Category: writing

Several tech authors recently contacted me for advice about problems with their publishers. (No publisher in particular, mind you.) Apparently I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m considered an expert. I’m writing this post so I can point these people at it later.

If you’re a tech author thinking of asking for my wisdom: this is basically it.

None of this is anything against any particular publisher or any particular writer.

This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, nor do I write stories involving lawyers.

No, I will not look at your publishing contract.

I’ll point you to resources for fiction authors. Genre authors have been bludgeoned over the head repeatedly with this stuff. Tech book authors? Not so much. Most tech authors are technologists first, gamers second, have another hobby or a family or something, and write books as a distant fourth or fifth. Fiction writers who make a living writing have been forced to defend themselves against predatory practices. (“Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me and all of my peers for years, we will gang up on you and burn down your house.”)

Now that the disclaimers are done:

So, you’ve written a tech book. Or you want to write a tech book. You’ve found a publisher. They express interest, and send you a contract. Hurrah! You’re going to be published! An antload of fame and a soupcon of fortune will be yours!

STOP.

Do not sign the contract.

Techies in particular have a disdain for paperwork, but the wrong contract can ruin your life. Even if you know the publisher. Even if the publisher is your best friend, like, ever. Even if you’ve been trained to automatically click on “I accept the license terms.” Overcome that disdain.

READ THE DANGED CONTRACT.

Maybe Microsoft isn’t going to come after you for that extra copy of Windows 95, but your publishing contract is much more personal. It’s aimed at you. And contracts tend to favor the side that writes the contract. Even the most scrupulously even-handed contract by the most good-hearted publisher in the world includes provisions where you agree to do stuff. It’s not as simple as “you write the book, you get paid.”

By signing the contract, you’re agreeing to do what the contract says. The written contract overrides anything verbal. That handshake deal? Utterly worthless. The email paper trail? Also worthless in the face of the contract. Mutual understandings? Nonexistent.

A publishing contract exists between you and the publishing company. The publishing company is not the nice acquisitions editor you’ve been talking to. It’s a legal entity owned by someone. That legal entity can be sold to another entity at any time. The new owner can fire the nice editor and assign you one with a ninth grade diploma and a deeply rooted, highly personal distaste for your work, your subject, your family, your religion, your college, and your personal aroma, who wants to know what button to push to make Microsoft Word do this FECN thing you’re talking about.

I agree that the publisher’s attitude and reputation are important. I work with No Starch Press because they’re awesome to work with. They focus on making the best book possible. That’s great. But:

The only binding agreement is the contract.

Read it. Understand it. Print it out. Highlight anything you don’t understand. Highlight anything that might be a legal term of art. Highlight anything that could be used against you.

What sorts of things should you look for? There are things that real publishers include in their contracts. The exact terms differ, but the bones are there. If any of these things are missing from a contract, the publisher is not a real publisher. Run away. Run away quickly. Put their gmail address in your spam bucket and blacklist their IP address at your network border.

Fast and furious progress these days:

Absolute OpenBSD: Peter has finished the tech edit on the entire manuscript. Chapters 1-18 are copyedited and returned to NSP. Chapters 1-17 are laid out and look somewhat like an actual book. (Seeing a book in laid out forces me to view it with new eyes. It makes me want to tear up the whole thing and start over. I know I can write better than that. But I think that both the publisher and you lot would lynch me if I delayed the book until 2016 for a proper rewrite.) I’m sending prepub PDFs out to various OpenBSD celebrities in the hope of getting blurbs for the front of the book. Best quote so far, from someone who will remain anonymous: ” It’s unfortunate that the strength of BSD man pages undercut his sales so much.”

DNSSec Mastery: I’ve made the second version available on LeanPub. It now contains everything you need to deploy DNSSec, provided nothing goes wrong and you don’t have to rotate keys. Plus, the introduction now gives you a reason to read the book, which is a bonus. (That last sentence originally read “The introduction no longer blows chunks.” And people say I can’t be tactful.)

To Ludovic ‘Ludy’ Simpson: You won the haiku contest. But you didn’t leave me contact info. Please get me your shipping address. Thank you.

I have the DNSSec book about a third done, which isn’t bad for spending a week in the hospital this month, and am looking at various publication options. Once the book is finished it’ll be available in print, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and hopefully iTunes. But I have an option for before the book is complete. LeanPub allows authors to upload works in progress, and update them as the work proceeds.

I’m pondering something like this:

If you follow my blog, you’re probably a fan. I have no problem giving a discount to people interested enough in my work to follow my blog. And I might even get useful feedback.

One of my goals is to reduce the amount of non-paying non-writing work I do. (Basically, I want to reduce my monthly recurring expenses, especially time expenses.) Updating a book as I write it isn’t a huge amount of work, but if nobody’s interested, I don’t want to bother.

So: would anyone be interested? Or should I keep writing in my bubble?

Amazon recently introduced Author Rank, where they list authors in order of popularity. I’ve had a lot of discussions about this feature and what it means to writers.

Amazon provides a surprising number of features for authors. Their Author Central system lets me see how many of which book sold, and where, over a given time period. There’s a neat little app that shows where in the country my books sold, according to Bookscan data. Bookscan data might not be complete, but it’s more information than my twice yearly No Starch royalty statements. I know that in the last four weeks, five of my NSP books sold in the SF-Oakland-San Jose area, and 4 in Washington, DC. That’s interesting, and for a tech author those sales numbers are not too shabby.

I choose the word “interesting” carefully. It’s interesting. But it’s not exactly useful. If these geographic sales charts show that I was consistently selling quite well in Amarillo, Texas, I might be inclined to see what’s going on down there. But the sales basically hit exactly where I expect: Silicon Valley, Washington DC, RTP, NYC, with others trailing.

An author can spend hours trawling through his sales data this way. It’s interesting, but: this data doesn’t help you sell books. It makes sense that you’d kill a couple hours the first time you get the data, but as an ongoing thing, it just takes up time. You’d be better off writing.

Author Central also gives graphs of how your books as a whole, or all your books, sell over time.

Looking at this, I might think “Wow. What did I do the week of March 7, 2011? Why did that book do so well that week? And how can I repeat this?” The answer is, I didn’t do anything. This sales spike had nothing to do with me. I wrote a good book. Someone ordered a bunch of copies, perhaps for a test, perhaps for their company, or perhaps because the paper the book is printed on is thin and soft. All I can do is be appreciative of “the folks who bought my book,” whoever they are.

The more insidious question would be: “why have my sales dropped since then?” I have an easy answer. My print sales have dropped, but my ebook sales have increased. Also, technology books have a lifespan. I’m pleasantly stunned that the five-year-old Absolute FreeBSD is still selling this well, but I have no right to expect this trend to continue.

It’s conceivable that I might find a use for this data. If my books consistently sell well in Amarillo, a place not known for its high tech business, I’d probably want to investigate and see what’s happening down there. Perhaps I would somehow use Amarillo in a new book, to give a nod to that readership. But the data fits my expectations, so it won’t change anything I do.

Also, this graph contains data. X number of book Y sold in Week Z. Those are real numbers. Not terribly useful, but interesting.

Now consider the Amazon Author Rank graph.

On October 5th, I was the #11,117th most popular author on Amazon. Think about that for a moment.

What is popularity? How is it calculated? What is that supposed to mean? Is that an average based on the sales of all of my books, or my sales in aggregate? How are authors ranked? Without this kind of knowledge, this chart isn’t data. It’s an arbitrary rank, no better than Klout. I’d actually find my Scalzi Number more useful; I know how that’s calculated, and hence could derive a shallow meaning from it.

This number will cause an author some kind of emotional reaction. Maybe they’re disappointed that 11,116 authors are more popular than them. Maybe they’re thrilled that hundreds of thousands of authors are less popular than them. Either way, this reaction does not help an author with their craft.

Ranking authors by some unknown popularity algorithm? It’s like high school all over again, and just as meaningful.

When this feature just came out, I exchanged tweets with other authors about it. Chris Sanders, author of Practical Packet Analysis, shared with the world that his author rank was 9425, a few thousand higher than mine.

I agree that his Practical Packet Analysis is a good book. But what am I to draw from him having a higher Amazon rank than I do?

I write the books I write. My Network Flow Analysis is the best book I can create on netflow. PPA is the best book Chris could write about Wireshark. Comparing them isn’t really possible: they’re different topics, different audiences, and completely different books. Even though both are books about networking, they are utterly different in purpose, execution, and readership.

And what does the difference mean? Does his one book sell more copies than all of my books compared together sell less than his? Could be. Even if his books outsell mine twenty-five to one, does it matter to me?

One of the very worst things an author can do is start comparing himself to other authors. That way lies despair and heartbreak. If I measured my success against Dean Koontz or James Patterson, or even Richard Stevens, I’d give up writing altogether. Because my books aren’t their books, my audience isn’t their audience, and my career is not their career. I write the best books I can. And my audience finds them useful enough to buy them. That’s enough.

You want to be a more popular author? Write the best books you can. Continuously work to improve your craft. Become a better author, and readers will come. Don’t get involved in high-school popularity contests, especially ones that offer no benefit to your career, your craft, or your ego.

Personally, I’m going to ignore Author Rank. I see no use for it. The best thing you can do is shut up and write.

And lest someone gets the wrong idea, I like Chris. If I get to Charleston, I plan to look him up and see if he’s free for lunch. I’m sure he knows where to get good barbeque. Mind you, he can pay for it. He’s the big-name popular author, after all.

Hey, maybe Author Rank isn’t completely useless…