Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” Print Status

I got the print proofs of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems yesterday, and they came out lovely.

I’ve gone through them and fixed some less-than-optimal layout decisions. You never know what a print book will look like until you hold it in your hands. Several folks read the ebook already and sent some corrections that I, the tech editors, and the copyeditor missed, so I fixed them. The ebook has been updated to match. The printer now has the print files.

So, when will the print book be in stores?

That depends on the printer. I expect they’ll approve the print in the next few days, unless they pull another Orcibus and sit on it for a month. After a week or so, though, I have nothing better to do than give them pain every. single. day.

I will release the print book to the public when I can. I’ll be ordering the pre-orders directly from the printer at the same time.

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Why “OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” is not in Amazon’s Kindle store

I expect folks to ask this, so here’s a pre-emptive blog post.

You can get OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems for Kindle direct from me at Tilted Windmill Press or at Gumroad. You can get a Kindle-friendly ebook from any number of other retailers, but while they’re all supposed to be DRM-free I can’t advise on prying the file out of another vendor’s ecosystem. The one place you cannot buy OMF for Kindle is Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.

TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over. Amazon is the only retailer that does this. Other retailers, I make somewhere around 65%-70% no matter the retail price. Everything follows from that math, but if you want the details read on.

According to economists, prices have gone up about 30% since I started releasing the Mastery books. According to my wallet, not so much. In 2012 I could get a cheap lunch for my wife and I for $10. I paid $18 last weekend. But let’s go with the official numbers. Just as “dime novels” now cost $10, I must raise prices. While book pricing is hotly debated, $11.99 is a reasonable price for a short tech book like OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems.

If I charge $9.99 for this ebook, I make about $7.

If I charge $11.99 for the ebook, I make about $8.40 everywhere but Amazon. At Amazon, I make $4.20. For me to make that $8.40 at Amazon, I must price the book at $23.99. I’m fond of the book, but it ain’t worth that! And if I did, giving Amazon a $15.59 slice of every sale for no reason sticks in my craw.

Charge $23.99 at Amazon and $11.99 elsewhere? Amazon’s program has a Most Favored Nation clause. They can price match any other major vendor.

Will Amazon change their business because of this? No. Authors are plentiful and of low value. I am not worth Amazon’s time.

Amazon’s business model is based on squeezing prices down, and they play a long game. I don’t expect them to ever raise that $9.99 limit. A novel might sell tens or hundreds of thousands of copies. If I’m lucky, a book like OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems might sell four thousand. The few extra bucks I’ll make by raising prices are important. That’s also why I’ve focused so hard on disintermediation through my Patronizers, sponsorships, and lately Kickstarter.

I have been expecting this for years now. I do not expect to publish future Mastery books on Amazon’s Kindle store, unless by some chance I write another very short one.

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“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” ebook leaking out

I had wanted the ebook before Christmas, but before New Years’ Day isn’t terrible.

The ebook of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems went to sponsors, Patronizers, and pre-order folks yesterday. It’s in my online bookstore today, and will appear elsewhere through the weekend as I upload to all the stores and all the databases churn.

Well, almost all the stores. The DRM-free ebooks sold in any store can be loaded onto a Kindle, but the book won’t be in Amazon’s Kindle store. I’ll do a blog post dedicated to this later, because I want it to come up easily on a search and I suspect this will quickly become a FAQ, but in short: when SSH Mastery came out in 2012, it was $9.99. That’s $12.81 today. OMF is about the same length as that book and took longer to write, so I’m comfy charging $11.99 for it. Amazon does not want me to price books between $10 and $20, so any book in that price range won’t be available there.

Print will take a little longer, because of the pre-orders.

Normally, between sponsors and backers, I have to order and ship about 30 print books. No big deal.

This time I tried pre-orders. I ignored the pre-orders as they happened, but now that it’s time to fulfill I took a look and–wow. 69 preorders? Yes, nice, but it’s tripled how many books I must order and ship. I’ll be rushing print proofs to my door but still, shuffling physical books around the country takes time. Once they arrive at my door I’ll drop everything to ship.

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“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” print layout notes

The cost of printing books is going up, just like everything. I don’t want to increase the price of my tech print books. I consider $25 reasonable.

For the second edition of DNSSEC Mastery, I developed a new print interior layout, using every trick I know to reduce page count while remaining readable. It worked. I was able to cut page count by about 30%. There’s only one problem with it:

I don’t like it.

Print books, especially tech books, occupy a weird niche these days. Books are no longer confined to paper. I have several thousand e-books on my reader, and as my eyes age I find myself increasingly unwilling to purchase print books unless they serve some special role. A paper book must be a unique physical artifact for me to consider offering it precious physical space in my overflowing bookshelves. My home already has libraries in three rooms, and we refuse let books bully us into moving again.

So I’m reverting to the previous design for OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. It might result in a price increase. Maybe not, because it’s a little shorter than the SNMP book. But the result will be a nicer physical artifact that provides a better reading experience.

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“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” status

I just finished indexing the manuscript. That’s normally a hard day’s work, but this being the week before a major holiday I was unable to get a full day to dedicate to the task. I wound up spending about two hard man-days on the task, because context switching in and out of indexing has a higher cost than any other task my brain runs.

With luck, I’ll have the print book laid out next week and ebooks by the end of the week. Yes, I could prepare ebooks first, but the print layout forces me to go through the manuscript one last time searching for errors. I always find one or two warts in the process.

I am, however, taking the weekend off for my family’s choice of Winter Solstice Holiday. May you all have a delightful WSH of your choice.

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The Spite Bezos sale ends, Filesystems, and my Next Kickstarter

A trio of updates, which is super annoying because I’m trying to blog more often but this all happened late yesterday so I guess I’m stuck.

The Amazon Spends Money To Sell Montague Portal hardcover and ebook sale has ended. Amazon has reverted the price to normal everywhere except for Kindle in the UK, and I’m sure that’ll follow soon. At first, I thought The Algorithm was drunk, but the hardcover sale stopped right when their spend crossed $500. That could be a coincidence, sure, but it’s a strangely regular number. Maybe someone at Amazon knew I’d take advantage of this and decided to give my career a hug? I will never know. This goes down as a Christmas miracle, and is hereby dubbed “the gift of the Bezi.”

“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” is back from copyedit. Diving into that in the next few days. It’s my first tech book that won’t be available in Amazon’s Kindle store, so this will be interesting.

The pre-launch page for my next Kickstarter is live. Devotion & Corrosion is a collection of short fiction. It’s a bunch of stories about love that aren’t love stories. Welder Wings’ art completely blew me away.

Despite popular opinion the cover is not a glimpse inside my skull, but only because it lacks Molotov cocktails.

Anyway, watch that space.

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Mailing List Freebies

I’ve tested everything and it all seems to work, so I guess I can tell you now:

If you sign up for my fiction and/or nonfiction mailing lists, you will get free ebooks.

If you sign up for the nonfiction list, you’ll get a free copy of Tarsnap Mastery. I’m sure that Colin over at Tarsnap will be less than thrilled that I’m giving away free documentation for his service, but it’s my book and he can suck it up.

If you sign up for the fiction list, you will receive not one not two but six free stories, spread out over a month. Some are commercially available only as part of collections.

These are not newsletters. I only bother to send mail when I have a new reason for you to give me money, such as a new release, a Kickstarter, a bundle, or one of my very rare sales.

Is this giveaway a transparent ploy to make you listen when I try to sell you other books? Yes. Yes, it is. I hope that the freebies will so enchant you that you must purchase everything I have ever written. Or, that my generosity will so burden your conscience that the mere sight of my name will make you mash the BUY button. Either works.

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“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” Print/Ebook Bundle Preorder

Until 1 December, I’ll be taking preorders for print copies of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. You can even buy two books if you want, because I can cram a second book into a Priority Mail envelope. Just let me know the title of the second one in an order comment.

Every purchase includes ebook versions of OMF (and any other titles you get).

I’ll be ordering your books with the sponsor copies, signing them, and shipping at the same time.

Details on the order page.

If this works out well, I’ll do it again. Disintermediation is good.

If it whirls into a bewildering mess, I won’t.

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Sponsorships, Releases, New Books, and Kickstarters

A giant tangle of stuff, and it’s all related. Plus, I want your opinion on two questions.

OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems is at the copyeditor, and due back 15 December. I should have print in stores immediately before Christmas. Barely.

Prohibition Orcs and Frozen Talons are leaking out in ebook right now. If you buy them directly from me, they come with an exclusive bonus–To Serve Orc: Enduring Recipes from the Old Country, Watered Down for America. It’s short, but you won’t find it anywhere except my site. The print books are underway, and the leather-covered Orcibus will have to wait until I can deliver print books to the cover maker. Covers should exist in early December, so I should completely fulfill everything before 2023.

Which brings me to scheduling.

People sometimes ask me if they can buy signed print books directly from me. I had intended to run a Kickstarter as an advance sale for OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems, which would let those folks buy signed books from me. Kickstarter will not let you run a new Kickstarter while an old one has not yet been fulfilled, however. If I’m honest, I can’t run a new Kickstarter until, oh, 1 January 2023.

Which means I can’t realistically do one for OMF. I am considering running a thirty-day print sale for OMF on my web site, however. Paperbacks would be $25, hardcovers $40. Shipping would be $10 US, $15 Canada, and $40 rest of world. (Yeah, shipping is terrible.) You’d have the option to order one extra book, at the same prices, for the same shipping. I can cram two Mastery books, or a Mastery and a novel, in an USPS Priority Mail envelope. Shipments would go out with the sponsor shipments, but would NOT arrive in time for Christmas. Comment if you’d buy one. If nobody wants it, I won’t bother setting it up.

Which means that my next Kickstarter will be for a fiction collection (Corrosive Devotion: Ten Tales of Love that Aren’t Love Stories), probably in January 2023.

About that time, I’ll open sponsorships for the next Mastery title, “Running Your Own Mail Server.” Because, like Kickstarter, I won’t open new sponsorships until I’ve fulfilled the old ones. Prices are rising everywhere, so I’m contemplating raising print sponsorship prices from $100 to $120. If you’re a previous print sponsor, would that stop you from sponsoring again? This will let me integrate a Kickstarter into the business plan, rather than being a late addition haphazardly nailed onto the side.

For similar reasons, the ebook of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems will be $12.99 rather than $10.99. This means that while the Kindle version will be available at any number of bookstores, it will not be in Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. Amazon will have the print edition. Amazon is no longer a viable e-bookstore for my new shorter nonfiction, mostly because I’m not willing to screw my readers.

That’s the reasons for the schedule.

Speaking of schedules, I have once again completed all current writing projects simultaneously and now must perform a laborious cold start. I truly must figure out how to de-synchronize my multiple projects.

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“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” draft done!

After far too long, I have finished a first draft of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. Sponsorships are now closed.

I’m asking tech reviewers to get any comments to me by 15 October 2022. That’s four weeks. It might seem tight, but experience shows that people either get their comments to me immediately, or wait until the last possible weekend. I’m not complaining–I do exactly the same thing. Please return any comments either a) in plain text, with enough context that I can find them when page numbers change, or b) as annotations directly on the PDF.

My tech reviewers are now in their third decade of winning the prize for “most likely to use many different PDF readers.” A file that works for one won’t work for another. I work around this by distributing three PDFs of the manuscript, each identical in contact but prepared differently. Everyone should be able to find one that works for them.

If you’re interested in doing a tech review, please drop me an email (mwl at mwl dot io) saying who you are, why you would make you a good reviewer, and that you won’t share the manuscript. (Piracy is bad, but having my name on an unreviewed and thus certainly incorrect document is horrifying). I’ll ignore responses that can’t follow those instructions, because whenever I don’t I get difficult-to-decipher feedback. (I have previously received PostScript diffs, and… no. Just no.)

I’ll be turning my attention to the Prohibition Orcs copyedits next. Then it’s back to the Epic Giant Fiction Project, and another tech book, title TBA.