Category: Nonfiction Books

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.

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.

As I beaver away on the new Absolute OpenBSD book, I’m pondering options for what to do afterwards. Part of that pondering concerns the business aspect of publishing. And I want your opinion.

This blog post is about tech books — or, more generally, “highly researched non-entertainment nonfiction,” a category which includes but is not limited to technology books. I’m explicitly excluding fiction and entertainment nonfiction. I’m discussing books meant to help the reader make more money, or at least keep their job.

I’ve wanted to write about certain technologies for years, but there aren’t enough buyers to support a traditional publishing run. They’re topics that would appeal to a majority of my blog readers, but a few hundred readers just can’t support a traditionally-published book. If I self-publish on such topics, I would get more money per reader. This could make special-interest books sufficiently profitable for me to invest a year writing them.

My goal is to make “enough” money so that I feel it’s worth spending my evenings and weekends writing a book. The exact value of “enough” varies with the topic, how hard the book is to write and research, how much I have to spend to write the book, who I have to work with to write the book, and what exactly I gave up in favor of writing the book. (Yes, I’d like to make great big steaming HEAPS of money. But that’s not realistic.) To achieve this, I must set the price of a book such that the reader feels he’s getting fair value, but still puts “enough” money in my pocket.

The problem comes in the payments I receive on the book.

You’ve probably heard that Amazon pays 70% royalties on self-published ebooks. That’s not quite accurate. It pays 70% royalties on self-published ebooks with a retail price of $9.99 or less. Barnes & Noble has a similar policy (look under Pricing and Payment Terms). Smashwords has a more complex royalty system, because they feed multiple ebook vendors. Royalties on books bought directly from Smashwords are about 85%, but royalties through various platforms that they feed pay varying percentages up to certain ceilings. For example, Kobo pays 60% up to $12.99, and 38% above that.

Physical book pricing is simpler. I get a certain amount for sales through Amazon, and a lower amount for sales through third parties such as Barnes & Noble or indie bookstores. Those royalties don’t have artificial ceilings.

I have no problem giving an ebook retailer their fair cut for delivery. I don’t wish to waste my time building and maintaining an ebook store when I could be writing. But the royalty scheme used by the large ebook retailers is clearly aimed at novels.

Companies like Amazon and B&N want self-published novels to be priced under $10. But there’s a definite difference between a 100,000-word novel with a potential audience of millions and a 300,000-word technology book with a potential audience of hundreds.

I cannot afford to spend a year writing a book with 500 expected buyers and sell it for $9.99. The income is not “enough.” Once I raise the price over $9.99, however, my royalty is halved. To raise my income a penny, I must increase the ebook price to over $20.

Unfair? Probably. Unnecessary? I’d say so. But that’s the retailer’s business decision, and I cannot change it, waste my time griping about it, or go on a long rant about how companies X, Y, and Z are destroying all that is good and wholesome in the world. (They aren’t, by the way. But that’s a separate blog post.)

So, for the sake of a purely hypothetical business decision, let me make up some numbers and facts. The pedantic will note that I’m rounding everything to the nearest dollar, but I’m already making up my own numbers, so who cares?

Assume I want to write a hefty book about a hypothetical project, MaguffinBSD. This project will take a year, expenses are minimal, and I have friends, allies, and supporters in the community. I decide that $14,000 gross is “enough”. My research indicates that maybe 500 people will buy the book. (How do I get that number? The community is about 1/10th the size of FreeBSD’s, and Absolute FreeBSD sold about 5000 copies in the first three years, with a dwindling long tail thereafter.) Let’s also assume that the book is up to my usual standards; it’s readable, mostly free of really blatant errors, and so on.

500 customers to raise $14,000 means that I must extract $28 from each buyer.

Option 1: I set the ebook price at $80, and sell it at that price across all platforms. Per various terms of service, the ebook must be priced at least 20% cheaper than the physical book retail price, so the print book is $100. My profit on the physical book is much higher, but sales are much lower.

Option 2: I write four smaller books: “MaguffinBSD, vol 1: Base Configuration,” “vol. 2, services,” “vol. 3, ongoing support,” and “vol 4: stupid MaguffinBSD Tricks.” Each of these books is available at all ebook retailers. I price each at $9.99.

A “MaguffinBSD, vols 1-4” is available as a print book, with a consolidated index and Table of Contents.

The version that appears in print is available as an ebook via Smashwords, and only Smashwords. It would not go to the other ebook retailers fed by Smashwords. Where you would pay $39.96 to buy each individual volume, I could sell the compendium for $32.

People who want individual volumes have the option to get them. People who want the compendium can get it in any desired format.

Option 3: Kickstarter. I include this because someone’s going to suggest it. I don’t like kickstarting books. Yes, some people do it, but publishing is a business. If I ever hope to make a living at writing, I need to treat it as a business. You can apply this same reasoning to asking for donations.

Model 2 increases my expenses and production time. I must prepare one book five times, in three different formats. But I might pick up some extra readers who are only interested in one or two volumes of the set, so I’ll consider that a wash.

But my gut reaction to model 1 is: oh dear God, NO.

So, my question to you lot is: which model would you accept more? Which would be more offensive? Or should I give up on writing specialty tech books and start writing about Windows, Apple, and Linux?

Samiuela LV Taufa was kind enough to write a review of SSH Mastery. Thank you, sir!

For those who are wondering why I haven’t posted much lately: I’m beavering away at the new Absolute OpenBSD, getting ready for a summer writing workshop with Kris Rusch, trying to get an article together for BSD Magazine, and when my brain is too tired to put words together, assembling a print version of Vicious Redemption.

So yes, I’m working. You just can’t see any results yet.

There’s been a slow-burning furor over dishonesty in “creative nonfiction,” most recently in this Fact vs. Artistic License in Creative Nonfiction post. Now and then someone accuses me of making stuff up in my books. For the record, here’s the truth.

I lie. I make stuff up all the time. But not technical stuff.

One technique I use in each tech book is to create a narrator. The narrator is not me. I don’t actually blackmail coworkers, as the narrator of Network Flow Analysis recommends. The narrator’s role is to bring life to the material, point out possibilities that are difficult to expose in pure technical text, and try to jolt the reader into paying attention.

I don’t create the narrators beforehand. They evolve from the material. The narrator of AO2e is worryingly like forensic blood spatter analyst Dexter Morgan. I’m trying to change that, but he’s fighting back.

Of course, some things are true. The afterword for Absolute OpenBSD 2nd ed. is the true story of a really bad night. But I don’t have enough of those stories to color a book.

This technique works. It helps the reader pay attention. Some people even find reading my books enjoyable (for example, there’s this review that made me giggle madly). There are readers who hate my books for exactly this reason. But I’m not going to change my writing style to chase a readership.

If I’m giving instructions on how to fdisk and disklabel a hard drive, the information is as correct as I can make it. Facts are inviolate.

If it’s more personal, it might be true. It might be fictional. I am a writer, and am not to be trusted.

So don’t try to call me out on this. I know. I don’t care.

Yep, Cisco Routers for the Desperate and Absolute FreeBSD are 50% off when you buy through No Starch Press’s O’Reilly distributor.

And other books. By other authors. Most of whom are more awesome than I am, so I’m not going to mention any names. Like Peter Hansteen. Or Joe Kong. Or Tom Limoncelli. Or Chris Sanders. Because they sure don’t need the press.

This is part of the EFF’s Day Against DRM. Use the code DRMFREE to get 50% off ebooks via O’Reilly.

Go to the O’Reilly site for all the details.

For the record, my tech books are all DRM-free. (I have one short story with DRM on Amazon. It was the first story I put up. Amazon doesn’t allow you to change your DRM choice without removing and republishing the title. And I have two good reviews on that story, which I would lose if I did so. So I’m stuck. But you can get that story DRM-free on other sites.)

And how do I feel about doing this as part of a “GNU promotion”? Despite what a lot of people think, I have no objections to the GPL. I think it’s morally inferior to the BSD license. Sharing with the condition that people share back is generous. A pure gift is even better, however.