Category: Nonfiction Books

Readers who don’t care about my non-technical writing should skip this post.

My friends include authors who are traditionally published, and some who are self-published. Both groups make excellent cases for their choices, and I’m not going to argue against anyone else’s decisions. Whatever works for you, live and let live, and so on.

But both sets make excellent arguments for what I should do with my career. Both sets tell me my non-technical work is good enough to make it. The traditional authors tell me to keep knocking at the doors of the Big Six publishers, and eventually I will get in. The self-publishers tell me that I have more “platform” than many traditionally published novelists, and I should leverage that to bootstrap my non-technical writing career.

It’s an emotional topic. People are very vested in their opinions. I can argue either side, and my opinion tends to vary depending on whoever I’ve spoken to most recently. The way to answer questions is with an experiment. Experiments start with a falsifiable statement. Here’s mine. “I have sufficient platform to profitably self-publish fiction on ereader platforms.”

Now, some conditions. What, exactly, is “profitable”? Here are some rough numbers that would probably make an accountant cry, but they’re adequate for this experiment.

Big Name authors sell short stories for thousands of dollars. Medium Name authors sell short stories for about $500. No-name authors sell short stories for prices from $10 to free. My first sale was for $100, but all others were for $10. I’m a no-name. So, let’s classify my writing labor as a $10 expense.

Ebooks need a cover. My graphic design skills are roughly equivalent to a badger’s. I can get an adequate cover for $25, largely due to the curiosity of my artist friend Brad McDevitt about the results.

Software to transform a document into an eBook is free. I started with Mobipocket Creator to transform a PDF into Amazon’s Kindle format, and then used Calibre to transform it into the Barnes & Noble ereader format. To reach the Apple audience, as well as a whole bunch of smaller retailers, I need to use Smashwords’ .doc file upload. I’ve experimented with each of these, and I believe that once I have a hang of them I’ll be able to upload to all three sites in about an hour. How much is my authorial time worth? Judging by the $10 price of a completed short story: not much. How about the time of a skilled software operator? That’s a little better. I’ll call it $20/hour.

I could add in a share of the computer, office space, and so on, but that’s all stuff I need for my tech writing business. I’m not going to count that. Similarly, I own a Kindle, for my own purposes, but I’ll use it to test my early ebook builds. I won’t count that, either. Should this be successful, all these would become legitimate expenses.

The expenses to publish a short story are, roughly speaking, $55.

The going price for ereader short stories is $0.99. Amazon gives authors a 35% royalty on $0.99 items, or $0.35 per sale. I must sell 157 copies of a story to break even.

One big question is, “is the work good enough to sell?” I’ll control for that by starting with stories I have previously sold, but whose rights have reverted back to me. If I have success with them, I’ll try a couple pieces that have never sold.

Time is another factor — if I sell 157 copies over 10 years, is that a win? No. How about one year? Maybe.

The first story is up on Amazon. I still need to do B&N and Smashwords.

A month or so after I have the first one up on all three sites, I’ll report my initial results.

Tuesday, 22 March, O’Reilly, No Starch Press, and Tidbits will donate all revenue, less author royalties, from Deal of the Day sales to the Japanese Red Cross. This includes all of my books available in electronic format: Absolute FreeBSD, Cisco Routers for the Desperate, and Network Flow Analysis.

If you’ve been waiting to pick up any of my books in electronic format — or any books by other NSP/O’Reilly/Tidbits authors — this is the day. Today only. You want them all. I know you do.

If you already own everything I’ve written, in both paper and electronic form, why not try something from another author? Everybody needs to know how to build Badass Lego Guns. Or you can just give directly to the Japanese Red Cross.

I’ll tweet this multiple times through the day. The O’Reilly site will be announcing totals throughout the day.

My short story Opening the Eye is now on Amazon as a $0.99 ebook. This story first appeared in Horror Library vol 2.

This story is in that hazy ground between urban fantasy and horror. If you enjoy that sort of thing, please check it out. If you like it, please leave a review. It won’t show up in most Amazon searches unless there’s a certain number of reviews.

If you don’t enjoy that sort of story, don’t read it. If you’re related to me, you don’t want to read this one. Trust me.

I’m not going to turn this blog into a plea for people to read these things, but I will briefly mention when they’re available in new places, such as the Nook or the Apple bookstore.

This is an experiment. (I have experimental conditions and everything!) But more on that later this week.

People keep asking me why I use a publisher when self-publishing has become more and more possible over the last few years. Today, 38% of Amazon’s top 100 titles are self-published. Authors with a long track record in publishing, like Bob Mayer and Joe Konrath, extol the advantages of self-publishing your work rather than going through a publisher. Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, authors with decades of respectable mainstream publishing behind them, make solid business cases for skipping publishers and selling directly to your audience.

These authors write fiction. How well do their arguments apply to non-fiction? Well enough, if you want to do the work or pay someone to do the work. Here’s what you must do to produce a professional-quality nonfiction book. (If you want to produce an amateur, feeble book, you can skip any or all of these.)

Tech review: Someone who knows the subject has to review your work. Even if you crowdsource an initial tech review, as I’ve done for my BSD books, you still need an acknowledged subject matter expert to double-check your work. Your technical reviewer will expect paying. Most publishers pay a couple grand for tech review, or offer a cut of the royalties.

Editing: An editor is not a proofreader. An editor helps transform your manuscript from the disjointed babblings of a subject matter expert into something that can be understood by your reader. You can expect to pay $1-2/page for a decent technical editor.

Copyediting/proofreader: This is your proofreader. $1-2/page, again.

Layout: A good book is invisible. The layout disappears from the reader’s perceptions, leaving only a stream of words flowing from the book in the reader’s brain. I have never met a technical person who really had this skill. There are people who will format your manuscript for publishing on Kindle, Smashwords, and other ebook retailers, as well as paper formats for CreateSpace or Lightning Source. This runs anywhere from $100 for a novel up to $500 or more for complicated technical documents.

Publicity: Different publishers offer different levels of publicity. My publisher, the inimitable No Starch Press, publicizes every book heavily, in every appropriate channel. Other publishers just put new books in the catalog and let the author hope. Publicity can cost as much as you want to spend.

Graphics: Most authors can’t draw, even if they think they can. Publishers usually have internal artists recreate author art. You need to make sure that your own art is adequate.

Management: Your book has a project manager who keeps track of all the disparate threads of producing your book. If you self-publish, that project manager is you.

Overall, you can expect to spend a few thousand dollars self-publishing a professional-quality book, and a fair amount of extra time. Miss any step, handle any step less than perfectly, and your book will suffer.

What do you miss out on when you self-publish?

Translations: Advances for foreign language rights range from $1000-$2000, plus royalties if and when the advance is earned out. You will not be able to pursue translation rights — you don’t have the contacts or the contract expertise.

Bookstores: You will not see your self-published book at Barnes & Noble. End of discussion.

Competence: Nonfiction publishers are experts at helping non-authors produce good, readable books. A good publisher will help you make your book the best it can be. If you’re not a writer, anything you self-publish will read poorly, no matter how much outside help you have. If you think you’re a writer, but you’ve never worked with a publisher, you have a lot to learn.

Cameraderie: You’re a team with your publisher. They will work with you. You’ll make friends. Everybody wants the book to succeed, and believes that the book can succeed. It’s hard to put a price tag on that.

Nonfiction authors have some potential advantages, however. If you have a truly unique book, with no competition, you can do well self-publishing. If you want to compete in an existing, well-established topic, however, you’ll have a much harder slog. I wouldn’t recommend self-publishing a FreeBSD book, for example.

How do these affect me?

I want an editor, tech editor, and copyeditor who are interested in producing the best book possible. An editor I hire is not going to tell me “Wow, this book is horrible and pointless.” An editor who works for my publisher will voice his concerns to the publisher, and the publisher will intervene as necessary. I can honestly say that none of my publishers have ever had to have this meeting with me, but I want them to have the freedom to do so.

Publicity? I have enough trouble with the little publicity I do now. I resisted blogging, Facebook, and Twitter for years. The less I talk to people, the more people like me. (It’s not that I’m an obnoxious person, but a little bit of me goes a long way.) An outside publicity person is an excellent idea. I try to give my publisher’s publicity person everything he asks for, follow his suggestions, and get out of his way.

Bookstores: I don’t see my books in stores in Detroit, but I know that some people buy my books in bookstores. It seems that Amazon owns my publishing career.

Graphics: I am an author, not an artist. Producing the graphics for PGP & GPG took as long as writing the manuscript itself. I need outside help with art.

I don’t want to do all this for my technology books. The tech publishing industry is in much better shape than the fiction industry, and I’m confident that I will be able to find a home for my nonfiction. I might self-publish my fiction some day, just to escape the submission treadmill. But I haven’t given up on that mainstream success… yet.

The video of my NYCBSDCon 2010 talk, BSD Needs Books, is now available at http://blip.tv/file/4844882. At the moment, it’s the top link on BSD TV.

This is the first time I’ve seen my own presentation, at any conference. I’ve always suspected that I look daft in front of an audience. It turns out that the slim chance I was wrong was a nice thing to have.

These are probably the last reviews for Network Flow Analysis: one from Left Brain Bookstore and another from ;login.  Positive reviews in ;login give me warm fuzzies.  USENIX feels like people I know, doing the things I do.

On an unrelated note I offer advice on grammar, in cartoon form. You no longer have an excuse.

My big project for the holidays was completing an outline for the next tech book.  I’m glad to say that the outline is done. I can’t yet give the title, but I can say:

• It’s huge:  29 chapters in a 25-page outline.
• I have a tech editor, a respected figure in the relevant community.  He’s currently reviewing the outline.
• No Starch Press wants it.
• I expect to spend a year writing it, so I would expect a release in early 2012.

The book’s length is a concern. I want to write books small enough for me to hold comfortably in the bathtub. I’m a big guy, but a 29-chapter tech book pushes that limit.  I might trim some content, or cover some parts in less detail, to meet that goal.

I don’t announce book titles far in advance, due to problems that’s caused me in the past.  (Some day I’ll write up that story, but not today.)  I expect that I’ll be far enough along in a few months to announce the title, so:  I’ll announce it during my presentation at BSDCan 2011.  (And now that I’ve made a public commitment to that date, I’ll have to get cracking!)

I sold my short story Wednesday’s Seagulls to short-story.me a few months ago. They released that story as part of their second “best of” anthology collection in November. I’ve wanted to check it out, but the holidays and my efforts to outline another nonfiction book interfered.

The order of stories within a volume takes more thought than most people realize. Most of the big-name editors have their own occult ordering methods, but there’s a few general rules.  The first story in the anthology is the story that, in the editor’s opinion, is most likely to hook the reader and compel them to read further. The last story is the one that, in the editor’s opinion, is most likely to leave the reader with the a good impression of the anthology.  While I’m proud of my previous antho sales, my work therein is buried in the comfortable middle.

Wednesday’s Seagulls is the first story in this anthology.  I have been awarded pole position.  Merry Christmas to me!  You can get the anthology in print and on Kindle.

I really must learn to write faster.  Maybe if I give up eating and sleeping…