Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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.

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    On Bogus Book Reviews

    There’s been a furor recently about authors faking reviews in one manner or another: Either by buying reviews, or by sock puppetry. As nobody can generate reams of morally-outraged words like offended writers, it’s created a pretty big buzz in the publishing world. Here’s my thoughts on these types of reviews. For brevity, I lump all of these reviews into a category I’m going to call “fake reviews.” It’s not strictly accurate, I know, but I can’t come up with a better phrase at the moment.

    I’m not outraged. I’ve expected this. Perhaps it’s my computer security experience, but any system that permits this kind of exploitation will be exploited. Publishing is no magic kingdom exempt from the rule of self-interest. Just because I’ve expected this, doesn’t mean I approve of it.

    Reviews are important. I depend on reviews for sales, and I depend on sales to write new books. Would I like hundreds of five-star reviews? Sure.

    Would I pay for them, or sock-puppet them? No.

    Purchasing reviews betrays a lack of confidence in your work. If your work is good, if it has an audience, that audience will find it. Eventually.

    Writing is a long game. You must have patience. In traditional publishing, a paperback book has about three months to find a readership. Today, with ebooks, online ordering, and print-on-demand, books can take years to find a readership. (My nonfiction books are different, mind you; one factor that goes into deciding if I should write a book is if I expect it to have at least a three-year lifespan. My books have considerably less time to find readers. Lucky novelist bastards.)

    The fact that I’m not willing to pay for good reviews means that I have to ask my readers for them. I walk a careful line between groveling for exposure and annoying my readers. So far, I seem to have erred on the side of not annoying my readers, but I’m OK with that. It’s better to get fewer reviews than alienate your readers.

    I send books to book reviewers. They want books to review, I want book reviews. It’s a fair trade.

    I can’t say that I would never buy a review. Never is a strong word. Purchasing a review from a reviewing business would be a business decision. But if I ever do buy reviews, they will be disclosed as such.

    On the other side of this coin:

    I occasionally review books, both on Blather and on Amazon. I frequently know the authors of these books. I don’t consider these reviews fake, but I do try to disclose my bias.

    If I review a book on this blog, it’s because I honestly think it’s awesome, or because it fills some desperate need and it’s “good enough,” or because it changed how I think about things. I review some books from No Starch Press, because they always ask me if I’m interested in their new titles. I don’t review all the books they send me. In part that’s because I’m lazy. In part it’s because I’m working on my own books. But I find the time to review the truly exceptionally awesome books they send me. (Which reminds me, I owe them a review on the Magna Guide to Linear Algebra.)

    I also review fiction books I really enjoy, but not as “Michael W Lucas, Famous-in-a-real-small-world Author.” Usually those go up under my family’s Kindle account. Do I know those authors? Some of them, sure. I’m a writer. I make friends with other writers. We sit around smoky rooms late at night, sipping absinthe and bemoaning how unfair life is to us artistic sorts. But most of my blog readers don’t really care that I think that Harry Connolly’s 20 Palaces books are unquestionably the best modern fantasy of the decade, and that everyone interested in that genre should purchase them all, immediately. You’re here for other reasons. (I have no idea what those reasons are, but they’re something about technology. Or writing. Something like that.)

    For example, I didn’t know Chris Sanders before reviewing Practical Packet Analysis. But we’ve exchanged emails several times since then, and if I ever get to his part of the world I’ll ask him if he wants to get barbeque. It’s called networking, and it makes your career go. But if he ruins the (purely hypothetical) third edition of his book, that connection won’t make me give him a five-star review. I’ll just quietly not review it.

    Same sort of thing Peter Hansteen and his Book of PF, although my chances of getting to Norway aren’t very good. And Norway isn’t noted for their barbeque. (What do they eat in Norway, anyway? From my observations at tech conferences, the answer seems to be “beer.”)

    I occasionally write reviews about books by writers I know. It’s a small world.

    If I write a review, in any genre of book, it’s because I honestly think a book is awesome. I’ll give that book 4-5 stars. I won’t give someone a 5-star review just because I’m their friend, however.

    If I read a book and I enjoy it, but it’s not awesome, I won’t review it. Just because a book doesn’t set fire to my brain doesn’t mean that book won’t speak to someone else. In computer book terms, just because a book is about Windows 7 doesn’t mean that it’s a bad book. It’s just not for me.

    Would I ever give a book a 1-star review? Sure. If a book is unprofessionally done, I’ll excoriate it. Sentences have these things called “verbs” and “nouns,” and are built with this thing called “grammar.” If a book completely fails to meet my standards for competent wordcraft, I feel free to label it a failure.

    But usually, when I get crap in my eyes I close them.

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    Absolute OpenBSD status, 9 Sep 2012

    Those who have been following my Twitter feed know most of this, but here’s the status on this book.

  • Chapters 0-10 have been sent to No Starch. They’ve done initial edits on 0-5. I’ve responded to those edits, so they’re now off for Hansteen’s tech review.
  • Chapters 11, 14, and 17 have been sent to Henning for informal review.
  • Chapters 12, 13, and 20 partially exist.
  • Other chapters are outlines, notes, fragments, script(1) sessions, etc.
  • Oh, and the Afterword exists. Mainly because it’s 90% stolen from my blog. But still, I can cross it off the list.

    Why are things written out of order? Depends on what I’m doing at the time. Also, some chapters can be written without Internet access. Otherwise, I write chapters in order.

    I believe I’ve chopped down the outline to where it needs to be for a book roughly the same size as Absolute FreeBSD. Chapter titles are subject to change. Heck, everything is subject to change.

    0: Introduction
    1: Community Support
    2: Installation Prep
    3: Installation Walk-Through
    4: Post-Install Setup
    5: Booting
    6: User Management
    7: Root, and how to avoid it
    8: Disks & Filesystems
    9: More Filesystems
    10: OpenBSD Security Features
    11: IPv4 & IPv6
    12: Network Connections
    13: Software Management
    14: /etc
    15: Maintenance
    16: Daemons (sensorsd, snmp, etc)
    17: Desktop OpenBSD (cwm, tmux, etc)
    18: Kernel Configuration
    19: Building Custom Kernels
    20: Upgrading
    21: Packet Filtering
    22: managing PF
    23: edges
    Afterword

    Trimming to this length hurt, but one of my critical design goals is to write a book small enough to hold in the bathtub. I might sometimes recommend books that exceed that limit, but they have to be freaking awesome books.

    One thing that helps is Peter Hansteen’s Book of PF. It didn’t exist when the first edition of AO came out, so I needed to do pretty exhaustive coverage into PF. My coverage of primordial PF took three chapters in the first edition, and PF and family has roughly doubled its features since then. He does an excellent deep dive into PF, so I can reduce those chapters.

    I’ve talked about word count before, but I need to stop doing that. The book has flailed around enough that the number of words I write isn’t exactly useful. I wrote 7,000 anti-words on Chapter 17 before sending it to Henning, for example.

    On the plus side, the AO2e narrator now sounds a little less Dexter Morgan and a little more BOFH. That’s probably a good thing.

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    BSDTalk #218, featuring… Me!

    Will Beckman interviewed me at BSDCan. That interview is now available as BSDTalk #218.

    Some of the issues I mention in the podcast are now solved. SSH Mastery is easily available in print in Europe. (You want the print copy as well as the ebook. You know you do.)

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    Writing New Editions

    This post is, “how is the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD coming along?” with a bit of musing on the craft of writing a second edition added in.

    I’m always shocked by the number of systems administrators ignorant of networking basics. I don’t care that they don’t know how to choose between BGP and OSPF, or that they don’t know what those acronyms stand for. That’s not relevant to most servers. But lots of them don’t know what an IP address is, or how to recognize a valid netmask, or the difference between TCP and UDP, or why there’s an /etc/protocols file. Any sysadmin who doesn’t know these things is still an amateur. My goal in writing a book is to drag people a little closer to professional.

    So, I include a chapter on networking basics in my introductory sysadmin texts, just like I include chapters on user management.

    I have a chapter on IPv4 networking in three published books. I’m writing this same chapter for the fourth time. I can’t just copy-and-paste from earlier editions. First, that would be rude. Second, my understanding of TCP/IP has changed in the last ten years, and that changes how I approach the material.

    But I can use the earlier efforts as models. Some text I can almost reuse, because it’s still the best way I know of to explain the specific topic. This will be the third time I use the dinner table analogy, for example. I still pass it through my brain to my keyboard, however, freeing myself to tweak a few words in the process.

    The most recent IPv4 chapter I wrote was for Absolute FreeBSD. In this incarnation, the chapter included a couple pages of basic binary and hexadecimal math. I looked at this, and thought “Why did I cover this? Doesn’t everybody know it?”

    Then I thought back, and realized that I included those pages because at the time I wrote the book, I spent a fair amount of energy teaching that material to my coworkers.

    I flipped back through the earlier editions of these books. Each book had one or more sections that I included because coworkers didn’t know it.

    At the moment, I’m not responsible for teaching anyone anything. I have no tech minions, and am molding nobody. It’s definitely changed my mind about what topics I cover. I suspect that the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD will contain less basic material. I’m definitely assuming that you know how to do binary and hexadecimal math, for one thing. This leaves room for more advanced topics.

    My conclusion seems to be: if you find the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD moves too fast, I suggest you get a copy of Absolute FreeBSD as well, or reread the one you have.

    (Mind you, the no-minions-to-mold is about to change. After two years of minion-free peace, I have been given a minion to mold. He’s on vacation at the moment, and has no idea what awaits him on his return. I have no desire to ruin his last few days of freedom, so we’re waiting for his first day back to tell him what he’s been sentenced to. The poor bastard.)

    So, where am I on the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD?

    If you want the minutia of my progress, search for the #ao2e hashtag on Twitter. But at a larger level, I’m writing the chapter on IPv4.

    This seems to be about 40% through the first draft of the book. The manuscript has proceeded quickly, now that I’m not moving into a house that needs work to be habitable. I’m hoping that this pace continues.

    I’ve received initial feedback on chapters 1-8 from Henning Brauer. Then the chapters go to Nathan Houle, my editor at No Starch Press, then back to me for corrections and discussion. Then they go to Peter Hansteen for formal technical review. Then back to me for correction. Then copyedit, back to me for correction, page layout, and back to me for correction.

    So, it’s not 40% done. The first draft is the hardest part, however. Doing the math, though, I see that I’ve been through an IPv4 chapter at least twenty times, given all the cycles. No wonder writing it is causing me nausea and chest pain.

    The original outline calls for a book about 400,000 words. For reference, Absolute FreeBSD is close to 300,000 words. This is too dang long. One of my goals is that my books be small enough to read in the bathtub.

    As SSH Mastery was successful, I have a resolution. I think I’ve figured out topics I can extract from the book and publish separately, without damaging the integrity of the book or its usefulness. Not everybody needs to know about, say, OpenBSD’s wireless features, but it’s certainly a topic worth covering. I can do small books on those topics and publish them as an aside, making the content available to interested readers. Assuming that the reader is a competent OpenBSD sysadmin (e.g., they’ve read Absolute OpenBSD 2nd ed or have an equivalent combination of education and experience) will let me do these books almost as easily as if it was integrated into the book. And my initial market research indicates that my readers are amenable to smaller, single-topic books.

    In summary: book is underway. More books coming.

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    I’m in BSD Magazine

    The July 2012 issue of BSD Magazine has an article by yours truly: freebsd-update as an Intrusion Detection System.

    It also has a code to get you 30% off of Absolute FreeBSD at No Starch Press. If you don’t have your copy of this book, here’s your chance.

    It has other good articles too. None as awe-inspiring as mine, of course, but definitely worth a read.