Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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Amazon gets it wrong

Amazon sends us Kindle owners an email every few days saying “You bought this and that, so we think you’ll like these items.” They’re right an annoying large portion of the time, but when they get it wrong they really blow it.

Like I'd buy any of these
Amazon Recommendation Failure

Okay, yes, the book of PF is pretty good. But I have a copy. And I actually paid cold hard cash for the FreeBSD Design & Implementation book, and waited in line to get it signed. Either of these would be excellent gifts for the BSD aficionado in your life, except that they probably already have them.

But the others? The author has never said a nice word about me. In fact, every time I get near him he calls me a lazy good-for-nothing who ought to be working harder, better, and smarter, eating less, and in general doing more for humanity. Flavored with a whole lot of really bad language. One of these days, I’m going to punch that bastard in the face.

The good news is, Amazon doesn’t know everything about us. Yet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy everything I need for the next month via my Amazon Prime subscription.

Happy holidays, everyone!

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Sudo Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery now at OpenBSD bookstore

The official OpenBSD bookstore now carries both DNSSEC Mastery and Sudo Mastery print. If you buy the print from them, you get the ebook as well. These books sell for list price, but sales support the OpenBSD Project.

I am not donating all my proceeds from these books to OpenBSD, however. I did that with SSH Mastery, because the OpenBSD guys kind of take it in the shorts with OpenSSH. One of my goals is to have the ability to make a living writing without needing survival tips like “There’s great cardboard boxes behind the appliance store” and “Get to Qdoba right after they close, because the night guy will give you a bag rather making you scrounge in the dumpster.” But the negotiations on this were pretty strange:

Me: Sorry, guys, but I have to charge a couple bucks for myself on this.

Them: No, you don’t. You charge us what you would charge any other direct order.

Me: Oh, I can do better than that for you.

Them: No, we want to pay what anyone else would pay.

Me: Really, a discount isn’t a problem.

Them: TAKE THE MONEY. DO NOT ANGER US.

Me: [gulp] As you command.

The end deal they got is better than what I charge Amazon. (Or, to be more accurate, it’s a better deal than the tithe Amazon extracts before condescending to carry my books.) If you want TWP books in bulk quantities, let me know.

And if your company uses OpenSSH, get them to donate something. OpenSSH has ridiculous market share, and the developers basically work for tips. You wouldn’t leave a restaurant after a fabulous meal without tipping the wait staff, would you? Then why would you do that with software?

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On asking me to write for you

[posted for later reference]

In the first eleven days of December 2013, I have received eight requests for me to write for a periodical such as a web site or a magazine. This is nice. I struggled for many years to get published. To have publishers knock on my door and ask for my work gives me a certain warm fuzzy feeling. They’re trying to fill in their 2014 editorial calendars, and want me to be part of it? That’s kind of cool.

There’s only one problem: they want to pay me with a subscription. The more generous ones offer advertising space. I address this in my FAQ, but it seems these people either don’t read the answer, don’t comprehend the answer, or think the answer doesn’t apply to them.

Here’s an explanation with more detail.

My writing time is completely occupied, either with work that I expect will return financial rewards or “writing of the heart” — projects that I really want to do, but that I accept will not pay.

Generally speaking, if you’re contacting me with a request to write for you, you expect to make money off of my writing. That makes this a business transaction. This means I expect to get paid an amount that is roughly equivalent to the amount I would make if I expend that amount of effort on other paying channels. A thousand-word article is almost certainly more than $50 of my time.

But it’s also important to not be a jerk. The world is a small place.

From now on, I’ll answer these requests with a form letter.

Hi,

Thanks for your interest.

At this time, I am completely occupied with paying writing work, so I cannot take your offer. But thanks for thinking of me.

Regards,
==ml

I’m not a total mercenary. I put a fair amount of technology content up in this blog, free for anyone who can use a search engine. But: I have a day job. My writing time is taken away from family and friends. I might choose to give up some of that time for someone. But that “someone” will be a person, not a business.

I know other people will write for these periodicals. Someone always will. But that’s their choice. I choose otherwise.

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Sudo Mastery print now at Amazon

You can now get a print Sudo Mastery from Amazon.

I have signed all of the Mastery books up for the Matchbook program. People who buy the print book from Amazon will soon be able to get the Kindle version for $2.99. It’s not an ideal print/ebook combo, but I’m not nearly well enough organized to ship out physical books directly.

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OpenBSD talk at Farmington Community Library 12 November 2013

I’ll be presenting about OpenBSD at !Michigan/usr/group, a Linux and UNIX user group, on Tuesday, 12 November 2013. The tentative title “OpenBSD for a Linux User Group,” covering the features and culture that make OpenBSD what it is. (Hint: it’s not security.)

These talks are always more fun when readers show up to heckle, throw rotten tomatoes, and question my morals and parentage.

If I have sufficient connectivity and nobody objects, I’ll try to do a Google Hangout for it. But you can’t throw rotten tomatoes over IP. Yet.

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“Sudo Mastery” print + ebook bundle via Amazon

I’ve mentioned this before in various forums and in passing, but it bears a small emphasis.

Some people want books in both ebook and print. I’m not set up to do that, but Amazon is making that happen through their Matchbook program. The general idea is that if you bought a book in paper, you can get the ebook version at a steep discount.

I’ve put both existing Mastery paperbacks in the program. If you’ve bought the print book from Amazon, you can get the electronic version for $2.99. When Sudo Mastery hits paperback, it’ll be included.

Why $2.99?

I feel the fair price for the combo is about $20. The list price on the print books is $20, but Amazon knocks a few bucks off based on their own inscrutable algorithms. I’ve seen SSH Mastery as low as $14 and as high as $18.

There’s also the Amazon royalty on Kindle books. Ebooks priced less than $2.99 pay me a 35% royalty. Ebooks priced at $2.99 and up pay 70% royalties. If I price the Matchbook versions at $2.99, I make about $2.00 per sale. If I price them at $1.99 (the next lower option), I make about $0.66/sale. Ouch. Either way, that’s a lot of sales to pay the mortgage.

All this is a long-winded way of saying:

If you want both the print and ebook versions of Sudo Mastery, wait until the print version comes out. You’ll be able to get both for about $20, more or less.

I never buy my print books through Amazon’s retail channel — I buy them in bulk, from their CreateSpace arm. I would really like confirmation that folks who bought a print Mastery book from Amazon can get the ebook at a discount. If you bought a print Mastery, please take a look at Amazon. See if you can get the Matchbook deal and let me know in the comments here.

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“Sudo Mastery” ebook widely available, and acknowledgements

At long last, Sudo Mastery is now available in ebook form on most platforms.

You can get it at my bookstore or Amazon.

It’s also available at Smashwords, but Smashwords doesn’t support footnotes. They do support a workaround that puts all footnotes together at the end of a chapter or the end of the book, but it’ll take some work on my part to make that happen.

It’s not at Barnes & Noble yet, because their new Nook Press application completely mangled the book’s formatting. As I sell an average of one book a month through B&N, I’m seriously considering not having the book there.

Print will come some time in November.

I appreciate all the people who helped me write this book. So, in that spirit, here are the acknowledgements.

I want to thank the folks who reviewed the manuscript for Sudo Mastery before publication: Bryan Irvine, JR Aquino, Hugh Brown, and Avigdor Finkelstein. Special thanks are due to Todd Miller, the current primary developer of sudo, who was very patient and helpful when answering my daft questions.

While I appreciate my technical reviewers, no errors in this book are their fault. All errors are my responsibility. Mine, do you hear me? You reviewers want blame for errors? Go make your own.

XKCD fans should note that the author does not particularly enjoy sandwiches. However, Miod Vallat, currently exiled to France, would really like a sandwich with nice fresh bread, really good mustard, and low-carb ground glass and rusty nails. And Bryan Irvine would like a rueben.

This book was written while listening obsessively to Assemblage 23.

Now, to finish writing my big 2013 fiction project before the end of the year…

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Sudo Mastery off to copyeditor

I just shipped the tech-reviewed copy of Sudo Mastery off to the copyeditor. She’ll have it back to me in a few days, and the book will move into production immediately thereafter.

This means that the pre-order discount will expire soon. How soon is soon? It’s soon.

Now I’m off to work on one of my other 2013 goals. Thanks to my appendix’s untimely detonation at the beginning of the year and my Europe trip I won’t accomplish everything on that list, but that’s no reason to not get as many of them finished as possible.

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“Sudo Mastery” tech reviewers wanted

Thursday night, I finished the first draft of Sudo Mastery. Today, I went through the manuscript, removed my known tics, discovered a few more tics that needed killing, cleaned up bits and pieces, and now have a work ready for technical review.

Which is where you lot come in. I’m looking for people with sudo experience to read the book and tell me where I’ve screwed up. My screw-ups usually come in two flavors:

1) I’m technically wrong.
2) I use something in a way other people don’t
3) I don’t include something important, because I’ve never used it.

The goal of Sudo Mastery is not to get 100% of my readers to 100% sudo expertise, but instead to get 90% of my readers everything they will need. The remaining 10% will get a solid grounding in sudo and pointers on solving their particularly pernicious edge cases. The idea is roughly similar to my other Mastery books or Cisco Routers for the Desperate.

The contents of Sudo Mastery are:

  1. Introduction
  2. sudo and sudoers
  3. editing and testing sudoers
  4. lists and aliases
  5. options and defaults
  6. shell escapes, editors, and sudoers policies
  7. configuring sudo
  8. user environments versus sudo
  9. sudo for intrusion detection
  10. sudoers distribution and complex policies
  11. security policies in ldap
  12. logging & debugging
  13. authentication

Most of these chapters are short. And much of the writing needs rewriting. But there’s no point in rewriting until I know the content is technically correct.

If you know sudo, if you consider yourself a sudo master already, this is your chance to spread your wisdom. Read my general notes for tech reviewers, and email me at mwlucas at michael w lucas dotcom. (The W is vastly important… you might get a response from the domain without one, but it won’t be what you expected.)

I plan to send out manuscripts over the next week. I’m asking for people to return their comments on or before 5 October. I plan to revise the manuscript the week of 6 October and get it to the copyeditor before the 15th.

With anything resembling luck, the completed book will be available before Thanksgiving. I’d really like to have the holidays off this year.