Gleefully Malicious Books
General publishing announcements
To my surprise, SSH Mastery is available at Smashwords.
I don’t know if this version will make it through to Kobo and iBooks, but you can buy it now. If I have to update it to get the book through the Smashwords Meatgrinder and into third-party stores, you’d get access to those later versions as well.
I just finished uploading the ebook versions of SSH Mastery to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The manuscript is en route to the print layout person.
Amazon should have the book available in 24 hours or so, Barnes & Noble in 24-72 hours. Once they’re available, I’ll be able to inspect the ebooks to check for really egregious errors. The files were clean when I uploaded them, but both companies perform their own manipulation on what I feed them. There’s no way to be sure the books come out okay until I can see the final product.
What about, say, iBooks? Kobo? The short answer is: they’re coming. The long answer is: those sites are fed via Smashwords. Smashwords only accepts Microsoft Word files, and they have very strict controls on how books can be formatted. Their ebook processor, Meatgrinder, isn’t exactly friendly to highly-formatted books. I must spend some quality quantity time getting the book into Smashwords.
I’ll post again when the books are available on each site. In the meantime, I’m going to go put my feet up.
My first collection of short fiction, Vicious Redemption: Five Horror Stories, has started to appear in online bookstores. So far it’s available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
Today it’s ebook only. I have a few marketing things to finalize before it goes to print.
Within a couple weeks, it should appear in other online bookstores. Ebook distribution is faster than physical distribution, but still slower than you’d think. I expect it to be in Kobo & Apple by the end of the month.
Would you enjoy these stories? The first story from the collection, Wednesday’s Seagulls, is posted on my personal web site. Go read it and find out.
I’m giving out review copies to my regular readers. If you normally read this sort of thing, and if you’re willing to read it and post a review on Amazon (as well as anywhere else you’d like), drop me an email.
Here’s the cover rough for SSH Mastery, by my pet artist the highly talented Bradley K McDevitt. If you see anything wrong with it, please say so now.
Last summer, preparing for the OpenSSH book, I attended a course on being your own publisher. If you’re interested in publishing, I highly recommend the Think like a Publisher course. The hotel was decorated with a variety of nautical clutter.
This critter hung directly over the breakfast table.
This was obviously the Hand of Fate. I borrowed a couple of really good cameras from fellow workshop attendees and snapped a bunch of photos. I’m a lousy photographer, but with good equipment and enough tries, eventually one came out.
The cover artist has assured me he can strip out the background and arrange this real-life Puffy suitably.
The OpenSSH book is in copyedit. I hope to get the copyedits back this year. I’ve seen the first round of copyedits, and they don’t look too bad. Once I make the corrections, the book goes to the print-on-demand layout person and I start on the ebook conversion. The ebook should be out next month.
The best title I’ve had suggested was “SSH: You’re Doing It Wrong.” I love that title, but it’s not really appropriate. Instead, it’ll be “SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, PuTTY, Tunnels, and Keys.” That’s what the book is about, after all.
Progressing on Absolute OpenBSD 2 slowly, thanks to the holidays.
For a year or so I’ve wanted to write a post about the impact of book reviews, specifically on Amazon book reviews, but Anne R. Allen has saved me the trouble.
In short: Amazon owns my writing career.
They make their decisions based on reviews by people like you.
And when I say “people like you,” I mean you, personally.
The biggest thing you can do to help any author is review their book in twenty words or more, and rate it four or five stars, and post it on Amazon. (Amazon considers a 3-star review not average, but negative.)
Today, for good or ill, Amazon owns the book business. Especially tech authors. We live and die by Amazon reviews. Reviews on other sites are nice too, but if the review isn’t on Amazon, it’s mostly shouting into the echo chamber.
(Anyone who is a big enough fan of my work to actually track down this blog is almost certainly not the target of this rant. But today, it happened one too many times.)
I had a little bit of writing time this morning before work. How did I spend it? Sending DMCA takedown notices. You can get my books for free. Even the brand new ones. They are frequently scanned and uploaded to file sharing sites, sometimes even before I get my author’s copies. I send out DMCA notices when I find them, if the host site is in the US.
What is the real impact of illicit book downloads on me as a writer?
Let’s get some of the bogus arguments out of the way.
The word piracy is ridiculous in this context. Theft is better, but that word implies scarcity. If you take a book I wrote from the store without paying for it, that’s theft. Electronic books are post-scarcity, in a certain sense. (The writing of the book is scarce, additional copies are not.) For downloading of electronic books without paying the publisher I prefer unlicensed or illicit, which aren’t perfect, but feel closer than any of the other popular alternatives.
I don’t like the DMCA, and I strongly disagree with its technological circumvention provisions. If you buy something I wrote in ebook form, I don’t care if you have a copy on every device you own or if you print it out or if you use the Kindle loan feature and get a friend to read it. If you buy something I write as a physical book, please loan it out, mark it up, photocopy key pieces and hang them above your desk, whatever. If you buy one of my physical books direct from my publisher, they’ll give you the ebook version for free, giving you the best of both worlds. But the DMCA takedown notice is the tool by which sites like scribd and tumblr accept notifications, so I use it.
So, what about my books? How does this affect me?
Writing a book is like staying on a diet. Every day, you decide you’re going to write instead of doing something else.
Writing books takes time. I have a day job. As day jobs go, it’s pretty good. I get the tools I need to do my work. I don’t have bogus meetings or daft cow-orkers. I get to choose most of the technologies I work with. Fearless Leader doesn’t call me in the middle of the night for bogus emergencies. I choose my hours. I have a private office for that couple of days a week where I condescend to grace the office with my presence. And on those days, Fearless Leader usually buys lunch. The hours are not ghastly, as in some companies, but it’s a full-time job.
When people say “Hey, did you see that show last night?” I say “No, I was writing.”
When the missus suggests I spend the evening watching movies with her, some nights I say “I really need to get some writing done.”
I just moved. My new office has floral wallpaper. I detest wallpaper. Even wallpaper without cheery climbing blue and red roses. It drives me batty. I could spend my free time for a couple of weeks and transform the room into an almost elegant techie’s office.
But moving has delayed my current books unduly. I know people are eagerly awaiting my next books. They tell me so. Repeatedly. At length. So I live with the wallpaper, and write.
I use SSH every day, but I don’t use every piece of its functionality. I’ve never needed to use a SSH VPN. To write that chapter of the OpenSSH book, I spent two weeks of “writing time” getting SSH VPNs working between Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD machines. I use OpenBSD daily, but I don’t use systrace. I use Apache, but OpenBSD just imported nginx. I have to figure out all of these things, and understand them well enough to explain them to you. More time.
If I just wrote fiction, I wouldn’t have to fanny about with packet sniffers and debugging logs. But fiction requires lots of research and preparation. The time is spent differently, but it’s still spent.
That’s time I could be hanging out with my family, or at the dojo, or with friends, or even watching some of the TV series I’ve never seen but that friends have raved about (Firefly, Buffy, X-files, whatever the current hit is). Instead, I’m writing.
I enjoy writing, but there’s a lot I want to write that’s much easier than technology books. And there’s a difference between writing something for myself, and writing something of sufficient quality that I can legitimately offer it to others.
The fact that my books can be fun to read doesn’t mean that they’re fun books. My books are meant to help you make money. Maybe that money is your salary, maybe it’s for your the company. Maybe the financial impact isn’t direct, but my goal is that when you finish reading one of my books, you will be more knowledgeable, more highly skilled, and a more valuable technologist. Transforming your skills into cash is your job.
Cutting out the people who help you improve yourself is downright disrespectful.
It’s been suggested that I put up a “tip jar,” so illicit downloaders can throw me a few bucks. Unfortunately, that ignores all the other people who go into making my books a success. My NSP books are professionally edited, copyedited, tech edited, and designed. I cannot in good conscience just cut them out. That would be just as disrespectful.
Losing money is unpleasant. But when someone says “I have so little respect for the year of your life that you spent working on this book that I’m going to give it away,” that’s downright insulting. Personally offensive. Disrespectful.
The greatest tool any of us have is enthusiasm for our work. Every time I find where someone has uploaded one of my books without permission, it drains my enthusiasm. Tonight, I really should finish up the tech edits on the OpenSSH book so it can go to copyedit. But I think those edits will wait. I’m going to dinner with the missus instead.
UPDATE 2015-02-10: I put up a tip jar.
I know people are waiting for the next books. So, how are they going?
The last month or so has basically been a loss for writing. We bought a new house. I’ve painted most of the rooms, removed rancid carpet, stripped, sanded, stained, and sealed the underlying battered-but-intact hardwood floors, and generally made the house inhabitable.
I now have a standing desk, made out of stuff found in abandoned Detroit buildings. Here’s the best photo I could take with my free-with-service BlackBerry.
The base is wire shelving, with wheels. The top is from a desk. We drilled small holes in the bottom of the desktop so that it fit into the top of the shelf poles. The keyboard trays are left over from another project. If you’ve never had a desk on wheels, I highly recommend it. The standing desk has taken a few days to get used to, but is now pretty comfortable.
The good news is, I can now resume writing.
Before anyone asks: the wallpaper in the new office has to go. All wallpaper is a taint upon life, but this wallpaper is particularly egregious. I think I’ll let myself strip the walls as a reward for completing the OpenSSH and OpenBSD books. If I can ignore them that long.
I also feel obliged to mention that if you look on the far right of the photo, atop the stereo speaker, you’ll see my ex-roommate’s skull.
I now have three horror stories available on all ebook reader platforms and stores. For September 2011, you can get all of them for free via Smashwords. All have been previously published elsewhere. If you like one of them, please leave a review at your favorite ebook site. (Yes, this is a blatant, transparent attempt to gather reviews.) Follow the link, use the coupon code, and download the stories in your preferred format.
Be warned: “Opening the Eye” contains blood and gore. The others are much more gentle.
Wednesday’s Seagulls (coupon code BD29B)
His plane crashed against a rocky Pacific island inhabited only by seagulls and a walking dead man.
If he stops moving, the zombie will eat him.
If he sleeps more than a couple hours, the zombie will eat him.
But trying to trap the dead man might only make things worse.
Breaking the Circle (coupon code AB94A)
Twelve-year-old Chris learned that lycanthropy ran in her family. The hard way.
On the desolate family farm dominated by her father’s alcoholism, everyone hides problems. As Chris grows, she spends one night a month locked in the basement and clawing at the door. She yearns for freedom, but can even transforming into a werewolf break the chains in Chris’ own mind?
Opening the Eye (coupon code TQ34G)
Street drug drought.
Mindless need chews your bones. No way to feed it.
An unthinkable solution to satisfy the hunger. Forever.
If you can live that way…