Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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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.

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First draft of “Sudo Mastery” complete

I just typed the last words of the first draft of Sudo Mastery.

The completed first draft is available for early purchasers. As it’s no longer an incomplete draft, I’ve raised the early purchase price to $8.99. That’s more than the really early buyers paid, but less than the final price. (Selling the early drafts from my own bookstore lets me experiment, so I’m ratcheting up the price to see what happens.)

What happens now?

First, I take a couple days and do something else. Anything else. This is vital, as I need some distance from the manuscript. I know it’s a big steaming pile of bodily waste, sure. But I need to be able to see the details of how, exactly, that pile is arranged.

Then: go over the manuscript from beginning to end, looking for obvious technical and writing problems.

Then spellcheck the book. (The purpose of an as-you-type spellchecker is to slow down the writing process. Note that a grammar checker never enters into this process.)

Then solicit technical reviewers. (Don’t volunteer yet: if you do, I’ll put you on my list of people who can’t follow directions.)

Then I go to EuroBSDCon. When I return, I integrate the comments into the book in another round of testing and fact-checking and rewriting.

Off to copyeditor.

Fix what the copyeditor finds.

Then the book comes out.

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Wanted: interesting sudoers

I’ve learned a lot about sudo while writing Sudo Mastery. One of the things I’ve learned is that many, many people have insecure sudo policies. Most tutorials, mine included, leave holes people who understand sudo can get through. I’ve also learned that many people are using sudo much more cleverly than I previously thought.

Sudo is perhaps the most widely used access control tool for Unix-like systems. I’d like this book to be accurate and useful. As such, I have a favor to ask my readers:

If you’re using sudo in production, and your sudoers file is pleasant and elegant, or it cleverly solves an tricky access problem, or it’s a horrible ghastly nightmare but you don’t know any other way to express the policy, I’d like you to send me a sanitized copy of your sudoers file.

I’m especially interested in “default deny” policies, where the word ALL doesn’t appear in the command field.

Don’t include real usernames or IP addresses.

And don’t send me anything you’re uncomfortable sharing.

I won’t cut-and-paste your policies, and anything I use will be further anonymized. But the world of sudo is huge, and there’s very little really good examples out there. The more good policies I read, the better the book will be.

You can email them to me at mwlucas at michael w lucas dotcom. Please use the word sudoers in the subject.

Thank you for your help.