“DNSSec Mastery” in-progress version available

By popular demand (mainly on Twitter) I’ve made the work-in-progress version of DNSSec Mastery available on LeanPub.

This is an experiment. If it works well, I’ll do it again. If not… I won’t.

Why would you be interested?

    It’s cheap. I intend to sell the finished ebook for $9.99. The work-in-progress version is $7.99. I will continue to update the manuscript on LeanPub until it’s finished.
    Once the manuscript is complete, I’ll raise the LeanPub price to $9.99 to match other vendors.
    If you want to provide feedback on an incomplete book, this is your chance.

Why would I do this?

    I can usually get subject matter experts to review a book. I have a real problem with getting non-experts to review a book before publication, however. Non-expert feedback is important — those are the people most likely to catch when I explain something poorly, as opposed to the experts who already understand what I’m writing about. I can only handle so much feedback, so I wind up picking a select group of volunteers based on their apparent enthusiasm for the book. Measuring by the results, either I am a poor judge of enthusiasm or enthusiasm is the wrong measurement. This method might work better.
    I get paid earlier. That’s always nice.
    I want feedback from people trying to use it.

    Do I care what you do? No.

    In the long run, sales made via Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, or other ebookstores are better for my career. I’m expecting that only my most hardcore fans will buy the book early. If you’re a hardcore fan, but want to wait for the release of an actual book to buy it, I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t buy an incomplete book.

    But it’s here if you want it.

Any interest in early drafts?

I have the DNSSec book about a third done, which isn’t bad for spending a week in the hospital this month, and am looking at various publication options. Once the book is finished it’ll be available in print, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and hopefully iTunes. But I have an option for before the book is complete. LeanPub allows authors to upload works in progress, and update them as the work proceeds.

I’m pondering something like this:

  • Offer the incomplete book on LeanPub at, say, a 20% discount. Those of you who want to see it can, and those of you who want to send feedback can.
  • Update the book on LeanPub as I write.
  • When the book is finished, upload the final manuscript to all ebook platforms. Raise the LeanPub price to match. If you bought it earlier, you still get access, of course.
  • If you follow my blog, you’re probably a fan. I have no problem giving a discount to people interested enough in my work to follow my blog. And I might even get useful feedback.

    One of my goals is to reduce the amount of non-paying non-writing work I do. (Basically, I want to reduce my monthly recurring expenses, especially time expenses.) Updating a book as I write it isn’t a huge amount of work, but if nobody’s interested, I don’t want to bother.

    So: would anyone be interested? Or should I keep writing in my bubble?

    Absolute OpenBSD 2/e Haiku Contest Winners & status

    I offered a haiku contest for the new Absolute OpenBSD. Winners got their haiku in the book, credited to them, plus an ebook copy of the book, plus a physical copy if I get enough physical copies and few enough winners.

    More people entered than I expected, a pleasant surprise. I appreciate everyone’s efforts.

    The winners are:

    Chapter 1:
    Josh Grosse: “Mailing lists are rough / Homework is mandatory / Love it or leave it”

    Chapter 3:
    Josh again, with “Straightforward questions. / Will you take the default prompts? / Think before you choose”

    Chapter 7:
    Ludovic Simpson, with “the root of all evil/ is never far from your touch / sudo saves your life”

    Chapter 12:
    Justin Sherrill, with: “My tunnel is now up/ I can do IPv6 / Me and three others” (needed slight edit for syllable count)

    Chapter 16:
    Josh Grosse again, with “Working behind scenes / taking care of vital things / the daemon is here”

    So, that’s three winners. I can swing three paper books.

    I had a lot of competition for certain chapters, others less so. Sending a network chapter haiku meant you went up against everyone, where submitting a haiku on the system maintenance chapter means you only went up against me.

    How did Josh get so many? Two ways. One, he submitted a haiku for every chapter. Two, I believe he was already familiar with haiku, and has read some of the classics. (Twitter doesn’t let me search old tweets easily, so I can’t be certain of that, but I’m pretty sure he’s the one I’m thinking of.) Josh actually inspired me to hold the contest with his Chapter 1 haiku.

    So, now that the haiku are ready, where is the book?

    Chapters 0-22 have gone through content editing. Two chapters remain.
    Chapters 0-17 have gone through tech edit.
    Chapters 0-14 have gone through copy edit.
    Chapters 1-6 have come back to me from layout. I have initial galleys to correct. They look really really nice — NSP always does a fabulous job producing books.

    The layout folks haven’t gotten the haiku yet, but needed to have something in that space. When I opened the draft I found:

    Here, a placeholder
    For a haiku still to come
    Replace at pages.

    The No Starch folks get it.

    2013 Projects and 2012 Errata

    When you set goals for a year, you need to tell people about them. The potential embarrassment of having to admit failure helps you complete the goals. With that in mind, here are my goals for 2013:

    1) I will do three short technology books through my private label (aka “self-publish”). The first, on DNSSec, is underway. Some text exists, and I’m making copious use of scratch paper and whiteboards to figure out how to explain KSKs, ZSK, and the signature and key lifecycle in a coherent manner. (If you happen to have a good resource for this, please feel free to point me at it in the comments.)

    2) I will write & self-publish one novel. If I write nothing but nonfiction, my brain freezes up and the tech books become unreadable. If I’m going to write fiction anyway, I might as well release it. Attempting to traditionally publish a novel takes more time and energy than writing a book and will probably fail, so I prefer to spend that T&E writing. The odds of the book succeeding are negligible either way, so I’d prefer to do so in the least expensive manner.

    3) If I accomplish both of these early enough, I will continue writing. I will indulge myself in trying something that’s “just crazy enough to work,” like, say, “dc(1) Mastery” or “netstat Mastery.”

    Now here’s a leftover from 2012:

    Richard Bejtlich has reviewed hundreds and hundreds of technology books over the last ten years. For a time, he was one of Amazon’s Top 100 reviewers. Each year he posts a list of the best books he’s read, and gives one book the “Best Book Bejtlich Read” (BBBR) award. The award and $5 will get me a nice gelato.

    I’ve been on the top 10 list before, in 2007, for Absolute FreeBSD, and 2006 for PGP & GPG.

    2012’s BBBR went to (drumroll): SSH Mastery.

    This comes with some caveats, mind you. Bejtlich read and reviewed only one tech book in 2012, and this is his final BBBR award. I had no competition. But I’m okay with that.

    Bejtlich no longer reviews tech books, which I personally find disappointing. (I mean, how can I not like reviews that start start off with The master writes again? That’s the sort of thing I bookmark for those nights I get really depressed and start contemplating a shot of whiskey and a small handgun.)

    Life changes, however, and he’s working in other areas now, so: Richard, so long, and thanks for all the fish. I’m still putting that last quote on the cover of the DNSSec book, though.

    Absolute OpenBSD pre-orders now available

    No Starch Press now has pre-orders for new Absolute OpenBSD. Order direct from the publisher, and get both the ebook and the paper for one price. If you use the coupon code ILUVMICHAEL you’ll get a discount, and I get a commission on the sale. (Bolded 20130207 because more than one person has said they missed that line.) If you use another coupon code, I still get paid, but not as much. I’m not deeply concerned which way you buy it, so long as you buy it.

    Here’s the cover of the new edition. It incorporates art from the first edition, plus a new background.AO2e Cover

    On a vaguely related note, I recently saw a link to my blog from a Chinese Unix users message board. Curious, I asked Google Translate what it said. It’s a discussion of the new book, which is awesome. Slightly worrying, though, is that in the translation they repeatedly refer to me as “Great God Lucas” or some variant thereof. I’m hoping that this is an artifact of translation, or some cultural thing I was previously unaware of.

    Otherwise, it would seem that I have a cult of worshippers in China, and that I must learn Chinese in order to issue my commands.

    Even more tangentially, links within a translated page take you to a translated version of that page. That’s pretty cool.

    Next Nonfiction Book

    I’ve made it a practice to not announce book topics or titles until the book is well underway. Writing a big book takes not less than a year (Absolute FreeBSD) and up to three years (Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed). Once I hand in the completed first draft to the publisher, there’s editing, tech edits, copyedit, page layout, and so on. It’s a few months to get the book into production.

    Delaying the announcement also gives me the chance to determine if the book is realistic. I’ve made no secret that I write about topics that I’m not qualified to cover. I’ve had more than one tech book that I’ve started, only to discover three chapters in that I am so not the person to write this book. Delaying announcing the topic gives me a chance to back out without anybody knowing.

    I’m trying something a little different this time. My next book will be published by Tilted Windmill Press (my private label) and much smaller than my BSD tomes. I have an outline. I’ve done the reading. My educational lab work is done (meaning that my rate of screaming “Why isn’t this working?” has dropped from thrice hourly to twice daily). And I’m doing a fairly wide variety of work with the topic in the next six months.

    The next book is on (drum roll please): DNSSec. Blame Richard Bejtlich. (I wish I could find the tweet in question, but seriously, how am I supposed to resist him declaring “You’re our only hope?” Flattery will get you anywhere. Especially if you’ve given me enough cover quote copy to last the rest of my career.)

    Writing the book concurrently with implementing DNSSec across great big piles of domains with multiple registrars should give me all sorts of problems to write about, and give my readers more benefit from my real-world pain.

    I know a lot of people don’t like DNSSec, have cogent arguments why DNSSec is poo, and really wish it would go away. They take me writing a book about it as a refutation of their arguments. It’s not. But DNSSec is here. It’s the standard. We’ve got to deal with it. And the supporting software has improved to the point where DNSSec can be implemented by the typical overworked sysadmin, rather than only crypto fans.

    DNSSec also gets you things like SSHFP records and vendor-free SSL certificates. The former is convenient. The latter will eliminate any excuse for unencrypted communications.

    Why announce this ahead of time? For one, you’ll probably see me griping about random pieces of DNSSec boneheadedness on Twitter. The savvy will be able to guess. Announcing the book will help keep my nonfiction writing focused. It’s still possible that someone will rush a book into print ahead of me, but the shorter cycle of independent publishing reduces that risk. The audience and community reaction to SSH Mastery is also encouraging; I know that if I write a good book, my readers will tell others about it, regardless of the publisher. If someone beats me to print, my readers will still support me.

    And if I write a crap book, it deserves to fail.

    (As an aside: having readers who tell their friends and co-workers about my books is freaking awesome. I could not publish books if you didn’t support my work. Thank you.)

    Ideally, I’ll have this book out for BSDCan 2013. Tilted Windmill Press is the BSDCan T-shirt sponsor, so having a book out for the conference would be a good idea.

    More questions? Too bad. That’s all I know right now. Except that now that I’ve set and announced a goal, my life will go horribly askew specifically to delay me.

    1st draft of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Ed. complete

    Last night, I finished the first draft of the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD.

    This is the longest book I’ve ever written (23 chapters). It’s taken longer than any other nonfiction book (3 years). Now that a first draft exists, I can state with some confidence that the book will be out about next spring-ish.

    As a first draft exists, if I get trampled by a rabid caribou between now and then, the book will still come out.

    This weekend is the first time in years that I will have had no work to do on the book. (Unless Henning sends me corrections on the few chapters he has left.) I plan to gaze blankly into space for several hours.

    Absolute OpenBSD 2nd Edition status, 15 November 2012

    Chapters 1-22 are written. Only chapter 23 remains.

    The first 23 chapters are either in preliminary tech review (Henning Brauer), editing (No Starch Press), technical review (Peter Hansteen), or copyediting (No Starch Press). And every time any one of those folks are done, the chapter comes back to me for rewrites. Which is as it should be, of course… unlike some publishers, NSP gives me every chance to improve the book, as opposed to having some unpaid intern with a degree in medieval lit “fix” the text.

    One chapter to go. Back to writing…

    Amazon Author Rank vs Writers

    Amazon recently introduced Author Rank, where they list authors in order of popularity. I’ve had a lot of discussions about this feature and what it means to writers.

    Amazon provides a surprising number of features for authors. Their Author Central system lets me see how many of which book sold, and where, over a given time period. There’s a neat little app that shows where in the country my books sold, according to Bookscan data. Bookscan data might not be complete, but it’s more information than my twice yearly No Starch royalty statements. I know that in the last four weeks, five of my NSP books sold in the SF-Oakland-San Jose area, and 4 in Washington, DC. That’s interesting, and for a tech author those sales numbers are not too shabby.

    I choose the word “interesting” carefully. It’s interesting. But it’s not exactly useful. If these geographic sales charts show that I was consistently selling quite well in Amarillo, Texas, I might be inclined to see what’s going on down there. But the sales basically hit exactly where I expect: Silicon Valley, Washington DC, RTP, NYC, with others trailing.

    An author can spend hours trawling through his sales data this way. It’s interesting, but: this data doesn’t help you sell books. It makes sense that you’d kill a couple hours the first time you get the data, but as an ongoing thing, it just takes up time. You’d be better off writing.

    Author Central also gives graphs of how your books as a whole, or all your books, sell over time.

    sales graph

    Looking at this, I might think “Wow. What did I do the week of March 7, 2011? Why did that book do so well that week? And how can I repeat this?” The answer is, I didn’t do anything. This sales spike had nothing to do with me. I wrote a good book. Someone ordered a bunch of copies, perhaps for a test, perhaps for their company, or perhaps because the paper the book is printed on is thin and soft. All I can do is be appreciative of “the folks who bought my book,” whoever they are.

    The more insidious question would be: “why have my sales dropped since then?” I have an easy answer. My print sales have dropped, but my ebook sales have increased. Also, technology books have a lifespan. I’m pleasantly stunned that the five-year-old Absolute FreeBSD is still selling this well, but I have no right to expect this trend to continue.

    It’s conceivable that I might find a use for this data. If my books consistently sell well in Amarillo, a place not known for its high tech business, I’d probably want to investigate and see what’s happening down there. Perhaps I would somehow use Amarillo in a new book, to give a nod to that readership. But the data fits my expectations, so it won’t change anything I do.

    Also, this graph contains data. X number of book Y sold in Week Z. Those are real numbers. Not terribly useful, but interesting.

    Now consider the Amazon Author Rank graph.

    rank graph

    On October 5th, I was the #11,117th most popular author on Amazon. Think about that for a moment.

    What is popularity? How is it calculated? What is that supposed to mean? Is that an average based on the sales of all of my books, or my sales in aggregate? How are authors ranked? Without this kind of knowledge, this chart isn’t data. It’s an arbitrary rank, no better than Klout. I’d actually find my Scalzi Number more useful; I know how that’s calculated, and hence could derive a shallow meaning from it.

    This number will cause an author some kind of emotional reaction. Maybe they’re disappointed that 11,116 authors are more popular than them. Maybe they’re thrilled that hundreds of thousands of authors are less popular than them. Either way, this reaction does not help an author with their craft.

    Ranking authors by some unknown popularity algorithm? It’s like high school all over again, and just as meaningful.

    When this feature just came out, I exchanged tweets with other authors about it. Chris Sanders, author of Practical Packet Analysis, shared with the world that his author rank was 9425, a few thousand higher than mine.

    I agree that his Practical Packet Analysis is a good book. But what am I to draw from him having a higher Amazon rank than I do?

    I write the books I write. My Network Flow Analysis is the best book I can create on netflow. PPA is the best book Chris could write about Wireshark. Comparing them isn’t really possible: they’re different topics, different audiences, and completely different books. Even though both are books about networking, they are utterly different in purpose, execution, and readership.

    And what does the difference mean? Does his one book sell more copies than all of my books compared together sell less than his? Could be. Even if his books outsell mine twenty-five to one, does it matter to me?

    One of the very worst things an author can do is start comparing himself to other authors. That way lies despair and heartbreak. If I measured my success against Dean Koontz or James Patterson, or even Richard Stevens, I’d give up writing altogether. Because my books aren’t their books, my audience isn’t their audience, and my career is not their career. I write the best books I can. And my audience finds them useful enough to buy them. That’s enough.

    You want to be a more popular author? Write the best books you can. Continuously work to improve your craft. Become a better author, and readers will come. Don’t get involved in high-school popularity contests, especially ones that offer no benefit to your career, your craft, or your ego.

    Personally, I’m going to ignore Author Rank. I see no use for it. The best thing you can do is shut up and write.

    And lest someone gets the wrong idea, I like Chris. If I get to Charleston, I plan to look him up and see if he’s free for lunch. I’m sure he knows where to get good barbeque. Mind you, he can pay for it. He’s the big-name popular author, after all.

    Hey, maybe Author Rank isn’t completely useless…

    Get Your Haiku Published in the new “Absolute OpenBSD”

    Something weird happened as I worked on the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD: people started sending me haiku. The first edition included a haiku at the beginning of each chapter, something apropos to the topic.

    TCP/IP
    Learn how it fits together
    You cannot escape

    I reviewed the old book before outlining the new version, and the haiku made me wince. They’re mediocre at best. I considered dropping them from the new edition, or perhaps replacing them with quotes on trust, but an informal Twitter poll came out overwhelmingly in favor of the haiku. This demonstrates that computing professionals have lousy taste in poetry, or that an author is permitted no opinion on the quality of his own work. Or both.

    Frankly, the haiku my fans send are better than the ones I write. Some of mine are okay, but they can’t compete with someone else’s inspiration.

    So, here’s the deal:

    You’ll find the outline for the second edition in my September status blog post. Each chapter needs a haiku.

    Post your English-language haiku here, along with valid contact information and your name as you’d like to be credited. If your haiku is better than what I have for that chapter, I’ll use yours instead of mine. By posting your haiku here, you give me permission to use it in the book. Winners will be selected by me, at my sole discretion, based on whatever criteria I feel like using at the time. Your best bet is to amuse me.

    If you don’t want to post your haiku, you can email it to me. Use the subject of “ao2e haiku” to avoid the Horrible Black Void that awaits most email I receive.

    What is a haiku? Real haiku are in Japanese. I can’t use real haiku — I can’t even read real haiku. For my purposes, a haiku has:

  • 5-syllable first line, 7-syllable second line, 5-syllable third line
  • A season word (i.e., summer, snow, etc)
  • A comparison
  • You might note that my leading haiku breaks two of these three rules. It amuses me, however, which is more important than any other characteristic. But if you can follow all three rules in a haiku about packet filtering, I’ll be slightly impressed.

    Both entries and attributions must be PG-rated. As in, no obscenity. Sorry, folks, I know that obscenity is a staple in sysadmin circles, but AO2e is supposed to be a clean family book.

    I’m not limiting entries per person, but I can say that if you flood me with dozens of mediocre haiku I’ll probably miss the the one awesome one you do post. (“Oh, it’s him again. Sigh.”)

    So, what’s in it for you?

    Selected haiku will appear at chapter headings in the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD, with attribution. This is your chance at eternal fame. Selected haiku-ists will get an ebook of the finished book. If I can swing a sufficient number of physical copies, I’ll give those out as well. Depends on how many winners and how many copies I get.

    Competition will remain open until I finish the first draft of the book. I’m writing frantically, hoping to get a first draft done by mid-November. If I make that deadline, the book can exist for BSDCan 2013. That would be awesome. Can I make that deadline? Dunno. I’m holding the contradictory ideas “no, that’s impossible” and “sure I can!” in my brain simultaneously.

    So, in closing:

    Lucas is lazy
    Your haiku makes him chortle?
    Get free electrons.