82: Lying to All Sides

Project IDGAF is complete, so I’m back on the new Networking for System Administrators.

Network address translation, or NAT, uses a device that accepts packets bound for the public Internet, rewrites them so they appear to come from the NAT device’s public address, and forwards them to their destination. When the remote site answers, the NAT device rewrites the response so that it goes to the original client. The NAT device maintains a table of connections, and tracks the state of each connection so that it can properly open and close connections as needed. Most home routers are NAT devices. While NAT seems easy, it involves lying to all sides of a network connection, and not all protocols can handle those lies. Common examples are FTP, VoIP, and certain sorts of VPN, which all require special handling to traverse NAT. The network administrator can apply filters to NAT devices to block some, but not all, unwanted traffic. NAT is not a security mechanism—the minimal protection NAT offers was broken decades ago. IPv6 specifically excludes NAT.

I hung up some cloth to muffle the roomy sound. We’ll see if that helps. Also, N4SA2e is still available for sponsorship.

81: An Occasional Meal

Zeno’s Paradox of Book Endings is well in play for Project IDGAF. Only a couple scenes left, but damn if this book ain’t fighting me hard.

Thirty years of honorable service, and it all came down to a house he couldn’t take proper care of and a pension that didn’t quite cover his meals and a hippie granddaughter who liked the wrong kind of boy.

Of the three, Colonel Wittstock worried the most about his granddaughter Katie. Katrina to everyone else, but his love had been Katrina and he’d called her Katie and they were so much like one another that he couldn’t call her anything else.

Smart, she was. Smart like a flick knife. She’d had trouble at that fancy LA school so her dad had decided that Wittstock needed a caretaker. Sure, he forgot things sometimes, but missing an occasional meal hadn’t done him any harm serving in Asia and it wouldn’t hurt him now. You miss one day eating, you enjoy tomorrow’s meals that much more. The bills got paid, eventually. Thinking about it, though, he hadn’t seen a power bill in a while. Had Katie been poking in his mail? No, she didn’t have that much money. Maybe his meddling son had called the power company, told some stories. It was good for a son to help out his dad. He’d done the same. But Wittstock didn’t need that kind of help, even if he’d forgotten a few times.

This week’s episode brought to you by Patronizer JM who donated a really good mic to me. It came with a spit shield and everything!

Direct Print Sales now shipping from US, UK, Australia, AND… Canada

Delivering books to Canada has long been a pain in my butt. I live in Detroit, Michigan. Canada’s right there! I can walk a mile to the shore, throw a rock, and hit a poutine wagon. But no matter how I stretch, I can’t get tiger tail and I can’t cheaply mail books there. It’s cheaper for me to ship to some parts of Europe and Asia than it is to ship to Toronto.

I just discovered that my direct print sales fulfillment printer, BookVault, now prints from Canada. I hit the button to enable that so fast, you’d think it was offering tiger tail delivery. The books will be printed in Winnipeg, and shipped within Canada via their postal system. I have not tested BV’s Canadian printer. I can’t; if I order a book here, they’ll print it in the US.

If you’re Canadian and want one of the books I’m selling direct, do try it and let me know.

February’s Fervid Sausage

This See the Sausage Being Made post went to my esteemed Patronizers at the beginning of February, and will go to the public in March. Not a Patronizer? You could be.

One of the advantages of being a self-employed writer is that my schedule is infinitely flexible. I can work any hours I want, so long as I work them. The down side is that everybody knows my hours are endlessly flexible, and when there’s a family emergency I get elected to cope. A sane society would have supports for medical emergencies, but this is the United States and everything is terrible.

Still, words are being made. I hope to have Project IDGAF finished by the end of February, and the new Networking for Systems Administrators done by the end of March. As Douglas Adams said, “deadlines are wonderful: I love to hear the whooshing noise they make as they shoot past.” Still gonna try to make them. The Windows examples in N4SA2e are pure PowerShell, which has been an education. PowerShell has an interesting and design that makes many things possible in managing Windows. Unfortunately, it’s burdened by managing Windows. Want to look at a network interface? Great! There’s several different commands for doing that, each slightly different! It has a built-in select command for grabbing columns out of the output, rather like the bastard child of SQL and awk. You have to have that, because the output of any one of these commands might be hundreds of characters wide. If you can remember which of the several similar commands you need to look at, that is.

Anyway. Windows admins need network competence too.

Once that’s done, I’ll be working on a new ZFS book with Allan and finishing Skybreach. After ZFS, I’m planning a core DNS book.

And now, for some tedious business neepery.

People have been asking me about this new author web site tool, Fourthwall.com. It promises to be all things an author would need: web site, store, monthly patronage, and so on. It pretty well replicates what I built on tiltedwindmillpress.com. They only charge 3% of all sales, plus transaction fees. It seems like a great deal, doesn’t it?

Rather than give an opinion, I’m going to discuss how I decide to use an outside service.

The core postulate of service selection: The Internet’s business model is betrayal. Amazon was willing to lose millions of dollars a year until they achieved market domination. Once they crushed the competition, they promptly raised prices. Uber spent millions to destroy taxis. It’s not just the Internet, of course; look at the devastation Walmart inflicts on community businesses. Short of malice, there’s also inexperience and incompetence. When my first business back in the 90s, I sat down and figured out my cash flow and decided the company would work. My inexperience showed itself through expenses that far outstripped my predictions. I failed. It happens. From my customers’ perspective, I’m certain it felt like betrayal. So: The Internet’s business model is betrayal.

Before using a service provider, ask yourself: if they betray me, what is the cost of no longer doing business with them?

I use BookFunnel to deliver books. They provide ebook delivery, track who has what books, and let buyers re-download their books months or years later. The service costs me $100 a year. I switched to BF because I was spending 20-30 hours a year dealing with delivery and redelivery issues. My time isn’t worth a lot, but is more than $4/hour.

If BookFunnel betrays me, I have to switch back to delivering books myself. I would probably hire a contractor to set up something, or persuade a WordPress developer to write a book delivery system suited not only for my customers but for the customers of every other affected author. In the grand scheme of things, the impact is vexing but minimal.

Mind you, I don’t really expect BF to betray us in the foreseeable future. Why? Because of profitability.

Consider what Bookfunnel does for me? They run a database, a web front end, and provide file downloads. That’s it. The web site doesn’t offer news updates or anything that would lure the Hacker News crowd, so it’s not likely to experience massive traffic and load spikes. Running such a site as a business requires a meticulous attention to detail, but it’s not technically hard. Tens of thousands of authors pay BF $100/year or more for work that can be done on a single rack-mount server. That’s a nice business. They also support author stores, charging fees that are better than Amazon but reasonably profitable for them.

Suppliers need to feed their pet rats. (Or children, whatever.) If a supplier’s business model doesn’t generate enough cash for the supplier to meet their bills, it’s a good sign that the supplier intends to capture and then betray their market.

Just as important as profitability is the path to profitability. I have no idea how BF started, so I’m going to assume it’s the success story I hear over and over.

Some programmer hears their author friend griping about the problems of indie book delivery and thinks, “I could solve that!” They hack together some PHP and Postgres, rent a VM, and pitch it to their author friend. That friend helps them discover the most vexing bugs. Once the thing basically works, that author tells their other author friends how this site solved all their problems.

One hundred dollars a month times one user? Your VM bills are paid and you made a few bucks helping a friend, cool.

Ten users? It’s staring to look like real money.

Fifty users and more signing up every day? Quit the day job and ride this cash cow as far as you can!

Best of all, their customers are technical enough to configure WordPress payment gateways and have enough traffic to consider that $100/month a worthwhile investment over managing files themselves. They’re not complete newbies, and support responses like “update your plugin” require no further explanation.

The path to profitability is obvious and predictable. So is the path to failure.

Let’s consider Fourthwall in those terms, and assume I set up shop there. This example uses novels, because most writers running their own stores are novelists.

The path to profitability? You’re offering every author in the world a free web site and free store! They’re gonna flood in. While file storage is almost free, it’s expensive at scale. Many of those customers will have never set up a real web store before, and are going to have questions.

Writing books is one of the hardest ways to make a living. Selling books as an indie author is even harder. Most authors sell nothing. Three percent of sales? I charge $5 for my novels. That gives Fourthwall $0.15 per sale. Many novelists sell their books for $1 (a terrible practice for anything but loss leaders, but that’s a separate argument). Fourthwall gets $0.03 per sale.

How many three-cent purchases will it take to cover monthly server rental?

The numbers on my tech book sales are slightly higher, but still depressing.

If I ran my site, my store, and my Patronizer program through Fourthwall and they took three percent? They’ll eventually either go out of business and leave me hanging, or be compelled to raise their prices. When either happens, I must drop everything and scramble to replace those services elsewhere.

Again, none of this requires malice. But authors are so prone to falling for scams that entire web sites exist exposing scammers. After thirty-two years kicking around publishing, an honest business is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.

And I might be wrong! I have made claims and been proven wrong before. (Performative Buzzword Compliance is very real, but the specifics of Kickstarter’s case made me wrong. Oh well.)

Being independent is not easy. I opened my bookstore eleven years ago. Getting it to its current state has been long and slow, and I’m still working on integrating print sales into it. I’m hoping that my outside contractor figures out the final shipping problem. I’m a tiny customer so I’ve told them to fit me in wherever.

For the curious, why did I outsource a silly WordPress problem? Because I’ve been fighting this problem for over a year. In the immortal words of ZZ Claybourne, “my job is book.” I don’t want to delve sufficiently deep into WordPress to solve this problem. I’d prefer writing “More SNMP Mastery” or “[ Mastery.”

In other business-related stuff: the new US presidential administration is just as bad for business as I expected. We’ve flipped our spending to Yellow. Business thrives on predictability, and predictability is now in the same narrow niche as the Ford Edsel and the mechanical calculator. While I am always grateful to my Patronizers, my thanks are especially fervid now.

But if I’m gonna get this book done, I better go make some words.

80: Mentally Stable People

I’m gonna finish this book. I’m gonna finish this book. It doesn’t matter how much life tries to stop me, I’m gonna finish this book…

One of the great problems of civilization is disposing of unwanted stuff. Nuclear power means nuclear waste, which remains toxic for tens of millennia and grants superpowers only to untraumatized, mentally stable people, of which there are zero. The obvious solution, of course, is “put it in the trash and make someone else deal with it,” which is our society’s go-to for everything. Instead, responsible folks treat nightmare toxins like they treat busted refrigerators and last week’s garbage; we bury it. Eventually we get an idea for a better place to bury it, so we dig it up and move it. Like a dog with a bone.

You don’t have to bury it. Most food waste you can compost, so long as your neighbors don’t mind the smell or the flies. What you can’t compost you can feed to the raccoons. They’ll love you for it at first, but will soon demand you eat more pork chops and leave more meat on the bones.

Bodies? Bodies are so much trouble to get rid of only because everybody gets weird about freelance disposal. Besides, there’s never a trespass-friendly pig farm around when you need one.

Only a few scenes left, but the ending keeps receding like Zeno’s Paragraph.

Also, we’re only a couple weeks from my next Kickstarter. I should probably mention it here.

“SSH Mastery” now available in print direct from me

The headline kind of says it all, but it won’t let me put a link so I’ll repeat it. If you want SSH Mastery in print you can buy it from me. Unlike any other store, buy the print and you get the no-DRM ebook for free.

Thanks to the number of retail channels I use I have no ability to generate per-title book sales figures, but SSH Mastery is consistently near the top at most of the stores.

Print and ebook editions of all future Tilted Windmill Press titles will be available first through my store. Adding a backlist title is a few hours work, and a couple weeks of waiting to be sure that the printer does a good job. Yes, it’s a third printer. I’ll rant about why in March’s See the Sausage Being Made column, which I still owe my Patronizers.

Anyway, you can get a print/ebook bundle of SSH Mastery. It’s a mere eight years later than I wanted, but that’s tech for you.

If you want to know if I have a particular title in print, see my store’s print category.

79: Creepy As Chad

The “Project IDGAF” Terminal Death March is upon me, so here’s a tidbit

You people in the special effects department need to pay attention here. Yeah, I know most of you are busy building the Isaac Asimov sign and rigging explosives in the faux gas station Props slammed together last night, not to mention stealing the mail collection box we need to complete the two blocks of Mole Hill we’ll need for the Big Finish. Yes, we’re on a tight timeline and a tighter budget. But this bit needs to be genuinely creepy.

The burn on Lance’s chest? It’s not a burn.

He thinks it’s a burn, but to be fair he can’t get a good look at it. His neck can’t stretch like a Gray’s, and he’s not the sort of guy to study his reflection in the mirror, so he doesn’t get a good look between his pecs. From his view sure, maybe it’s a burn.

But it’s a silver and black plate. Kind of pebbly. Weirdly organic looking, if lead can be organic. The size of Katrina’s hand over Lance’s heart. This “burn” needs to look as creepy as Chad.

Okay, fine. Nothing can be that creepy. But still, people, work with me here!

This book demanded a soundtrack. It’s given me an excuse to dig up old songs I love that I hadn’t heard in a while. Looking at the songs, though, it’s clear that my 80s were not like most people’s 80s.

The Reader Acquisition Funnel

I keep referring people to the Reader Acquisition Funnel, which I wrote about in the middle of one of my monthly See the Sausage Being Made posts. It’s clear I need to pull this out into its own post. I’ve twiddled with the text because I can’t leave bad enough alone.

My goal is to spend my life doing work I enjoy. That means I’ve had to learn unholy business concepts that I would rather not soil my soul with, and apply them to my trade. Disintermediation is one of those concepts. I want you to reduce the number of middlemen between you and I. How does one accomplish this? Marketing experts create a Customer Acquisition Funnel describing how they lure people into their employer’s clutches. I have a similar Reader Acquisition Funnel.

  1. Read my free or discounted samples (articles in magazines, free first in series, sample pages in bookstore, library check-out)
  2. Buy my books through retail channels
  3. Social media follow (fediverse, bluesky)
  4. Sign up for my mailing list in exchange for freebies
  5. Buy books directly from me
  6. Kickstarter backer
  7. Sponsor books
  8. Regular monthly contributor
  9. You do all my chores so I can write more

I just realized this funnel has nine rings, exactly like a famous legendary funnel. I promise that my ninth ring is not eternally frozen. I live in Michigan, it’s only frozen for half of the year.

My goal is to make the mouth of the funnel as broad as possible, to suck folks in. With fiction, that’s straightforward. Now that the Prohibition Orcs books are out, I’m working on making the first orc story free everywhere. If someone reads the tale, gets to the end, and wants more, they’ll see the friendly note at the end of the tale inviting them to check out the full-length books.

My nonfiction is less blatant, but that’s why you’ll see my FreeBSD Journal column. I give nonfiction mailing list subscribers a copy of Tarsnap Mastery to give them a taste of what my books are like. I also carefully choose which topics to write about. If you have a problem with PAM, there’s only one book on the topic. Same with ed(1). Such books broaden the funnel’s second level. People keep asking for a book about LDAP, but there are many good tomes on that topic and it would do nothing to widen the funnel. Plus, LDAP is evil.

Does a book on a forty-year-old text editor broaden the funnel? Yes. Ed is legendary.

And yes, I did monetize the FreeBSD Journal column. By popular demand.

A business school graduate would say that the readers at the bottom of the funnel are more likely to buy more of my books. I acknowledge that’s true on the spreadsheet, but the only way I can guide people to purchase my books on an ongoing basis is by providing a quality emotional and educational experience. Yes, my nonfiction is emotional as well as educational. The emotion is why certain folks hate my tech books.

Each ring offers subtle notifications that further levels exist. Buy a book? In the back you’ll find a link to my web page and a list of other titles. Back me on Kickstarter? I will thank you copiously. As the campaign reaches fulfillment I will mention my crowdfunding and sponsors mailing list. I’ll also mention that the only way to get a challenge coin is to sponsor a book directly with me.

Anyway. Someone encounters my work, buys a few books, perhaps follows me on the fediverse, signs up for my mailing list, and eventually starts paying me to exist like my wonderful Patronizers do. At each stage, I gently make them aware of the next level.

The Reader Acquisition Funnel guides my business decisions. For example, I was waffling on whether I should provide my free titles in my bookstore. I was spelling this out for my Penguicon publishing talk when I realized that the people who get my free things from my e-bookstore? They are in the funnel’s first ring, and if they like the sample are willing to immediately leap down to the River Styx — uh, my fifth ring. MY fifth ring. Not Dante’s.

By providing the freebies from my store, I make that leap easy. As I revise this post, I realize that my bookstore should also offer a Freebies Bundle.

The lesson? If you’re wondering what to do, review the basics.

And now I want to write a book on the business of publishing, themed after the Inferno. Dammit Muse, I don’t have that kind of time!

78: Parentally Mandated Assholes

I’m still grinding to get “project IDGAF” done by the end of the month, so here’s a snippet from it.

The average party has a handful of actual friends and a few people that think they’re friends. Not even the birthday girl knows who belongs in which category. High school friendships fail only in challenges like “Emily slacked off on the group project,” which is a pretty coarse filter compared to adulthood’s “every one of these bastards will betray me to steal my promotion.” Sociopaths succeed because they realize that love and friendship are not real. Human beings succeed when they realize that love and friendship are the only real things—but they don’t get promoted.

Outside the circle of undifferentiated friends are the neighbors and classmates invited to satisfy social responsibilities. Hopefully that protective circle will diffuse or, at worst, absorb the malice of the parentally-mandated assholes. The number of PMAs is directly proportional to the size and depth of the family pool.

Beth Tubnor’s parents had a ten foot deep Olympic-length in-ground pool.

This novel is a folk tale, meaning (among other things) it has a narrator. The narrator’s voice has much in common with that of Dear Abyss.