Author: Michael Lucas

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of November, and the public in December. A buck a month gets you early access and more.

These posts need titles, so I go for alliteration. Alliteration gives me an excuse to grab my primordial Oxford English Dictionary. I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t think folks quite appreciate what a font of wordage it is.

It’s ninety years old and smells like knowledge.

Anyway, it’s been quite a month. The Apocalypse Moi Kickstarter is now completely fulfilled. Just as I was writing this sentence, though, the doorbell rang. UPS dropped off two packages, and—yep. It’s two copies of the book, dropshipped from the printer. They were supposed to go to backers. Instead, they went to me. Did I screw up entering the address? Possible. Did the printer screw up? Very possible. Did the printer’s obtuse web-based ordering system refresh inconveniently and overwrite my meticulously hand-entered shipping address with the default address? Screechingly possible. Each has a shipping slip with an order number, so I get to go through the orders and figure out who got shorted.

Or maybe the printer got carried away and shipped me extra books. That happens, too.

If it wasn’t for the lack of conference calls, I’d call this the worst business ever. But then I’d remember working in the auto industry and realize it’s not nearly that bad.

Anyway. That Kickstarter’s over except for the lingering cruft.

I’m to the bit of Run Your Own Mail Server where I get to talk about filtering and greylisting and SPF and all those fun topics. That’s not a huge topic, but it might take me a little longer than I’d like to get through. Which is the story of this book. October was a crunch month for my family. The crunch ends next Monday and I’ll be free to spew words. I’m learning things about email that I didn’t want to know, and details about workarounds that I didn’t want to know. Here’s yesterday.

Postfix’s postscreen(8) performs sanity checks on incoming email connections. Spambots behave badly, taking full advantage of Jon Postel’s original Robustness Principle. Postscreen identifies those bad actors and prevents them from talking to the SMTP server. Seems fine, right?

Postscreen has optional checks that are intrusive. It does most of the SMTP transaction and, if the client behaves well throughout, adds the client’s address to a temporary allowlist. The problem is, it can’t forward that connection to the mail handler. Instead, it gives the client a 400 error to say “I’m sorry, I can’t finish this right now, please come back later.” That’s a normal part of the email protocol. When the client returns, postscreen sees the address on the allowlist and steers it straight to the SMTP server. Simple enough.

Some of you might recognize that as greylisting. Greylisting is a controversial topic that I’m not gonna get into right now, but it is what it is. How does one get email delivered immediately, while still performing sanity checks? In theory, when a mail client can’t deliver to the primary mail server, it should immediately try the backup. Small sites don’t need a backup mail server.

But you can make a faux backup server.

Add a second IP address to your mail server. List it as the backup MX.

The client goes to the primary MX, passes the intrusive tests, and gets the 400 error. It immediately goes to the second MX. That’s the same host, so it has the same temporary allowlist. The mail is immediately accepted. You need to set up the backup MX address so that SMTP connections that arrive there cannot be added to the allowlist, but that’s included in Postfix.

So I go and set this up. I dig through Vultr’s web interface until I find how to get a second IP address and how to add it to a host. I add a second IPv6 address to that test host. Reboot everything, make sure all the connectivity works. Set up Postfix as a faux backup MX, adjust the DNS records. None of this is advanced work, but it’s tedious and annoying and type-prone. But at last everything looks correct, so I go to my other test host and send an email.

The test host tries the IPv4 address, and gets a 400. Good.

The test host tries the IPv6 address. 400. Good.

And then… it stops.

Postfix doesn’t try the backup MX. Why not?

I go to my old mail server, the one that’s running Sendmail. It gets a 400, immediately tries the backup MX, and sails through. Exactly the way it should. I’ll be trying with gmail today, see what they do. While gmail retries delay-queued mail from different IP addresses, I have no idea if the immediate retries change addresses. It’s an interesting test.

But I worked in IT for decades. I know perfectly well that if someone deployed this in the real world and something went wrong with an incoming message, a manager would ask “Are they on the list?” Because that’s what they ask. That meant I had to figure out how to interrogate the allowlist cache. This is not a public Postfix interface, and Postfix’s developer never intended that people should poke at it. I have no problem telling people “this isn’t meant for you, and it might change in the future, and you shouldn’t rely on any of the other data it reveals, but here’s how you glimpse at it.” But that still leaves me figuring out how to grovel through the stupid cache. Turns out you have to specify the cache format on the command line, a hint which appears nowhere in the documentation because you’re not supposed to go poking at the cache.

Anyway.

That’s a day. Forty words written, and I still don’t know why Postfix didn’t immediately try the backup MX.

The fiction crashed to a halt this month, because of aforementioned family crunch. That’ll restart next month. I owe the world an orc baseball story. I’ve figured out how to make that a short story, finally. One of the rules to making a story short is to limit the number of characters, but a baseball team has nine players, so I’d just like to say oops this was a terrible idea.

Ah well. Live and learn. Learn something that will do you absolutely no good in the future, because part of you already knew it.

I’ve taken sponsorships on the mail book, but I’m pondering doing a Kickstarter for it anyway. Sponsors and Patronizers will get theirs, of course, but there’s a broad pool of folks who want a thing to be ready to produce before they buy it. I’m also pondering stretch goals like “for $25k, I will put the book contents on a public web site.” I’d still have the book in stores, of course. But the ebook won’t be available on Kindle. Heck, the way this book is going the ebook might be $19.99. It’s gonna be freaking huge. Anyway, that Kickstarter and such stretch goals is just idle fancy. Some authors have good results with making their books public. For others, it destroys sales.

Which am I?

Only one way to find out, and the test costs only a year’s work.

That’s it for this month. Thanks for Patronizing me. Onward!

You might have noticed that I’ve stopped publishing my shorter fiction on third-party bookstores like Amazon and Kobo and whatnot. If it’s not credibly a novel by historical standards¹, it’s in my store. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity when someone asks me about my business model, I make a lot of noise about the importance of having your work available on every platform. Why would I break my own rule? Because I’m okay with exclusivity, so long as it’s mine.

My short stories have a publication life cycle. The good ones I publish as stand-alone chapbooks. (The bad ones get thrown in the Pit, where the stronger devour the weaker. It’s not nice, but go ask David Attenborough how nature works.) When I have enough stories on a theme, I gather them into a collection, Kickstart it, and unpublish the chapbooks. Publishing a title on every retailer takes about four to five hours. Unpublishing takes about the same, because while unpublishing requires less information, interfaces optimized for offering something to the world are often anti-optimized for undoing that. I have to expect to make a few hundred bucks to be worth the time.

As I’ve discussed earlier, Amazon penalizes pricing books outside the $2.99-$9.99 range. I’ve been forced to price my short stories at $2.99, even though I think $1.99 is a more fair price. I carried that price across all platforms. For years people bought them at that price, until suddenly they stopped.

I had no idea why they stopped. It’s not like I can reach out to people who buy through Amazon.

But after this had gone on for a while, I asked a couple folks who signed up for my Patronizer program. (It’s Patreon, except you can use either Patreon proper or go direct with me.) Every one of them gave me the same answer: “I used to buy your stories, but now I send you money every month and get them for free.”

Obvious, really. I have successfully disintermediated many of my short fiction readers! Yay me!

That’s old readers, though. But what about discoverability? Having more work in a bookstore prioritizes you in their algorithm. My fiction career is not as strong as my nonfiction career, surely I need all the help I can get. Uh… have you looked at my fiction name over at Amazon? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Supposedly the more titles you have, the more likely it is that the Almighty Algorithm will bless you with virality. I do not chase algorithms, because The Algorithm giveth and The Algorithm taketh away. Yes, this business requires luck–but I prefer relying on the kind of luck that looks a lot like hard work, and relying on goals rather than dreams (a topic I discuss in unreasonable depth in Domesticate Your Badgers.)

Having short stories exclusively on my bookstore lets me price them at $1.99. I think that’s a fair price. After fees I make about $1.60 on each sale, which beats the heck out of Amazon’s ~$0.65 for a $1.99 tale. I no longer lose a full day on the publishing/unpublishing cycle. I’ll still publish full-length books everywhere that offers a reasonable contract, but the short stories will stay with me for now.

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The new story’s on my bookstore. Imagine Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but it’s weird modern fantasy. I have almost enough of these tales to Kickstart a collection, but many of them are sitting in various trad pub channels awaiting rejection.

“Hey Lucas, what all do you offer on your web store?”

I have had to answer this question three times, mostly from other authors looking to build their own web stores. A couple of the big ebook-selling platforms are clearly embracing enshittification, and interest in disintermediation among creators is greater than I’ve ever seen it. I don’t mind sharing the information, but I do mind writing out the answer more than thrice.

I had some rules in building a web store.

1. NO CUSTOM CODE. I can write code. It has been called “comically evil,” but I can write code. I can hire people to write competent code. Both are bad choices for a teeny-tiny business. I will merrily discuss why in meatspace, but not online.
2. STANDARD PARTS. I will not build a business on an obfuscated WordPress module. I’ll use such modules for side details, but I won’t base the business on them. I want the source code to be readily available and readable. If Woocommerce or WordPress folds, another company will step in to provide maintenance. Same for themes. I’m even using the standard Woocommerce “Storefront” We-Will-Always-Have-This Minimum Viable Theme.
3. HANDOVER READY. It must be simple enough that if one of my books becomes popular and I get to spend all my time writing¹, I can hire a WordPress flunky² and the design won’t shock them. See the two points above.
4. BOOKFUNNEL. WordPress can deliver book files to readers. Life is too short to help people load files on their Kindles, let alone their weird limited-production-run-of-50 hybrid-endian built-into-a-self-cooling-beer-stein devices. Pay someone to do that for you.

According to the Wayback Machine I started the store in May 2013, more than ten years ago. I added these features one at a time. Don’t whinge at me that you can’t do all this or that I’m special. Neither could I, and I’m not. Running your own web store on any platform, Woocommerce or Shopify or whatever, requires competence. You gotta spend the time and learn. Yes, I write books on how to build your own network and run servers, but my Internet skills have no pictures, no sound, and especially no video. When I design web sites, you get my 2012 site. There are reasons I sucked it up and learned stupid WordPress and stupid Woocommerce.

Anyway. The features. With a great big helping of “YMMV” and “who knows why this business works?” What works for me might not for you, and the reverse.

• The most vital feature I have is “Name Your Price.” It lets people overpay. About half my customers throw a little extra in my kibble bowl. Sometimes they throw a lot.
• “Treat the Rats” is the tip jar. Before Name Your Price, it was a couple grand a year. Now it’s a couple hundred a year but, hey, the rats gotta eat.
• Bundles like All the Fiction, All the Tech Books, This Entire Series. “The Full Michael” is everything I publish indie. (I even had a photo of me to play off The Full Monty.)
• Bundle Exclusives. The orc kickstarter had a stretch goal of a tiny 6-recipe orcish cookbook, because a friend of mine wanted to do it. That book is only available if you buy the orc bundle direct from me. It lures people in. I intend to do more of these. Also, multiple people have reported that “Beans With Found Meat” is delicious. Weirdly, nobody has reported back after trying the “Longest Dark” orcish holiday punch.
• Sponsorships. “I’m writing this book, and for $30 you get your name in the back of the ebook. For $100 you go in the back of the print and the ebook.” Sponsorship is the only way you can get a personalized signed copy of a book without meeting me in person. Signed Kickstarter books, I just write my name. Unless I know you and want to engage in recreational trolling, of course.
• My loss leader freebies are all in my store. A few people grab them. Those readers have indicated a willingness to go direct immediately and I gleefully welcome them.
• My Patreon work-alike. It’s the exact same benefits as Patreon, but the money goes straight to me. The downside is, I spend a thousand bucks a year on the WordPress plugins to do that. (The free options all annoyed me or didn’t work as I needed.) I have a sufficient number of direct Patronizers to keep that up. Plus, it lets me offer weird things like a special “29 February” option in 2024. (Pay four years of the highest level in advance, save 10%!)
• Standalone short stories are now exclusive to my store. Once upon a time I made a few hundred bucks per indie story at outside retailers, but once I started the Patronizer program and said “$5/month gives you everything I release indie,” that dried up. Turns out all the short story buyers are now Patronizers. Ah, well. I still make out okay. If I hire my own publisher, I might reverse this decision.
• Mechandise. Shirts and stickers and such, via Redbubble. Failed experiment. Print on demand is expensive. Very few folks buy these, so I’ve stopped adding new things except by request.
• The Audiobook. Yes, I have one. Consider yourself warned.

I still haven’t figured out how to hook the checkout process into my mailing list signup, so folks can click a box during check-out to sign up. There’s a plugin for that. It bit me. In its defense, I have three mailing lists and they’re all stupid.

That’s it. You can do all this too. With a willingness to spend time, to learn, and to get back up after you fail. Just like the rest of being a writer.

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