A few years ago I switched from delivering books via WordPress downloads to Bookfunnel. Now and then, folks ask why. “Because it reduces my pain without escalating yours” is trite, but true. Here’s the full explanation.
When I first opened tiltedwindmillpress.com, I provided files at obfuscated filenames. By the third direct sale, someone had shared the link to eleven thousand of their closest friends. Pirating my books is a jerk move, but pirating them off my own server is downright insulting.
Woocommerce provides access controls for downloads, letting me limit the number of downloads. I set it to ten and moved on.
That eventually caused problems, though. Now and then someone would need to redownload their books more than ten times. People want help loading their files onto devices. Woocommerce’s download management is clunky, probably because they didn’t anticipate my use case. Bundles like The Full Michael took hours of painstaking labor to update. (I don’t remember if I actually launched TFM before Bookfunnel, but the thought of doing it the old way causes keyboard-trashing shudders, so my body certainly remembers.)
Bookfunnel lets me provide epub, mobi, and PDF, all easily labeled. If you create an account at https://my.bookfunnel.com, they’ll let you redownload your books as many times as you like. When I update a book, updates actually propagate across the accounts. They can help you load your ebooks onto whatever weird ereader you own. I pay them for this service specifically so they leave my customers the heck alone.
Yes, having my readers’ email addresses in the hands of an exploitative firm would suck. I am highly confident that exploitative firms already have that information, however. Many of you use disposable or filterable addresses for exactly that reason. I would take the money I spend on Bookfunnel and give it to a WordPress contractor to have them manage the files, or to even write a Woo-compatible WordPress plugin for ebook management.
So: ease of management, ease of re-downloads, and help loading books on your devices. That’s why.
Yesterday, the copyedits on Run Your Own Mail Server returned. This means that today I’ll be setting up a Discord and integrating into my Patronizer systems to replace the Video Hangout level, writing the next column for the FreeBSD Journal and, coincidentally, the last column for Dear Abyss. I asked Simon Travaglia if he’d be interested in doing a foreword but he sensibly declined, so I guess I better write something to introduce that travesty. (I’m open on suggestions for people to approach, mind you.)
Anyway.
Once I complete the copyedits, I start on the page layout.
Once I complete page layout, I order print proofs and make the ebook.
The print proof is my absolute last chance to fix errors. At that point, I turn off preorders and order sponsor, Patronizer, Kickstarter, and preorder copies.
I have no date for this. Depends on if the copyeditor can cause me as much pain as I caused her.
(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of June, and the public at the beginning of July.)
“The deck is clear, projects are ready to go, I’m ready to WRITE!”
One lovely Friday night in May, She Who Must Be Obeyed finished teaching for the summer. The following Sunday, at five AM, she broke her leg.
You look alarmed, so I’ll say now: she will fully recover.
The next couple weeks were a blur. The third week, where she could take care of herself enough that I could do some work, are also a blur–but mostly because I was doing tech edits on Run Your Own Mail Server. The Kickstarter was scheduled to start on 20 May, and I had invested a bunch of energy in shilling it, so I didn’t want to push it back, but my stupid conscience demanded I have the book in copyedit before launching the Kickstarter. Why would I launch a Kickstarter on a book I’m not ready to deliver? I also had to finish writing two four-hour courses, one on email and one on TLS, for BSDCan. So, I launched the Kickstarter and got ready for BSDCan.
You remember my last Sausage post? Where I said I thought that the direct market for RYOMS was exhausted? I hoped I might gross seven, maybe ten thousand?
I was wrong.
So very wrong.
This is insane
And the dang thing isn’t over! I’m going to be shipping over 500 books. I might need to buy help doing that, particularly for the drop-shipped copies. Despite that complaint, you’d be helping me out if you’d share the campaign.
Part of the reason I set the Kickstarter to run over BSDCan was that I was teaching about email, and wanted to mention that the Kickstarter existed. I thought it might sell a couple more books. Also, I thought that if I was busy being the BSDCan con chair, I couldn’t spend my days obsessively reloading the Kickstarter page to see if anyone bid. The con chair role mainly consisted of pointing at volunteers and saying “You. You are empowered to make this Thing happen. Go. Do.” Plus, I’d deal with any last-minute disasters.
You ever start a week-long con exhausted? Because I sure did. It was a loooong week. Fortunately, SWMBO was more able to care for herself, so I was able to go at all. (If I hadn’t been chair, I would have canceled.)
So, yeah. Very few new words this month, and those all on polishing RYOMS. I hope to change that this month.
The eight hour drive home from BSDCan gave me time to ponder the world and my place in it. One thing I’ve been contemplating is my Patronizer rewards. The video hangout tier was popular during the covid lockdown. We still have covid, but we’re not in lockdown. I often start the video hangout and nobody shows up.
I’m contemplating dropping the monthly video hangout, replacing it with a quarterly all-Patronizer hangout: two in my morning, and two in my evening. That would give everyone a chance to show up.
I would replace the Monthly Video Hangout tier with a private chat. I would check the chat at least 2-3 times a week. The question is, what platform? Signal would be preferable, but its anonymity means it doesn’t integrate well with Patreon or Woocommerce. I’m familiar with Slack. Matrix and Discord annoy me. The catch would be, I’d demand that such a chat be family-friendly. Perhaps Addams Family friendly, but family friendly. That means moderation. I don’t know if I want to do that labor.
So, pondering. Video hangout subscribers, I’m open to your thoughts.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for RYOMS to return from copyedit. While books like SNMP Mastery covered complex material, that material could easily be chunked. It’s the most complex and interrelated book I’ve ever written. It does not break into chunks. Everything depends on everything. That meant painstaking interleaving of information, in a weird order that looks clunky but is the only way to approach the material. There’s reasons nobody else wrote this book. I have several outstanding anthology invitations, so I’m gonna break up my mental logjam and write some short fiction for a little bit. My brain is tired after the last few months.
I’m looking at the RYOMS Kickstarter and thinking I should do that revision of Networking for System Administrators I’ve been pondering. The cover art will need mushrooms, however.
Before then, though, I’ll launch Dear Abyss. Which might make two grand, if I’m very lucky. A collection of previously published honest advice columns is of much less interest than running a mail server. Even if “honest” means “bitter and cynical.” We’re talking sysadmin stuff, after all.
Sorry for the dearth of news, but it’s been a crap month. Do let me know what you think about the chat thing, however.
The “We Get Letters” column of the FreeBSD Journal is my opportunity to subtweet the Sysadmin Discourse of the Day. There’s far more than one Discourse between issues but let’s be real, most of the discourse isn’t worthy of discussion.
Anyway, I talk configuration management in the newest issue. My column appears first in the magazine, which I’m certain means something. Probably that the editor has been kidnapped and he’s asking his friends to rescue him, but that specifically excludes me so it’s not my problem.
If you like the column, you might grab the Letters to Ed(1) collection, containing the first three years of these columns. It will go out of print soon, because I’ll be publishing the Dear Abyss collection of years 1-6. But hey! Letters to Ed(1) will become a collectors item!
This bundle is full of great stuff. Gleason, Pope, and Carriger and titans of steampunk. I read Kilgore and Sawyer quite regularly. Rusch’s magnificent Fey series is early steampunk. The other authors and editors, well, given by the company they’re in, I have high expectations for them all.
If Tolkien’s elves went West to America, then eventually, the orcs would follow.
Michael takes that silly idea and weaves a sometimes funny, sometimes touching tale of how those poor orcs could survive in Detroit of the 1920s.
Being big and strong, they get manual labor jobs. Dirty work that nobody else wants to do.
And, given half a chance, they become what the Purple Gang only dreamed about- the best rum-runners in the mid-west.
The plots get complex. Unlike most fantasy stories, these orcs have real motivations, consistent behavior, and rich lives as they adapt to a world they never imagined.
And the orcs are likeable characters. Maybe not your first choice for a dinner companion, but characters you fall in love with and want to see succeed.
And they do succeed, but not the way you expect.
A couple folks have told me that Prohibition Orcs is not steampunk, but dieselpunk. They’re too early for dieselpunk. They’re too late for steampunk. There won’t be a ProhibitionPunk, however, because anyone who understands punk knows that Prohibition was arguably the most punk era of American history. The system failed people, so they did it themselves. There’s literal steam in the orc books, what with boilers and repurposed steam locomotives powering factories, along with giant mechanical systems and the general cleverness of steampunk, so I’m going to say they belong in steampunk as much as they belong anywhere. Perhaps with a bit more emphasis on the punk than the steam, however.
So grab the Storybundle while you can. A chunk of your purchase goes to help Girls On The Run.
The last time I did a print sale (for OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems), I offered options. From that sale, I learned that I am easily confused and should not offer options. This time I’m keeping things simple.
You can order a paperback or a hardback. It’s slightly more expensive than retail, because managing shipping is actual work that takes me away from writing.
When the books are ready to print, I will close this sale and order the sponsor, Kickstarter, and direct order copies in one gigantic heap. I will send out the ebooks a day or two after that.
Books will be shipped to me. I will open the boxes and sign them one after the other. I will print shipping labels, stuff books into envelopes, and request the post office schedule the Pickup Of Doom.
That’s it. Nothing fancy. No extra books, sorry.
This is the only way you can now get a signed book without finding me in meatspace. I am looking at ways to integrate drop-shipping print books into my web store, but none of them are quite satisfactory yet. Several printers are close–but not quite there. Either they have great Woocommerce integration but only ship from one location, or they dropship globally but have terrible integration. It’s very frustrating.
All I can say is “what?”1966 backers. $76,833. I have never received that much for a single title in a single lump. The Absolute books might each $40,000 over their publishing lifetime, spread over years, occasionally boosted by Humble Bundles and the like. This is stunning. My gratitude to everyone. Some comments, in no particular order. I could put them in order, if my brain wasn’t fried from screaming NUMBER GO UP! NUMBER GO UP! all weekend.
31% of pledges were referred by Kickstarter. I suspect that’s from the “Project We Love” algorithm.
The dashboard gives referrers for incoming links. 55% of incoming traffic was “Direct traffic or no referrer information. The big social media sites like Facebook and Hacker News show up as referrers. So, what’s that 55%? It’s some sort of web site. I suspect it’s the Fediverse, aka “Mastodon and friends.”
What the heck? What the absolute heck??? How did any book I write bring in this kind of money?
The catch with Kickstarter is, of course, that I don’t get to keep the money. Half of it goes to fulfillment. Half of what remains gets held back for taxes. What remains is a nice chunk of cash, but I need a new car and some roof work. (I’m 57 years old and the roof is a 45-degree slope, I no longer climb up there.)
