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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.

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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.

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Now available: combined print/ebook bundles direct from my bookstore

The question I get asked most often is “Can I get a print and ebook combo of your books?” No, hang on, that’s not quite true. Technically, the most common questions are “Are you mad?” followed by “Are you serious?” but the print/ebook combo thing is a solid third place.

I am delighted to announce that after years of work, I am deploying direct print sales from my bookstore. Buy the print book and get the ebook free. Ebook will arrive in minutes. The print book will ship in about a week.

Only Run Your Own Mail Server and Dear Abyss are available so far.

While I’d like to offer a discount, the big bookstores would price match me. And yes, you pay shipping. With shipping charges it’s more expensive and slower than Amazon Prime. Every penny outside shipping, printing, and processing fees goes to feeding my family, however, so that’s a win (for me). I’m looking at ways to reduce the cost, but I need to see if anyone will actually order this way before I sink more money and time into it.

When you place an order, my store invokes BookFunnel for the ebook and files a print order with BookVault. In minutes, BookFunnel will send you an email with links to download your books. They’ll be available for redownload at https://my.bookfunnel.com. A few hours later, BookVault will send you a print order confirmation.

All new books will be available on my site before anywhere else. I will also be adding older titles as time permits.

I’ve been working on disintermediation for over ten years. This is the last big piece. I am delighted.

Why did this take so long? Well, shipping in the real world is kind of a mess. That makes shipping in WooCommerce kind of a mess. For most authors BookVault would be plug-and-run, but I’m special. My sponsorships are incompatible with BookVault. I wound up employing Sleeping Giant Studios to resolve incompatibilities between the two. I highly recommend SGS for any WooCommerce daftness.

77: The Wrong Kind of Clever

The networking book is heavy in command line stuff, which I’m not going to read. Here’s another chunk of the fiction project.

The driver had a postgraduate degree in Not Being Noticed. The black suit and tie oozed boredom. His smoothly-shaved face lacked a big nose, round lips, a jutting chin, or any other distinguishing trait. His freshly trimmed black hair was combed to perfection, his tie snug despite the heat. Heavy black sunglasses protected his eyes from the scorching light. If he’d been standing anywhere else you’d think bank clerk or accountant. Something to do with money, but not exciting amounts of money.

Technically, he did have something to do with money. The stability of money. Business thrives with stable conditions and currency, and the United States is nothing if not business-friendly. The Federal Reserve has twelve banks. The man was an agent for the thirteenth. Within the Reserve it had been called Bureau 13, but then cult role-playing game designer Richard Tucholka had not only used that for a title but had stumbled suspiciously close to the truth. Investigations showed that there was no leak, the man was simply the wrong kind of clever.

I knew Richard in university. He taught me the reality of living as punk/indie creator. I can guarantee that he’d be delighted if the government declared an official Tucholka Debacle.

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January’s Joggly Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of January, and the public at the beginning(ish) of February.)

My thoughts on last month? “Well, that was a thing that happened.” Lost two weeks to holiday chaos, but managed to get a few words made anyway.

The Dear Abyss Kickstarter is basically complete. Three people still owe me their addresses to ship books. That’s a problem, but I’ve poked them to fill out their backer surveys. When I get addresses, I’ll ship. My conscience is clean. I’m having an online launch party for this book. You’re invited. Details are at the bottom of this post.

Releasing a weird book on 1 April might not be my annual tradition, but after the Networknomicon, the two editions of Ed Mastery, the Savaged by Systemd audiobook, and Only Footnotes, it’s certainly a tradition. One that I’m continuing this year. This is a full-length book that I have done actual writing for, unlike Only Footnotes. (People claim they want a book containing only the footnotes, but when I release one they don’t buy it. Weird. Well, at least they stopped asking for it. I’ll take the win.) However low your expectations are, I can guarantee that this book will not meet them.

I’m still on the accountant hunt, but it appears that I’m not going to find an accountant specializing in intellectual property who is interested in taking me on as a client. I don’t make enough to be worth their while. Oh well. If you’re interested in the money side of my career, I put up my annual “where my money comes from” blog post.

I’m also still pondering doing a large book. For contractual reasons, I’m not going to indie publish a large OpenBSD or FreeBSD book at this time. Allan Jude is interested in updating our ZFS books, though, so that’s probably what’ll happen. Yes, I still want to write It’s Always DNS and What To Do About It, but I gotta shamelessly vacuum Allan’s brain while it’s available. FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and FM: Advanced ZFS are still valid, but ZFS has developed many new features since those books came out. We’ll cover both FreeBSD and Linux. Yes, ZFS is better integrated with FreeBSD than Linux, but there are myriad Linux OpenZFS users. On the publishing side, I’ll combine them in one large book and call it OpenZFS Mastery. I’m guessing it’ll come to about 150,000 words, about three times the size of the typical Mastery title. That’s enough that it’ll need professional indexing and heavy copyediting and tech review, but it’s less ambitious than a big Unix book.

It’s a small step, not a giant leap, but it’s probably wiser.

One of my goals over the last couple of years has been learning to speak coherently. Yes, I give talks. Those talks get recorded and put online. Those recordings show the whole world that I am a) incoherent, and b) daft. I can discover antigravity more easily than I can change the second, but the first could be improved. That’s why I have the 60 Seconds of WIP podcast; it forces me to speak regularly. One of my dear Patronizers used professional-grade podcast equipment at work for an internal company podcast, but the company shut down the podcast. Long story short, I now have professional-grade podcasting equipment. This might be the impetus I need to convert my office bathroom into a recording room. I at least need to set up a computer in a different room for recordings: the fans on my new desktop are loud enough to show up on the recordings. I’ve never played with audio or video on BSD, so that might be fun. Especially with a fancy Heil mic. I do worry that it might require understanding more about video formats than I want to know, but if it stops being fun I could move it over to the MacOS laptop. I’ve ordered a small wheeled standing desk that should fit nicely in the bathroom. Running water doesn’t mix with sound-damping foam, but even with bare walls it will be an improvement over the Apocalypse Fans.

The new Networking for Systems Administrators is coming along. It now has over a hundred print sponsors, which means I I’ll do a challenge coin. This book has picked up more sponsors than any other I’ve written. Many of the new sponsors are folks who backed the RYOMS Kickstarter and signed up for the sponsors mailing list. That gives me a horrid nervous complex that I better deliver a quality book or they’ll hunt me down–uh, I mean, warm fuzzy feelings. Yeah. Warm fuzzy feelings.

Anyway: you’re all welcome to the Dear Abyss launch party. Party is a strong word for a Zoom session, but we live in an age where companies describe their new shoes as “hope” so I’m going with it. Saturday 25 January 2025 at 10AM EST, or 15:00 UTC. The US West Coast can get up at 7AM, the Europeans can skip dinner time, and as usual Australia is fubar. One day I’ll do one of these in Australian time and annoy everyone else.

(zoom info deleted, because it’s past and wasn’t public.)

76: Freedom Costs Five Cents a Can

A chunk of the current fiction project.

The Barrens might be uninhabited, but people live near enough to hear when some damn fool gets their hands on dynamite and goes out for informal fireworks. The staties always ignored the first two calls, but when a third person called they’d dispatch someone to take a look. Not that they’d catch anyone. The officer might notice a blown-up boulder or two, with or without accompanying crushed beer cans. The deposit law’s nothing but government overreach after all. Freedom costs five cents a can.

This time, they got eleven calls from three different sides of the Barrens, even crazy old Lucas in his survivalist cabin atop Mount Screwitall. The officer found molten and shattered outcroppings still casting columns of dust into the breeze. He called the ATF asking about large explosive thefts. Correlated with a weird Air Traffic Control report, that call got a black Cadillac dispatched from LA.

I want to rename that mountain. But maybe not.

75: Interrupt So Frequently

Here’s a chunk from the new Networking for System Administrators.

Here’s the catch. The listed speed is not how fast the interface can pass traffic. Think of the speed as a language. Your server’s NIC might speak and understand the 2.5G protocol, but that’s no guarantee that the server, card, or network can support passing that much traffic. Actual throughput depends on how the NIC is attached to the host’s bus, the network cable, the load on the switch, and more. Some low-quality NICs speak the protocols but are built on hardware incapable of passing a tenth of the claimed bandwidth. Servers that can’t push 2.5G might ship with 10G interfaces. Some NICs speak the 10G protocol but interrupt so frequently they can’t even reach a gigabit. Certain vendors run benchmarks using carefully crafted packets so they can claim performance you will never achieve in reality.

This isn’t new; gigabit Ethernet first appeared on hardware incapable of handling even a hundred megabit, just so that vendors could advertise the new feature.

I keep having to circle back to the beginning of this book to fix boneheaded errors. The first edition doesn’t even mention virtual interfaces! I’d appreciate your support in getting this done.

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New Rats’ Man’s Lackey story: “and the Bringer of Leaves”

“The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Bringer of Leaves” previously appeared in Pulphouse #33, and it’s now standalone in ebook for a paltry $1.99 on my bookstore.

More Rats’ Man’s Lackey stories exist, but the dang things keep selling to trad publishing. Seems there’s a market for “supernatural Witness Protection cosplaying as urban fantasy Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin” tales. At this rate, I’ll probably publish a collection in 2026.

You can’t get this at Amazon. I am no longer publishing short stories standalone in other bookstores. The pricing just doesn’t work. I think I should make a “a buck or two” on a story, and that you should pay “a buck or two.” If I price it for $1.99 on Amazon, I make about sixty cents. At $2.99 my cut jumps to about $2, but that’s a lot for you to pay.

Patronizers, your free copy is on the way. Well, I say free. You pay for the right to get my stuff for free. It’s a terrible deal, but you knew that.

74: Nobody Likes You

From the untitled fiction project #projectIDGAF.

Dating has always been a nightmare. Forget the humiliation, awkwardness, clumsiness, and most people’s internal insistence that they make lepers look good. Forget that when the innocent word “love” needs a break from the rack, we stuff it into an Iron Maiden. Skip that attraction ranges from “you’re kind of nice” all the way up to “I would be your adoring servant for eternity” and the resultant complications of asymmetric attraction. Finding someone who likes you exactly the way you like them is impossible. Finding someone whose attraction you’re willing to indulge in exchange for them indulging yours has to be good enough.

Worse: there’s no rules. Everybody has to discover their own path, with useless guidance from media, family, and society. In 1989, media disguised cruelty as honesty and rape as romance—remember, “it’s okay if it’s funny!” Well-meaning parents told children to “just talk to them,” which is a great start but spectacularly implodes two sentences after “hi” and they probably don’t like you anyway. Nobody likes you.

It’s not perfect now, but broad awareness of the word “consent” does make things suck less.