validate Dale Whitehead’s work—or expose him as a fraud.

When a tragic death devastates the conference, only Dale suspects murder.

Computer geeks care about code.

But do they care enough… to kill?

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon IT, Kobo, iBooks, Nook, Gumroad

Print has hit Amazon, but you might need to search by title if you want print. Amazon is quick to get the book listed, not so quick

“Absolute FreeBSD 3rd ed” Auction ends SOON

In a few hours, the auction to get your name in the third edition of Absolute FreeBSD will close.

Right now, the winning bid is at $605.

Feel free to bid or not, as you wish. I do have to say, though:

The auction I just did to Tuckerize someone in a small OpenBSD book went for $1300. Absolute FreeBSD is a bigger book, and will have wider distribution.

If the AF3e auction goes for less than that, I’ll be forced to conclude that FreeBSD folks have less team spirit than the OpenBSD ones. The OpenBSD folks will get bragging rights.

But it’s entirely up to you. No pressure.

On an unrelated note: my novel git commit murder is available in ebook now. More stores will appear soon. It’s basically “If Agatha Christie ran a Unix con.”

At the GP Central Library 11 March 2017

Libraries are starting to like me. Which is cool, because I like them.

Next Monday night I’ll be talking at the Troy Public Library on High Performance Nonfiction–basically, how I write books. See, I’m on the library’s calendar and everything!

Then on Saturday, 11 March 2017, I’ll be at the Central Branch of the Grosse Pointe Library, 10 AM to 2 PM, for their Write On Pointe local authors fair. I’ll be selling copies of, well, everything I have copies of, I guess?

Stop by. Say hello. Otherwise I’ll be talking to my neighbors, and I think we all know that won’t turn out well.

The Apocalypse, on Sale

Lots of apocalyptic news and feelings in the last couple days, and probably for a while to come. Why not trade one apocalypse for another?

My post-apocalypse SF 1novel Immortal Clay is on sale for the next few days. You can get the ebook for only $0.99.

Immortal Clay plays off of John Campbell’s classic story Who Goes There, (filmed as The Thing), but after we lose.

Why do this? Book sales routinely drop before an election, and jump right after. Selling a few copies per day for a few days on Amazon.com would be enough to get the book into the Top 100 list, where it’s more likely to be discovered organically. I can then turn the price back up. And of course, hopefully people who read it and like it will buy the sequel and my other novels.

Grab the ebook at: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon IT, Kobo, iBooks, Gumroad

New novel, and a new novel bundle

So… er… I put a new novel out last month.

And totally forgot to blog it. Apparently, releasing a new book is now such a commonplace occurrence that even I don’t find it noteworthy.

Or maybe it’s just that my brain absorbs information as readily as a stainless steel sponge.

Whatever.

Anyway, Hydrogen Sleets is the first ever Montague Portal novel.


Hydrogen Sleets: a Montague Portal novelMeet the new universe, same as the old universe—
but thirteen billion years younger.

Aidan Redding’s new assignment? A space station in a universe so young it’s barely invented hydrogen. Researchers study the cosmos’ earliest days, discover whole new realms of science…
and go screaming insane.

The mathematicians claim this universe obeys the same natural laws as Redding’s own.

At the beginning of time, though, the universe writes its own rules…

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon IT, Kobo, iBooks, Gumroad


If you’ve wanted more Portal stories, this is your chance.

I imagined the Portal tales as short stories. It’s a perfect setup for a short story series, with its built-in reset button and the opportunities for mayhem. Somehow, this turned into a novel.

Those of you who collect these in print: despite it being a novel, Hydrogen Sleets has the same cover size as the other tales. It’s thicker because, well, it’s a novel, but it won’t mess up your pretty shelf display.

It’s available at all fine online bookstores, in both ebook and print.

Buying the book on its own is the expensive way to get it, though.

Hydrogen Sleets is temporarily part of the Out Of This World fiction bundle, a collection of high-tech SF novels that are all, in some way, out of this world. Here you’ll find starship repossessions, space pirates, doomsday machines, and more.

Get six books, including mine, for a paltry $3.99, or $9.99 for sixteen books. This is days of reading from a crew of excellent authors, plus me.

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Rebecca Senese, the bundle curator, invited authors whose work she enjoyed. This bundle includes some of my favorite authors.

Personally, I enjoy buying bundles. They’re a great way to get explore new authors. The inexpensive price lets me sample work from authors I’ve never tried. Inevitably, I’ll enjoy most the books and a few will hit my tastes just right. It’s a great deal.

Rebecca’s doing a daily blog about each book and the author, including J.D. Brink, Leah Cutter, Marcelle Dube’, Mark Fassett, Jamie Ferguson, J A Marlow, Stefon Mears, Debbie Mumford, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Rita Schulz, Rebecca Senese, Dean Wesley Smith, Douglas Smith, and Blaze Ward. She’ll have a new post every day while the bundle runs.

Oh, did I mention it expires soon? You have four days. FOUR DAYS. As of when I write this, of course. Probably less by the time you read it. Get it now, or miss out forever.

Well, no. Not forever. You can buy each book individually. But that’s a lot more expensive, and all that clicking will tire out your mouse finger. Be smart. Get it now.

And I promise, next time I put a novel out, I’ll actually say something when it’s available.