Michael Lucas – Page 15 – Michael W Lucas

January 10, 2023

“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.

January 6, 2023January 18, 2023

2022 Income Sources

Here’s where my money came from in 2022. (For those seeing these for the first time, I did similar posts in 2019, 2020, and 2021.)

I’m a writer. My income comes from writing books and making them available. I publish both independently and through publishers. I don’t consult. I don’t seek out speaking fees. I desire to make my living as an author, creating and licensing intellectual property. I make my books available in every channel that offers reasonable terms.

How did 2022 look?

First off, my income is down about 20% since 2021. This is not a surprise. In 2020 and 2021, lots of folks stayed home and read. In 2022, pandemic or not, people sick of the isolation burst out into the world and read less. But the percentages might interest you.

Here’s the detail.

Here’s my rough conclusions.

First and foremost, I want to draw attention to income through my web site. Direct sales, 18.57%. Direct Patronizers, 6.34%. Sponsorships, 5.33%, and direct preorders, 2.38%. Taken all together, 32.62% of my income coming from sales through my web site.

Amazon provides 31.35%.

Amazon is no longer my biggest income source. I’m gonna say that again.

AMAZON IS NO LONGER MY BIGGEST INCOME SOURCE.

My biggest source of income is now my web site. People paying me directly. My goal of disintermediation works.

Yes, they’re only 1.27% apart. It’s a win by a nose. But I’ll take it.

This is personally important right now because I’m cutting Amazon off as a distributor of my new tech ebooks. OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems will not be available on Amazon’s Kindle store. You can get Kindle copies everywhere but Amazon. Achieving this right now means it’s a fair comparison.

Mind you, it’s not entirely fair.

I have a Patreon, but I also host a Patreon-like program on my web site. To be a sincerely fair comparison, I would have to combine the Amazon and Patreon income. I haven’t done that math, because I have the answer I want. My web site brings in more than Amazon, I’m content.

For the record, I neither hate nor love Amazon. They are a retailer. They offer a variety of no-negotiation deals. I accept some. I reject others. I must not become dependent on, nor vulnerable to, any one business partner. Losing Amazon would hurt. I’d survive.

Kickstarter income for Prohibition Orcs is number three, but that’s deceptive. Kickstarters have fulfillment costs. I’ll post details on those once the campaign closes, but here’s a taste.

Between Kickstarter backers and Patronizers, that’s fifty Orcibuses I must mail. (Which reminds me, I must add the Orcibus to my web site. It’s a backer exclusive and not commercially available, but I should acknowledge it.) They cost over $600 to print, let alone mail. Most of these will get orc-leather covers.

So, yeah. Kickstarter is great, except for the ratio of income to expenses. The discoverability is delightful, though.

Traditional publishing income isn’t very large but to be fair, I haven’t published anything traditionally for a few years. I’m in discussions to do so, however.

IngramSpark is “print paperback sales outside of Amazon, and all hardcovers.” Definitely worth doing. I use Amazon’s print program for paperbacks sold within Amazon.

After that, we have the smaller players. Gumroad, Apple, Kobo, Draft2Digital, and so on are ebook retailers. Are these tiny places worth selling through? Absolutely. Those nickels spend. If you bought the best ereader on the market and shop the Kobo store, I want you to buy my books.

The last item here, Findaway? That’s for audiobooks. Audiobook, really. I only have one. This math has made up my mind, however. Authors have reported problems with audiobook accounting for years now, and I believe I’ve sold more than one audiobook in the last year. I’ll be pulling the Savaged by Systemd audiobook from Audible and all other retail channels and making it an exclusive on my web site.

I’ve done these analyses for four years. That’s a little early to start looking for trends, but graphs are easy to create so let’s try it.

Here are the trends over the last four years. For legibility, I have excluded all the sub-1% channels.

It’s a bit much to call any of these entries “trends.” Kickstarter, direct Patronizers, and direct preorders have squeezed other channels down. But if I aggregate all of the items I offer through my web site, there’s something slightly interesting.

Each year I add options to my web store, like offering bundles of all the tech books and all the novels and collections. I thought nobody would buy either, and that maintaining them would be more work than they were worth. I was wrong. The more different types of stuff I offer for direct sale, the bigger share of my income comes from my web site. Imagine that.

One could argue that Kickstarter and standard Patreon should count as disintermediated. Both offer far better deals than I get from any standard book retailer, and Kickstarter seems great for discovery. Both are external web sites, external dependencies, so they are absolutely not disintermediated.

I could count those as “non-retailer” income, however. (My web site is a retailer from where you sit, but my business does not consider it as such.) Let’s see what that does to the graph.

This looks like… a trend?

Non-retailer income is now 47%. Almost half. And consistently increasing. Yes, these sales cannibalize my retailer sales, but Amazon pays me about 70% of cover price and my store pays me about 95% so I can’t complain.

I am stunned. This is incredibly cool. I can’t walk away from retail, but perhaps one day I can somehow deprioritize it.

The truth is, I can take no credit for this trend. My readers looked at their options and said “Yeah, let’s give him our cash directly.” I built it. You came. Thank you.

Part of me still wants to shout “GAZE UPON MY WORKS, YE BEZOS, AND DESPAIR.” Who am I kidding, though? Amazon does not care. I am not worth an hour of a helpdesk tech’s time.

But I care. A lot. Thank you all.

(PS: Someone always asks, “Why don’t you share actual dollar figures?” Declaring my income inevitably leads to people telling me that I can’t possibly be making that much, other people telling me I don’t deserve to make that much, and still other people trying to get “the secret” out of me. It not only steals my time, it increases my annoyance. Not worth it. I will say that I make less than I would in any tech position, but more than most authors.)

January 3, 2023

The Terminal Brag Shelf

An author’s brag shelf is where they keep one copy of every edition of everything they’ve published. The problem with a practicing writer’s brag shelf is that it needs more and more space. I mean, look at this from 2017.

That’s respectable, I think. Many authors built their careers around that many books. Fast forward three years, though, and it doesn’t look so tidy.

Fine. I’ll recycle an old bookcase for my brag shelf. As of November, it looked like this.

brag shelf 2022

As they say on social media: oh no.

It was time to deal with this once and for all. I’m about halfway through my writing career, and unlikely to become considerably more prolific than I am. I counted the number of shelf-feet I have consumed so far, doubled it, and bought the next size up. Allow me to present the Terminal Brag Shelf, which should suffice to hold everything I write for the rest of my life.

The bottommost shelf holds duplicates, so they don’t count. I got the wrong doors from Ikea, so I have to return them and get doors that are fully glass. Because what’s the point of having a brag shelf that hides things away? If you’ve made it to my office, you deserve the full experience.

Unfortunately, seeing everything neatly arranged here with lots of room for more books, more room than I can possibly write to fill, my first thought was: I must overflow this bastard.

Oh no.

December 30, 2022

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.

December 29, 2022

“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.

December 27, 2022

“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.

December 23, 2022December 23, 2022

“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.

December 15, 2022

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.

December 12, 2022

the complete Montague Portal redux, in hardcover

I posted yesterday about Amazon putting the complete Montague Portal for Kindle on sale for $5.85. They still pay me $7 a sale, so each time you buy one Bezos adds his own dollar to my payment. It’s pretty clear that they’ll clear a profit if you buy this book and one other ebook. Okay, that makes sense.

But now they’ve put the hardcover on sale for $5.85, at least in the US and UK. (Reports in other countries are mixed. I have no clue what’s happening.)

At first, I thought this was to clear out unsold copies. Amazon predicts how many hardcovers of a new title they’ll need, which is fine. They buy ahead, which is also fine. Their prediction algorithm lumps my fiction and nonfiction together, which is completely inaccurate but I’m okay with it.

But no. They are ordering new hardcovers from IngramSpark, at full retail price, to fill these purchases.

Amazon loses about $15 for every hardcover you buy.

I do not understand their business model. Risking a buck, sure, I can see that. I am torn between “they are playing 4d chess” and “their algorithm is drunk.” (“Both” is a valid answer.) What I do know is that if this bright future SF exploration crime series has ever tempted you, you should grab this deal. No idea how long it will last, if it will spread to other countries, or if Jeff will send legbreakers out to collect his $15 from each of you.

Note that while Amazon only lets each account buy an ebook once, you can buy as many hardcovers as you like. Each purchase costs Amazon $15 plus fulfillment. Just saying.

Oh, and if you use my affiliate links above? They throw a few extra pennies in my pocket. The phrase “guilding the lily” comes to mind, but it turns out I’m okay with that.

December 11, 2022

The complete Montague Portal on sale for $5.85 at Amazon

My book Aidan Redding Against the Universes, Kindle version, is on sale for $5.85 at Amazon US and Amazon UK. If you buy it, Amazon will pay me $7.

Seriously. You can cost Amazon money by buying one of my books.

You get three novels and two stories–Forever Falls, Hydrogen Sleets, Drinking Heavy Water, Sticky Supersaturation, and No More Lonesome Blue Rings–for a bit over $1 each.

I have no idea how long this deal will last. I have no idea why they picked me. But as I write this, it’s a thing. You will never find it cheaper, unless some vendor discounts it again.