Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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“SSH Mastery, 2nd ed” in hardcover

I’ve been publishing books for about a quarter century now. At long last, one of my books is out in hardcover. With a dust jacket and everything. Introducing the newest version of SSH Mastery.

Why produce this book in hardcover?

First, because I need to know how to do it. Self-pub hardcover books are a different beast than paperbacks. One day I’ll have a serious need for hardcovers. That’s not the time to learn how to create them. I’ll need those skills in advance.

And second, because I wanted to. Because how cool is this?

Hardcovers are not cheap. This book retails for $39.99. Much like paperback print on demand, I expect the price to drop with time.

In theory, the hardcover will withstand more abuse than a paperback. I love theories. They make spending forty bucks on a book you can get for ten in ebook sound sensible.

I’ve ordered a case of hardbacks, as gifts for the fine folks who sponsored this book.

Also, this book uses my own ISBN, 978-1-64235-022-7. As I have very few combination book nerd/tech nerd readers, let me explain the joke: this is ISBN 22 out of my block of 1000, 978-1-64235-022-7. You have my permission to roll your eyes now.

As I don’t expect anyone to actually purchase the hardcover edition, I let myself have fun with it. The dust jacket is very BOFH, and contains Extra Rat.

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speaking at mug.org 10 April 2018

On 10 April 2018, I’ll be giving speaking at mug.org. Each MUG meeting has two presentations, one long and one short. Somehow, they’ve given me both of them.

My first, longer talk will be on ZFS, including some newer developments.

The second talk? I’m not saying.

The MUG talks coordinator, JM, agreed to let me present on the topic of my next book, the one with the undisclosed topic, without knowing what that topic is.

This gives me a hard deadline; either I’m in a position to announce the book by then, or the project fails. But hey. No pressure.

So, if you want to know the topic of #mwlSecretBook, show up at mug.org on 10 April.

In unrelated news, MUG is a great group that can always use volunteers. For example, I suspect they might desperately need a new talks coordinator on 11 April…

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SSH Mastery 2/e out

For the last week or so, the new edition of SSH Mastery has been leaking out.

It’s now available in print via Amazon, and in ebooks just about everywhere: iTunes, Kobo, my bookstore, and more.

The print version will soon be available through Ingram’s distribution as well, including a dust-jacketed hardcover version. That’s going to be a couple more weeks, though.

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Sponsoring a Scam

I’m writing a multi-Unix technology book that doesn’t have a title yet.

Well, okay, it has a title. But I’m not saying what it is. The reasons why will be obvious once the book comes out. It’ll be out before May.

#MWLSecretBook will be fairly short, about 15,000 words–about half the size of Sudo Mastery. A tech book novella, as it were. As such, it will be less expensive than other Mastery books.

When you find out what this book is, you’ll probably groan and roll your eyes. Or send hate mail. Or wonder why it hasn’t existed until now, when the need is so obvious and a whole bunch of you don’t know the topic at all.

I did a Twitter poll asking if I should offer sponsorships. The reaction was widely split between “no, you’re an idiot,” and “yes, you’re a maniac.”

I have mixed feelings on offering sponsorships because, well, this really is a pig in a poke. I’ve decided to go ahead, because a) I could use the money, and b) the sponsorships include pretty clear warnings. So:

MWLSecretBook – print sponsor
MWLSecretBook – ebook sponsor

The image is a narrow piece of the cover art.

This whole thing is a complete rip-off. I mean, PT Barnum would approve. That’s why the rates are at my usual tech book sponsorship rates, because if you want in on a scam you want all in.

And let me say in advance: I’m sorry.

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“SSH Mastery 2/e” copyedits back

My copyeditor returned the corrected manuscript for “SSH Mastery, 2nd Edition” to me last night. You should be able to buy the book within a few weeks.

In unrelated news, the first draft of #mwlSecretBook is coming along nicely. It’ll be the shortest Mastery book I’ve ever written, but at some horrific moment in your professional career you’ll be desperately glad to have it.

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MWL’s 2017 Wrap-Up

It’s that time again. Time to reflect on my myriad personal failures in 2017.

The obvious place to start is my 2016 wrap-up post, where I listed goals for 2017. As usual, these goals were wildly delusional.

The short answer is, my iron was back up to normal. My writing speed wasn’t, though. I’d lost too much general health, and needed hard exercise to recover it. Yes, writing requires physical endurance. Maintaining that level of concentration for several hours a day demands a certain level of blood flow to the brain. I could have faked it in a day job, but when self-employed as an artist? Not so much.

Then there’s travel. I did my usual BSDCan trip, plus two educational trips to Lincoln City, Oregon. The current political mayhem convinced me that if I wanted to hit EuroBSDCon any time in the next few years, I should do it in the very near future. So I went to Paris, where I promptly got pickpocketed. (Thankfully, they didn’t get my passport.) I was actively writing the third edition of Absolute FreeBSD, so I visited BSDCam in Cambridge to get the latest information and a sense of where FreeBSD was going. I also did weekends at Kansas LinuxFest (because they asked and paid for my trip) and Penguicon.

(Because people will ask: why EuroBSDCon and not AsiaBSDCon? A six-hour transatlantic flight requires that I take a substantial dose of heavy-grade tranquilizers. I’m incapable of making intelligent decisions while on those drugs, or for several hours afterward. They don’t last long enough for twelve-hour flight to Japan, so I need to be accompanied by someone qualified to tell me when I need to take the next dose partway through the flight. This isn’t a predetermined time that I can set an alarm for; it depends on how the clonazepam affects me at those altitudes. A drug overdose while flying over the North Pole would be bad. When I can arrange that qualified companion, I’ll make the trip.)

I need most of the preceding week to prepare for long trips. I need the following week to recover from time shifts and general exhaustion. Additionally, I have to hoard people juice for a few weeks beforehand so I can deal with folks during these expeditions. Travel disrupts my dojo time as well, which impacts my health.

Taken as a whole: I didn’t get nearly as much done as I hoped.

Here’s my complete output of big books.

Or, everything I put out: one novel, one tech book, one story, and one novella.

I wrote more stories, but Kris Rusch bludgeoned me into submitting them to trad markets. (The woman is a brute, I tell you. Cross her at your peril.)

Among my 2017 titles, my fiction outsold the tech books. No, not Prohibition Orcs–all four of the people who buy those love them, but the sales tell me I’ve done something wrong with those tales.

My cozy mystery git commit murder outsold Relayd and Httpd Mastery.

But what outdid them both, as well as most of my older books? What title utterly dominated my sales for the last quarter of the year? It was of course, my open source software political satire disguised as porn Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter.

I can’t believe I just wrote that paragraph.

The good news is, once I recovered from EuroBSDCon, my writing got better.

I finished Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition and submitted it to the publisher.

I wrote the second edition of SSH Mastery (no link, because you can’t order it yet.)

I’m plowing through git sync murder, the sequel to git commit murder. I don’t get to see the new Star Wars movie until I finish GSM, so hopefully that’ll be this month.

All in all, I wrote 480,200 words in 2017. Most of that was after September. It’s annoyingly close to breaking half a million, but after 2016’s scandalous 195,700, I’ll take it.

One of the nice things about being an author is that most of your income is passive. You do the work, and the money trickles in for years afterwards. I had money coming in while I was out of commission. The bad news is, that income slowly drops. If I’m to stay an author instead of becoming a wage peasant, I have to schlep some books out PDQ. I can do it, provided I remain focused on production.

That slump is the big reason why I broke down and started a Patreon. It’s why I started taking sponsorships for tech books. You folks carried me through my health problems. I can’t thank you enough.

The fact that AF3e is trad published complicates the financial picture. I won’t see any money from that book until 2019. No, I’m not complaining–that’s just a fact of life, and I knew that going in. But it provides extra motivation for getting my butt in gear right off in 2018.

So 2018 will be my Year Of Making Words. The finest words, of course. Artisinal. Straight from Detroit, a third world city in America’s heartland.

So what’s on tap for 2018? What’s the plan?

  • BSDCan, Penguicon, and two educational trips to Lincoln City, Oregon. That’s it. Under no circumstances will I leave North America, sorry.
  • write 600,000 words, or 50,000 words a month.
  • Complete and release four tech books
    • SSH Mastery 2nd ed
    • FreeBSD Mastery: Jails (I suspect this will turn into two books, it’s a huge topic)
    • either Mastodon Mastery or Ansible for Legacy Systems.
    • #MWLSecretBook, which I can’t talk about until for now, for reasons which will become clear once the book comes out
  • Write the tech book I didn’t complete above, and release it if there’s time
  • Write four novels
    • git sync murder, a sequel to git commit murder
    • Bones Like Water, or Immortal Clay #3
    • Drinking Heavy Water, Montague Portal #5 or Aidan Redding #4
    • To Be Decided From a List of Candidates, All of Which I Really Want to Write
  • Be sufficiently flexible to kick Ray Percival in the head at BSDCan. A front kick will do, but I’m shooting for the high-flexibility side kick as a stretch goal.
  • Exercise enough to drop twenty pounds
  • Stay married while doing all of the above
  • Stay alive

Other than the last two, these are all deliberately fail-forward goals. If I only get three tech books done instead of four–hey, I’m ahead by three tech books! If I only drop ten pounds, that’s better than gaining ten. “Stay married” and “stay alive” aren’t fail-forward goals, but I have a good idea how to achieve them both.

This time next year, come back to see exactly how I failed!

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“SSH Mastery” 2nd ed tech reviewers wanted

Last night, I finished a first draft of the second edition of SSH Mastery. The book covers OpenSSH as a server and a client, and PuTTY as a client. There’s small updates throughout the book, plus some new topics–most notably, SSH certificates.

I’m looking for SSH mavens who’d be willing to review the manuscript before publication.

I’d need any comments back by 2 January 2018.

I’d like comments in plain text, with enough context that I can find the spot you’re talking about.

Interested? Drop me an email at mwl at mwl dot io.

If you’re a sponsor and want to be a tech reviewer–you already have a copy of the manuscript. Read it. Send me comments. You’ve already helped me a bunch, but I won’t turn down your thoughts.

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The first AF3e preorders

This morning, Google alerted me to a reputable site mentioning “Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition.”

To my shock, it’s a pre-order on Kobo.

[UPDATE: AF3e now has a web page, where I’ll be collecting pre-order links.]

I guess we have a release date now? And a price? Cool.

I expect other preorders to appear on other sites. No Starch will have a page for their combined print/ebook soon, as well as their early access program.

But as a writer, I adore Kobo. You could do worse than to get it there.

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“SSH Mastery, 2nd Ed” News, Sponsorships, and Cover

SSH Mastery has been my best-selling title since I published it in 2012.

SSH Mastery has been on a five year mission to find and eradicate passwords. SSH has changed in the last five years. SSHv1 is no more, except where it is. A whole bunch of crypto algorithms are no longer in use, except when they are. We get jump hosts and centralized key management, except when we don’t.

It’s time for it to return to dock and get a refit. The new one will be cleaner! Brighter! Cover certificates! Capable of reaching Warp 5–no, wait, wrong story, never mind. But the cover will be pretty sweet. Here’s a rough draft.

I present to you: the Bloata Lisa!

SSH Mastery, 2nd Edition should be out before BSDCan 2018. If I do everything right, I’ll have two new tech books for folks in Ottawa.

This time, I’m soliciting print sponsors and ebook sponsors. As this is my best-selling Mastery book, I’ve raised the sponsorship prices a touch. Sponsors can expect readers to gloss over their names for years to come!

I must also concede that I’m hoping the sponsorships will help offset buying a block of ISBNs. I need ISBNs to produce the hardcover dust-covered sewn-spine print edition.

Oh, wait–did I not mention that? Sorry. Yes, hardcover. Stitched pages, not glued. A cloth cover and gold-stamped title beneath a glossy dust jacket.

Hardcovers are a little tricky, so I’m not promising I can accomplish that. Other authors manage it, though, so I’m not carving a new tunnel out of a mountain here.

A book needs 3-5 ISBNs, depending on the printing facilities I choose. As a US citizen I can buy 1 ISBN for $125, 10 for $295, 100 for $575, or 1000 for $1500. 100 ISBNs will last me for 20 books, but I know dang well that if I buy 100 I will regret it. The price of these arbitrary reference numbers will only increase, though, and I can easily see running out in a few years. So: I’m getting 1,000. For $1500. Ouch.

But hardcovers.

ISBNs will also let me take advantage of print-on-demand facilities in Europe, Australia, and post-Brexit UK. I’ll be able to fulfill wholesales orders for my books. It’s a reasonable business investment.