Category: Nonfiction Books

Mark Leslie Lefebvre hosts Stark Reflections, an essential podcast for writers. He was kind enough to interview me on my new book, Cash Flow for Creators. If you have any interest in managing money in a creative business, check it out. We also talked about the Networknomicon and other special editions, as well as many other options open to today’s creators.

Mark knows the publishing business cold, and his thoughts are well worth listening to. Plus, Mark is giving away a copy of the book. Listen to learn how to win.

Meanwhile, over at Writing Slices, Alex Kourvo reads books about writing. Now, I’m not saying that Kourvo calls her blog that because when she finds a bad book she slices it to ribbons. I wouldn’t dare. Alex turned her experienced and incisive eye to C4C. While I’ve given up soliciting long-form reviews, I’m always pleased when they happen. I expected her to leave my book a heap of ribbons, but was pleasantly surprised.

If you’re a writer and you have any interest in learning your craft, you should subscribe to Writing Slices. She really will save you a whole world of frustration with lousy books, freeing you to discover your own personal, entirely unique realms of frustration. I rarely buy writing books any more, but when I do it’s because she recommended them.

You can get C4C in all the usual places, including at my ebookstore and my print bookstore.

That’s enough resting on past successes. The electricity has returned after a 51-hour outage. The fridge has been sanitized and restocked. It’s time for me to descend into the Word Mines and drag out a bucket of high-carat verbs, not all of them obscene.

I make my living writing books. I don’t consult. I don’t teach, except for occasional talks at user groups and conferences–and cynics might call those talks “one hour commercials for a book.” It caused a problem I didn’t predict. People keep asking me how I do it. Some of these querents are making enough at their writing or other creative endeavor that they could make a living with their writing. I find my way of life immensely satisfying, and I believe similarly inclined folks should enjoy the same pleasure.

The answer comes down to: learn business.

Most business books are irrelevant to creators. Business books are aimed at franchises or stores or family factories, and contain chapter after chapter of stuff that’s utterly irrelevant to creators. I know. I read the books. Plus, the artistic stereotype includes “bad with business.” This is a pernicious myth that hampers many creators. A creator that dives into a business book filled with irrelevancies can be forgiven for buying into the myth, though.

This myth supports an entire industry. Any number of people will agree that creators have no head for business. It’s genetic. It’s not in their nature. That’s just how it is. They will soberly agree to handle your business affairs for a meager cut of the take. These people have an unparalleled skill at looking serious while their inner child is cackling and counting up the money. They profit by feeding the myth. These folks take the “no head for business” myth from a handicap and escalate it to utter pernicious fallacy.

A creative business isn’t hard, once you know how to do it. It might be the simplest kind of business there is, specifically because you don’t have to worry about so many of the things that make a store or a factory complicated. It might also be the most complicated, because being a full-time creator changes your whole life.

So I wrote a book about it. A small book. A cheap book. Cash Flow for Creators is about how to create, run, and build a creative business from the ground up. It explains how business works, and how to convert the irregular flow of creative income into rent payments without getting in trouble with the tax man.

It’s available my ebookstore and my brand new print bookstore. Or lots of other places shown in the book listing. (Still waiting on Apple, dagnabit.)

There it is. That’s how I do it. No secrets, no evasions.

The rest is up to you.

My next book will be TLS Mastery, all about Transport Layer Encryption, Let’s Encrypt, OCSP, and so on.

This should be a shorter book, more like my DNSSEC or Tarsnap titles, or the first edition of Sudo Mastery. I would like a break from writing doorstops like the SNMP and jails books.

You can sponsor in print or ebook. Remember, the print sponsorship includes everything in the ebook sponsorship, so you don’t need to buy both unless you want your name to appear twice in the ebook.

As we’re in a pandemic: take care of you and yours first! I’m conflicted on offering sponsorships, as so many people have lost their jobs. Several folks said they were going to send me money anyway, so I’ve opened these up. Do NOT send me money if you have any doubts about your financial stability.

Bit by bit, site by site, SNMP Mastery is escaping into the world. I’ll keep the SNMP Mastery entry on my web page updated as it appears in more stores.

The various store databases are still synching everything up. You can get both paperback and Kindle on Amazon, but the entries aren’t connected. IngramSpark, the non-Amazon paper distributor and the sole source for hardcovers, is still processing. It’ll appear in other stores soon.

Now to go do my taxes, and get more work on git sync murder.

I’ve been working like a maniac to complete “SNMP Mastery” before AsiaBSDCon. This means I haven’t had time to do my usual year-end roundup, the book cover reveal, or any of my usual beginning-of-year crud. The book went to copyedit today. At 60,000 words, it’s the biggest Mastery title yet. It’s bigger than I wanted, but SNMP is bigger than I want it to be, so I guess it evens out.

This means I have time to show the cover, done after Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day.

Why’s Beastie the one holding the umbrella? Because he’s a bloody gentleman. Also: hands.

(Purists will note that the ISBN sticker is not right. That’s because it’s not the final ISBN. I just assigned ISBNs today. I won’t have the real barcode until close to completion. You don’t have to email me about the inaccuracy, I remember from last time. Seriously.)

I’ve just finished the first draft of SNMP Mastery, and I’m looking for folks interested in pointing out my mistakes and misunderstandings.

If you’ve got the time to read the book and comment, please drop me an email at mwl at mwl dot io saying:

• your degree of SNMP expertise
• that you won’t share the draft manuscript. (I don’t need piracy of unproofed manuscripts to ruin my reputation, the finished books do enough harm, thank you.)

I would need all comments back before Monday, 13 January 2020. All comments need to be in plain text with enough context that I can find the bit you’re talking about, or annotations on the PDF. While I appreciate the madman who took the time send me PostScript diffs, I am insufficiently geeky to cope with them in the time allotted. With luck I’ll have it in time for AsiaBSDCon and HasGeek in March.

This book is written with a Lovecraftian cosmic horror motif. Because

We’re left with a protocol that’s incredibly powerful and flexible, but bears all the scars of its history. SNMP lets you invoke ancient standards from the void. It grants you incredible system-changing power, and can destroy everything you’ve worked for. SNMP exposes the secrets of your servers, and—if you’re thoughtless—reconfigures them into unspeakable nightmares. It’s like something out of an HP Lovecraft tale, without the rampant xenophobia but with all the alien system topologies.¹

¹The topologies were there all along. Your shallow human mind was blissfully incapable of perceiving them.
This whole analogy is disturbingly apropos.

Here’s the Table of Contents

• Introduction
• SNMP Essentials
• Authentication
• Queries
• The Management Information Base
• The Net-SNMP Agent
• Logging
• SET
• Proxies, SMUX, and AgentX
• Access Control
• Extending snmpd(8)
• Monitoring
• Traps
• Afterword

What comes next? I’ve been writing twelve hours a day for the past two weeks to finish this book on time. What comes next is a heartfelt faceplant. Hopefully onto the couch, but if I hit the bed of nails that’s okay.

My next tech book will be SNMP Mastery. Much like PAM Mastery, I’m writing this book as a public service. SNMP is an uncomfortable fact of life. It’s baroque, obtuse, and misunderstood.

Now that I’ve shipped the Sudo Mastery sponsor gifts, I’m opening print and ebook sponsorships for SNMP Mastery.

The voices in my head tell me that I need to write this with Lovecraftian cosmic horror references. Because SNMP. Who knows if that’ll actually work in the manuscript, however.

I’ve sold 71 copies of Ed Mastery: Manly McManface edition. This means I owe the Grosse Pointe Soroptimists $71. Most of these were print sales, presumably as prank gifts because of the very manly cover.

Rather than track sales of this book forever, I’ve rounded up the amount I donated to $250. I expect this will cover the lifetime sales of this particular edition. Tilted Windmill Press is now a proud sponsor of SIGP’s Stop Traffic 5K Walk/Run on 21 September.

They have room for more sponsors. You should consider sponsoring this fundraiser for a very worthy cause.

If you’re local, you should consider stirring your lazy carcass and joining the walk.

And for posterity, here’s the complete official chronology of this most masculine of books.

• Sponsoring a Scam
• For 1 April: #mwlSecretBook reveal!
• Ed Mastery follow-up

I hereby declare this prank complete.