Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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Print pre-order for “SSH Mastery” now available

The OpenBSD folks have made pre-orders available for SSH Mastery.

I’m giving the books to the OpenBSD Project at cost, and they’re selling them at list as a fund-raiser. I make nothing on books ordered through OpenBSD, but the money will go to further OpenBSD, OpenSSH, PF, and who knows what else. I’m going to imagine that the money will support the annual developer barbeque, as buying beer is more fun than buying hardware.

I will make a decent profit on books sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and brick-and-mortar stores. (Yes, I can get books into brick-and-mortar stores, with a bit of luck, a smidgeon of effort, and just a few ounces of blackmail.) I figure it’ll even out; the general public will order from Amazon.

When will the books arrive? Once the proofs are approved, I’ll order the OpenBSD books before I approve sale through Amazon. I don’t know when that is yet, but believe me, I want this book out there.

So, if I make nothing on this, why do it? It’s a good way to support a widely-used project that has written software that makes my job easier. So order yours now!

Plus, I write about open-source software projects, preferably BSD-based ones. This means that I have to maintain good relationships with those projects. Not only am I a geek, I work at home. My usual social interactions consist of ignoring the threatening emails from the boss, the pet rats asking for treats, and the nagging phone calls from the social worker asking if I’ve taken my meds today. As you might guess, maintaining good relationships is not my strong point. If you have trouble keeping friends, try bribery. I hear it works a treat.

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“SSH Mastery” print status

Thursday, I received the first print proofs of SSH Mastery.

Initial impressions: the print version looks good. The photo doesn’t do the nice glossy cover and bright colors justice, but:

After careful inspection, though, I found a few errors. The interior images are not as sharp as I would like. Some of these I can’t really help: printouts of screenshots look like crap. But I’m more concerned about pixellation in diagrams and images.

Plus, there’s an extraneous colon on the back cover.

If I want this book to be taken seriously, it needs to look like a real book. So I’m getting the layout corrected and running another round of proofs. I suspect I’ll get the new proofs late next week. If those are OK, I will be able to open orders.

I’ve been working with Austin from the OpenBSD group to get their ordering up soon.

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January “SSH Mastery” sales, by the numbers

I’ve promised several authors to share the results of my self-publishing experiment with SSH Mastery. I don’t have complete data yet, but I do have sales numbers for January from Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords.

Some caveats here:

  • This includes only “SSH Mastery.” I have removed my fiction from the totals. (Fiction sales are considerably lower, but growing.)
  • February’s initial results are much lower than January’s. January’s sales are obviously to my “hard-core fans” and people close to the community.
  • My expenses aren’t yet totaled, as the print version isn’t available yet. I expect them to come in at roughly $3000. The majority of this expense is the class I took to learn how to self-pub properly, which is a one-time expenditure. A business person would argue that this expense doesn’t count, as it should be spread across multiple books. But as an author running a test project, I have to count this expense somewhere, so it’s attached to this book. Also, these expenses are only cash out of pocket; they assume my time is free.
  • On a related note, an accountant would probably find my reasoning naive. I already have two careers (writer and engineer), I’m not going to add a third.
  • I’m not going to regularly report sales numbers to the general public. I will say when I break even.

    • Before I published, I expected to make most of my sales through Amazon, then Barnes & Noble, and then Smashwords last. I had no idea of how many sales I would make, but I figured they’d be in that order. Let’s see how this compared to reality.

  • Amazon Kindle: 123 books sold (92 US, 12 UK, 14 DE, 2 FR, 1 IT, 2 ES), for a total of $810.27 USD at today’s exchange rates. (Amazon reports European royalties in euros or pounds.)
  • Barnes & Noble: 4 books sold, for $25.96 USD.
  • Smashwords: 76 books sold, for $607.65
  • Total: 202 books sold, for a total of $1443.88

    • Some interesting things here:

    I’m shocked at how low Barnes & Noble sales are. The book was available on B&N a couple days after Smashwords and Amazon, mainly because getting the book through B&N’s internal systems took longer. Apparently my readers don’t use the Nook.

    Smashwords sales as a proportion of total sales is much higher than I expected.

    Averaging the royalty per book is also interesting.

    Amazon: $6.58/sale
    Smashwords: $7.99/sale
    B&N: $6.49/sale

    You’ll hear lots of commentary about how Amazon offers a 70% royalty on ebooks. This has all sorts of exceptions and exclusions, where you’ll only get a 35% royalty. My effective average royalty at Amazon is about 65%, so that’s not bad.

    Barnes & Noble, at just under 65%, offers the worst net royalty.

    Smashwords: I love you. Just saying. My core audience really wants the book as PDF, and Smashwords offers PDF, epub, mobi, and all the other big ebook formats with one purchase. And they pay me the highest per-sale royalty. I still haven’t gotten the book through Meatgrinder into the other channels they feed, such as iBooks and Kobo. Once that happens, I expect to see their percentage rise. I wouldn’t be surprised if they overtake Amazon.

    The real lesson is: sell your work through all available channels. You can’t tell who will buy what from where.

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    New review of SSH Mastery, and print pre-order status

    There’s a new review of SSH Mastery over at DragonFlyBSD Digest. I’m delighted that Justin liked the book. (Mind you, I’m appalled that he’s actually reading and paying attention to the minutia I occasionally post here. But I’m delighted he liked the book.)

    On the pre-order front: Austin Hook just ordered 200 copies of SSH Mastery for the OpenBSD Project. He will be listing the book for pre-order “soon.” I’ve given them the greatest discount possible, and they’ll be selling the book for list price. Proceeds will go to support OpenBSD/OpenSSH development. I will fill Austin’s order at the first opportunity.

    When is that? When the book exists in finished form. I reviewed the print layout today, made some corrections, and sent them back to the layout person. If she doesn’t kill me outright, I’ll be able to order proofs in a few days. If the proofs show an error, I do another cycle. (Print pages look nothing like on-screen pages.) Once I approve the proofs, I can order books.

    A normal publisher (whatever that means) would have a scheduled print time. They’d push out the release date, and delay the book if necessary to fit that window. That gives them a known release date. Me, I’m not going to set a sufficiently-padded arbitrary date when I can get them sooner.

    And for those of you who wonder when I’m going to quit pushing my wares and post techie stuff again, I’ll have a post on DNSSEC deployment next week.

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    SSH Mastery now #2 best-seller on Smashwords

    Smashwords is an ebook retailer that sells books in ten different electronic formats in one purchase. If you want a book in .pdb for your Palm Pilot, in PDF for your laptop, and epub for your Nook, that’s where you go.

    I just saw this in their best-seller list.

    I’m at #2 site-wide, right behind the Fat Loss Bible.

    The implications are obvious: I must write a book for fat techies. I’ll make a fortune!

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    SSH Mastery Review from Peter Hansteen

    Peter has already read and reviewed SSH Mastery. While a few of my readers have been kind enough to post reviews on Amazon and Smashwords (which I very deeply appreciate), Peter’s is the first long review.

    And here I should confess something: The very existence of SSH Mastery is Peter’s fault.

    Peter will be doing the tech review of Absolute OpenBSD 2nd Edition. He looked over the outline and said “You need more SSH in here. You need SSH here, and here. More SSH love!” So, I listened to him. The SSH content overflowed the OpenBSD book from a planned 350K words to closer to 400K. I can’t comfortably read a 400K-word book. So, something had to give. And it was SSH.

    And to again answer what people keep emailing me and asking: yes, a print version is coming. Yes, I am writing AO2e. When I have dates, I will announce them.

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    SSH Mastery Round-Up

    I went to bed last night, satisfied that I had gotten SSH Mastery uploaded to the various ebook sites. I figured that I’d contact some people about doing reviews this weekend, maybe generate one or two sales. Awoke to discover ten copies sold while I slept. And I received a whole bunch of messages via Twitter, Facebook, and email. Rather than try to answer them all individually, I decided to answer here.

    If you’ve bought the book: thank you! Please consider leaving a review on your ebook site and/or Amazon, it would seriously help me out.

    SSH Mastery is currently available via Smashwords and Kindle, and Nook. The Nook version seems to be missing it’s cover, I’ll take that up with B&N once I post this.

    Want it in your preferred format? Permit me to direct you to Smashwords. Buy the book once, get it in any or all of ten different formats, from epub to PDF to old formats like PalmDoc and LRF. It doesn’t sync to your device, but you can read it anywhere, and it’s stored “In The Cloud (ooooh!)”. There is no DRM, on any version where I control DRM. SSH Mastery is only $9.99. If someone goes to the trouble to illicitly download a tightly-focused, task-specific tech book that’s less expensive than lunch, well, they suck. Please tell them that.

    Once Smashwords finishes digesting the book, they will feed it to iBooks, Kobo, and all the other online retailers. I have no insight into how long this will take. If you sight SSH Mastery on iBooks or Kobo, please let me know! Actually, I’m shocked that Smashwords was able to process the highly-formatted original document. Their Meatgrinder only takes Microsoft Word files, and my file was full of headers and in-document hyperlinks and text styles and images. It’s obviously much improved over the early days. Following their instructions works. Amazing, that.

    There will be a print version. The print layout person works from the same files I feed to the ebookstores. The print will take time. She will lay out a chapter for me, so that I can approve a rough design. She will then lay out the entire book. That will give us a page count and let me do the index. We’ll proof that a few times, to catch any errors, and then kick it out to the printer. But I didn’t want to delay the ebook until the print was ready.

    The page count is critical. Page count dictates the price. I’m 90% confident of the price, but I can’t announce it until I know. Once I have the price, we can start taking pre-orders. Now, I don’t have the infrastructure to take pre-orders. Any number of third-party companies would hold your money in escrow until I delivered the books to them. That would take a whole bunch of legal agreements, and frankly, I’m too dang lazy to be bothered.

    Especially when the OpenSSH/OpenBSD folks already have that infrastructure, and they have an existing trust relationship with the community. I plan to let them have the books at my cost plus expenses (shipping and CreateSpace fulfillment costs, not sunk costs), to funnel some money into OpenSSH. CreateSpace is doing the printing, so I don’t think I can offer an exclusivity window — once I order a crate of books, Amazon will list and ship to their direct customers. But I will ship those books at the earliest opportunity.

    I’m also looking for a solution to let me sell print/ebook combinations. That’s how I like my books, after all. I can work out a cost-effective solution that doesn’t involve me hand-mailing books, I’ll do it.

    But you want the book now. You really do. Mind you, I know all of my readers are good people. You don’t use passwords with SSH. You tightly secured all of your SSH servers. You know when and how to forward ports, and X11, and when to use a SSH VPN. But you know people who need this book. You know people who think that SSH-ing in as root with a password is a good idea. Make them buy the book. For their own good.