Category: Nonfiction Books

[edit, 17 March 2023: Sponsorships are now open.]

My next tech book will be “Run Your Own Mail Server,” part of the IT Mastery series. I would like a snappier title. “Lay Down All Hope, You That Go In By Me” is accurate to the spirit, but doesn’t inform about the content. Now that the Devotion & Corrosion Kickstarter is over, I could theoretically open sponsorships for the new book. I’m not doing it yet.

I work to be honest in my books. I can’t yet express this book’s truth in a short pithy way suitable for a catalog.

Email is a huge topic. Postfix, exim or Exchange? Dovecot, Cyrus, or Courier? Sendmail or syphilis? What exactly is this book about, anyway? I’m using a couple programs for my reference implementation, but this is not exactly a book about system administration. It is about citizenship and society. A novice sysadmin will not be able to use this book without reading a bunch of other books first. This is mostly about how the system hangs together, and about the less well-known services that help email happen. SPF and DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, and TLS-RPT. How not to warm up your IP address. Defeating Google. IPv4 or IPv6?

The easiest way to communicate this is by posting Chapter 0 before I open sponsorships.

Which means that the chapter must be vaguely readable. It will be riddled with errors, but it will discuss what’s further in the book.

A handful of you don’t care what the book is about. You’ll sponsor it anyway. You’d sponsor a book about ls(1). You folks are the best, and I appreciate your eagerness to give me money for no good reason. Most folks are not so enraptured, however, and want to know something about what I’m writing.

Maybe next week? The week after? I write nonfiction in order but not linearly, so it’s taking longer than I hoped.

But book is happening. Eddie Sharam’s cover art is glorious, and it’s an actual painting again. It might be a Kickstarter reward, though I think he’d make more if he put it up for direct auction. We’ll find out.

I do know that email is overwhelmingly dominated by a handful of big companies. An Email Empire, if you will. Those of us who run our own email are a ragtag band of rebels struggling against the Empire, constantly hoping not to be crushed as we carve out our little space. Gmail has altered the email agreement, and we pray they do not alter it further. All we need is a Bigfoot with an energy-crossbow-thingamajig…

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.

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.

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.

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.