Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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Now available: combined print/ebook bundles direct from my bookstore

The question I get asked most often is “Can I get a print and ebook combo of your books?” No, hang on, that’s not quite true. Technically, the most common questions are “Are you mad?” followed by “Are you serious?” but the print/ebook combo thing is a solid third place.

I am delighted to announce that after years of work, I am deploying direct print sales from my bookstore. Buy the print book and get the ebook free. Ebook will arrive in minutes. The print book will ship in about a week.

Only Run Your Own Mail Server and Dear Abyss are available so far.

While I’d like to offer a discount, the big bookstores would price match me. And yes, you pay shipping. With shipping charges it’s more expensive and slower than Amazon Prime. Every penny outside shipping, printing, and processing fees goes to feeding my family, however, so that’s a win (for me). I’m looking at ways to reduce the cost, but I need to see if anyone will actually order this way before I sink more money and time into it.

When you place an order, my store invokes BookFunnel for the ebook and files a print order with BookVault. In minutes, BookFunnel will send you an email with links to download your books. They’ll be available for redownload at https://my.bookfunnel.com. A few hours later, BookVault will send you a print order confirmation.

All new books will be available on my site before anywhere else. I will also be adding older titles as time permits.

I’ve been working on disintermediation for over ten years. This is the last big piece. I am delighted.

Why did this take so long? Well, shipping in the real world is kind of a mess. That makes shipping in WooCommerce kind of a mess. For most authors BookVault would be plug-and-run, but I’m special. My sponsorships are incompatible with BookVault. I wound up employing Sleeping Giant Studios to resolve incompatibilities between the two. I highly recommend SGS for any WooCommerce daftness.

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“Networking for System Administrators, 2nd edition” cover art

The inimitable Eddie Sharam has finished the cover painting for the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. It’s a parody of Giuseppe Zocchi’s Pietre Dure of Architettura. It’s a wraparound, but you can see a mockup of the front cover at the sponsorship page.

Eddie painted this. Like, on paper. With paint. The current plan is to include the painting as a Kickstarter reward level, much as we did with the cover for Run Your Own Mail Server.

At this moment, N4SA2e has 98 print sponsors. Two more sponsors and I have to do a challenge coin. If I have to do a coin, it’ll have the usual rat and bear the words NEVER MY FAULT/ALWAYS MY PROBLEM.

Mind you, my plan is that I will get exactly one more print sponsor and then y’all’ll stop backing it, so I don’t have to do any extra work.

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New Releases: Dear Abyss, The Last Hour of Hogswatch

It’s the end of the year, so I’m shoving a couple titles out the door at the last minute. Like you do.

First up we have Dear Abyss: the FreeBSD Journal Letters column, years 1-6. The ebook is on most platforms now, and print is leaking out.

For the folks who are into solstice holidays, my story The Last Hour of Hogswatch is now available standalone. It’s only in my bookstore; I don’t bother putting short stories on the big stores any more, or in print.

Happy holiday-of-your-choice, folks!

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“Dear Abyss” live on Kickstarter

Confession time: I don’t love Kickstarter. I don’t love money either, but it does seem to be a dependency when living in capitalism.

When I release a book on my site, I sell a few copies. When I launch it on Kickstarter, sales go up tenfold.

So: Dear Abyss is live on Kickstarter. The book exists, and the moment I get paid it goes to everyone.

Backers immediately get a copy of Letters to ed(1), the out-of-print three-year compilation.

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“Networking for Systems Administrators, 2nd ed” open for sponsorship

TLDR: “Networking for Systems Administrators, 2nd Edition” is open for sponsorships at https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/n4sa2e-sponsor/ and I would appreciate your support.

Longer version:

Every large company I’d ever worked in since 1995 suffered from a continuous feud between the sysadmins and the network team. One team would demand an inch, the other would insist on 25.4 millimeters, and battle was declared. As someone with an ankle shackled in each world, I quickly reached two conclusions.

One, the job is hard enough without us arguing past each other.

Two, everybody involved needed a short sharp visit from the Slap Fairy.

About ten years ago I achieved my lifelong goal of becoming a full-time writer, and promptly lost my mind. I could keep being a writer so long as I kept bringing in money. If I didn’t bring in money, I’d get stuffed back in a cubicle. I had to write books, and quickly. I had made a list of titles I could spew fast. One of them was “Networking for Systems Administrators,” meant to end that feud or at least bring about a ceasefire.

Because my other goal was “pay the mortgage before I get stuffed back into a cubicle,” I slammed out that manuscript in about a month.

To my surprise, it was well-received. Managers bought the book in bulk to distribute to their staff. Network administrators bought it to give to select colleagues. Sysadmins bought so they could successfully argue with their network administrators.

It’s been ten years, and that book needs updating. Some of the commands have been changed. 100Mb Ethernet is rare, while 10G and 100G are almost common. There’s all those tidbits I could have done better, if I hadn’t been driving myself too hard. Let’s Encrypt made TLS omnipresent, so I need to add that. And of course it must have a proper Eddie Sharam cover.

If I get ~100 print sponsors I’ll do another challenge coin, like the one I did for Run Your Own Mail Server (https://mwl.io/archives/23836).

So, yeah. https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/n4sa2e-sponsor/ is my effort to bring a tiny peace to IT departments around the world. I would be grateful for your sponsorship, and your support with the mortgage part.

Thank you for your consideration.

PS: I should also mention that my collected FreeBSD Journal advice columns, Dear Abyss, is going to kickstarter soon. “Dear Abby for Sysadmins” isn’t going to sponsorship, but if you’re interested you might check it out. (https://mwl.io/ks)

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Mail Talk 8 October 2024, with bonus Craig Maloney Memorial Charity Auction starting–NOW

Next Tuesday, 8 October 2024, I’ll be talking about Running Your Own Mail Server at mug.org, 6:30PM EDT. MUG is my local “hard-core Unixy People” group. Giving a talk during a book release is bad planning, but I am crap at scheduling.

One of its members was Craig Maloney. Many years ago Craig asked me if I was the same Michael Lucas who had written a couple RPG books in the 1990s. I admitted my guilt. He pulled an obviously-read plastic-bagged copy of Gatecrasher out of his backpack and asked me to sign it. The dude had friends across the world and did his best to boost us all. An all-around great guy, who sadly lost his life to cancer earlier this year.

Craig had sponsored Run Your Own Mail Server. I am now left with his sponsor gifts. I’ve checked with Craig’s family, and they’re okay with me auctioning them off for charity. The Craig Maloney Memorial Auction runs on this page from now until my MUG talk ends1.

The sponsor gifts will never be available in bookstores, at least not new. (I do have a few extras that I will auction off for charity over the rest of my life, but I’ll stretch those out.) I don’t want to describe them here because not all the sponsors have their gifts yet and I’d rather not spoil the surprise, but you can see photos at link 1 and link 2.

I’m going to end this auction a little differently, though. The auction will close at the end of Tuesday’s mug.org talk. I’ll ask live, online for any last bids. You can bid by posting on the page or in the video session. The auction will close when bidding stops. Comment on this post to bid. Once the auction ends, I’ll notify the winner. The winner sends me the donation receipt and I ship the gifts. I pay for shipping.

The beneficiary is Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. They’re as close to the ground as you can get these days, and donations are tax-deductible in the US. You can choose from several donation targets. I don’t care if you donate cash, fill an Amazon shipment with the North Carolina wishlist, target Puerto Rico, or whatever. Just get them the money and get a receipt.

Anyway, leave a comment to bid. Good cause. Ridiculous prize.

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“Run Your Own Mail Server” is leaking out

My latest tech book, Run Your Own Mail Server, is starting to creep into bookstores. The book entry on my web site links to various stores that carry it, and will be updated as more stores appear.

Paperbacks are available on Amazon and will reach other stores shortly. They’ll be in the Ingram catalog, so you can have your local bookstore order them via ISBN 9781642350784.

Hardcovers are pending. Once the Ingram databases finish churning, they’ll also be available everywhere. Ask your bookstore to order ISBN 9781642350791.

I’m working with BookVault to manage direct print sales from my web site, but their Woocommerce plugin hit my store and promptly soiled itself. In their defense very few authors have been running direct sales for over ten years, and most of those don’t have as many features as tiltedwindmillpress.com.

Speaking of my bookstore, you can get the ebook there.

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Why “Run Your Own Mail Server” is not in Amazon’s Kindle store

I expect folks to ask this, so here’s a pre-emptive blog post. TLDR: for the same reasons OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems is not. Amazon’s deal is unacceptable.

You can get Run Your Own Mail Server for Kindle direct from me at Tilted Windmill Press or at Gumroad. You can get a Kindle-friendly ebook from any number of other retailers, but while they’re all supposed to be DRM-free I can’t advise on prying the file out of another vendor’s ecosystem. The one place you cannot buy RYOMS for Kindle is Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.

TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over. Amazon is the only retailer that does this. Other retailers, I make somewhere around 65%-70% no matter the retail price. Everything follows from that math, but if you want the details read on.

According to economists, prices have gone up about 30% since I started releasing the Mastery books. According to my wallet, not so much. In 2012 I could get a cheap lunch for my wife and I for $10. I paid $18 last weekend. But let’s go with the official numbers. Just as “dime novels” now cost $10, I must raise prices. While book pricing is hotly debated, $14.99 is a reasonable price for a 350-page tech book like Run Your Own Mail Server.

If I charge $9.99 for this ebook, I make about $7.

If I charge $14.99 for the ebook, I make about $10.50 everywhere but Amazon. At Amazon, I make $5.25. For me to make that $10.50 at Amazon, I must price the book at $29.99. I’m fond of the book, but it ain’t worth that! And if I did, giving Amazon a $20 slice of every sale for no reason sticks in my craw.

Charge $29.99 at Amazon and $14.99 elsewhere? Amazon’s program has a Most Favored Nation clause. They can price match any other major vendor.

Will Amazon change their business because of this? No. Authors are plentiful and of low value. I am not worth Amazon’s time.

Amazon’s business model is based on squeezing prices down, and they play a long game. I don’t expect them to ever raise that $9.99 limit. A novel might sell tens or hundreds of thousands of copies. If I’m lucky, a book like RYOMS might sell five thousand copies at retail. (Why that many? The Kickstarter went viral, and I suspect it ate through the market.) The few extra bucks I’ll make by raising prices are important. That’s also why I’ve focused so hard on disintermediation through my Patronizers, sponsorships, and lately Kickstarter.

I have been expecting this for years now. I do not expect to publish future Mastery books on Amazon’s Kindle store, unless by some chance I write another very short one.

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“Run Your Own Mail Server” sponsor and Patronizer gifts

I spent the weekend transforming crates of stuff into a heap of packages.

Dear sponsors, you have a gift coming. It is not a copy of Run Your Own Mail Server. Go read the fine print on the description of what you backed: I said I will send you a gift, not a copy of the book. Your package contains not one but two items. They are irreplaceable, so when you trick them into falling into the smelter they will be gone forever.

Tricking them won’t be hard. They’re not that smart. Merely irreplaceable.

This heap also contains books for folks who chose the special edition during the RYOMS Kickstarter campaign. I have to make one more pass through the backer list to catch people who gave me their shipping information after I did the initial shipment. After that, I’ll check back in a month or so. I can’t force folks to give me their addresses.

I learned some important things in creating this heap.

Next time I ship gifts for a sponsorship that’s open longer than a year, I need to contact every backer and get their current shipping addresses. Probably some sort of web form for address collection.

Signing and shipping hundreds of books is a right pain. Next time, I must hire help. A teenager willing to help stuff books and carry boxes would have made this so much easier.

You must have IOSS paperwork to work with printers inside the EU. It’s not a legal requirement, but printers don’t want to work with any outsider who doesn’t have proper tax paperwork. You only need an IOSS number if you’re doing 10,000EUR or more of direct sales with the EU, however. That excludes me. That could change, but I don’t anticipate that happening. When I do a dropship-based sales, I’ll plan on shipping from the UK.

I still believe that this book was what authors call “a lightning strike.” These sales are not my new normal. The next book will have fewer backers, and that’s fine. I’ll enjoy the brief triumph and get on writing the next book.

Once the acetaminophen kicks in, that is.

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“Run Your Own Mail Server” Auction for BSD Conference AV Team

A team of volunteers led by the stalwart Patrick McEvoy records the talks for EuroBSDCon, BSDCan, and AsiaBSDCon and makes them available. They rent equipment from local suppliers every year. The rental fees approach the cost of purchasing the equipment, and the team has to configure the gear from scratch and desperately hope that the previous renter didn’t break any connectors or fry any capacitors, but at least they don’t have to lug heavy gear around the world.

Video equipment now small enough that they can lug it around the world.

The BSD A/V team is raising money to purchase their own equipment. They can configure it properly at home so (in theory) they arrive, plug in, and are ready to go. They’re taking donations directly via bsdfund.org, or if you need a charitable donation receipt you could funnel it through the FreeBSD Foundation and say “community AV team” in the comments.

If they don’t raise enough money to buy the gear they need? The conference will pay to rent it. You’ll still get videos. But it’ll stress out Pat and the gang. Let’s not stress out Pat.

In wholly unrelated news, I have a spare hardcover of Run Your Own Mail Server. Not yet available in stores. Not available anywhere.

I’m auctioning it off to benefit the AV crew.

Comment on this post to bid. All bids in US dollars.

The auction runs from now until 5PM EDT 15 September. If the bidding goes nuts in the last few minutes, I’ll leave it open until it settles down. There’s no sniping this auction at the last moment, as I want the bids to escalate beyond all sensible limits.

They need the money soon, so once I acknowledge your victory I’ll ask you to donate the money within the next day and send me the receipt. I will sign this book and send it to you on the 16th, along with the ebook.

Bid early, bid often.

Thank you.