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2024 Income Sources

How do I make a living at this silly business? By gathering money through every available channel. For the last few years I’ve posted where the money comes from.

First, the usual boilerplate. 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.

Whenever I share actual dollar figures, people inform me that I can’t possibly be making that much, or that I don’t deserve to make that much, or demand I share “the secret.” The first two are not worth my time, and I’ve been trying to tell everyone the dang secret for years: keep writing with an attitude of deliberate practice and manage your cashflow. Nothing productive comes from such discussions, so I don’t share those numbers.

The numbers this year are weird because the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter went viral. When you express values year-over-year as percentages and one of the values decides to bloat, everything else skews. How weird? Well, here’s 2024.

Here’s the detail.

Kickstarter – 41.63%
Amazon – 16.34%
TWP direct sales – 14.09%
TWP sponsorship – 11.30%
Trad Pub – 6.07%
TWP patronizer – 3.53%
Patreon – 2.67%
IngramSpark – 2.25%
Gumroad – 1.12%

What about Apple, Kobo, Google, and so on? The mighty Barnes & Noble? All under one percent. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the cash, but at that level the sale of a single book can shift a retailer’s ranking.

What conclusions can I draw from this?

First, disintermediation works. Eliminating rent-seeking middlemen is a viable path. Yes, Kickstarter is a middleman. They are a much less intrusive middleman than Amazon, however.

If you just look at the percentages, however, you might think that I’ve replaced a dependency on Amazon with a dependency on Kickstarter. Kickstarter backers are much closer to the bottom of the Reader Acquisition Funnel than Amazon customers, however. Those readers are highly willing to back authors they like, and they prefer to do so as directly as possible. Most of my Kickstarter backers are happy to sign up for my mailing list and even sponsor future books.

That’s a strong statement, but consider this. The print sponsorships for Run Your Own Mail Server were open for a year. I got 148 epub sponsors and 89 print sponsors in that year, and was delighted. That book advanced to Kickstarter, and I was thrilled. Happy RYOMS backers signed up for my sponsors mailing list.

The sponsorships for the next book opened 12 October 2024. Since then, it’s picked up 70 epub sponsors and 113 print sponsors. Many of those sponsors came from the RYOMS Kickstarter.

Lure people into a direct relationship with you. Offer special bait to suck them in. It works. Remember that you want happy readers who come back over and over again: be a rose, not a pitcher plant!

But what about Amazon? What about discoverability?

Amazon is just a discovery platform, like Apple Books and Kickstarter and everything else. The most recent tech books are available in print from Amazon, but not in their Kindle store. You can buy Kindle-compatible versions in many places, but not on Amazon. Again, I don’t hate Amazon. I don’t love them, either. They’re just another retailer offering yet another nonnegotiable deal, and for my tech books I must refuse their Kindle store deal.

So, are there long-term trends? I ran the numbers to compare my above-1% retailers to my non-retail channels. For what it’s worth, I graphed them.

That huge blue block that dominated everything this year? That’s driven by the viral Kickstarter. A sudden surge in one channel throws off the so-called trends.

Each year, more people buy more directly. Treating retailers as discovery channels works.

The question is, can I replicate RYOMS’ crowdfunding success? The real test will be when the new Networking for Systems Administrators advances to Kickstarter. But I’ve already promised people disappointment for another Kickstarter and 81 people have signed up for it, so I’m inclined to say that initial signs are good. (Once I launch that they’ll run screaming, of course, but at the moment it looks promising!)

I should also say: I neither love nor hate Kickstarter. I’m fond of them at the moment, sure, but that’s because it worked. If it keeps working, I will remain fond of it. If it stops working, I move on.

But now, it’s time for me to turn the actual numbers into a tax return. Wish me luck. I’m gonna need it.

71: The Great State of Soviet Texas

I took the last week off, so here’s a bit of Drinking Heavy Water.

The Great State of Soviet Texas was designed from the dirt up so that nobody would hate their work. Unique among Earth’s four hundred and eighty-one nations, the Texas Datacore existed to optimize the health, happiness, and liberties of Soviet citizens. Nobody was in charge of anything beyond themselves. Chevy had trusted the datacore all through school, even when the post-doc work in experimental mathematics at the University of New Houston had almost melted his brain. The first year and a half had been torturous, but eventually the inexorable, irresistible, intoxicating equations had kept him awake all night, luring him far past what his fellow students could understand. The datacore had been right to put him there. He not only had a talent for the edges of mathematics, he enjoyed it. He’d had no higher ambition than to work at a university, expand the scope of human knowledge, and repay a dozen times over the Soviet’s investment in the miracle of his life. One wife, two dogs, three kids, and four months vacation would round that up to the ideal life.

Then the Soviet had traded five years of his services to the Montague Corporation.

You can grab Drinking Heavy Water as a standalone novel, but the best value is the Montague Portal omnibus Aidan Redding Against the Universes.

70: The Athlete’s Foot Disaster Alarm

A snippet from the unnamed fiction WIP.

It was Patrolman Ernie McAllister who’d lit a blunt the size of his thumb. That’s smaller than you might think. McAllister had the muscle definition of a cat tree, and what skin he had was stretched too tight over his bones. The man had showered that morning, and before going to bed alone last night, and he’d laundered the uniform, but not even the prime weed’s burning-rope stink could cover up the mushroomy funk that continually seeped from his hide. He claimed it was hormones, but if Ernie ever got within half a mile of a dermatology clinic the Athlete’s Foot Disaster Alarm would have gone off and he would have been netted, drenched from scalp to sole in Desenex anti-fungal goop, and confined in isolation until Earth’s only yeast-based civilization collapsed, reducing our world to seven native intelligent species. As it was, the Sun hammered down through the open window and scorched his driver’s tan into cancer, coincidentally providing solar energy for thirty billion microscopic homes.

For the record, Desenex was useless.

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BSDCan 2025 Chair’s Entirely Personal Comments on the Con Mask Policy

Yes, we discussed this in the organizing committee. Nothing has changed since last year. And yes, some of the new covid treatments give hope for a better future.

Degreed scientists have performed large amounts of actual research. Their data shows over and over again, that masks work. Multiple sorts of studies have shown this.

YouTube is not science. Neither is Twitter, nor Substack, Facebook, any social media, blog, or influencer web page. Fox News certainly is not.

The BSD community has quite a few people with above-average respiratory risks. They include a few members of the BSDCan organizing committee. The world needs one conference they can safely attend. At BSDCan 2024, many attendees with marginal health personally thanked me for requiring masks so they could attend.

Are we serious? At BSDCan 2024 I told more than one person that if they wouldn’t wear a mask, we would remove them from the event. I expect I’ll have to do the same this year. If you are adamantly opposed to consistently wearing a mask, I suggest that you save me the trouble and choose another conference.

We also have people with hearing problems. I am investigating buying transparent N95 masks in bulk, either for just the speakers or for all attendees. Because people who need to read lips should also have their needs met.

All this falls under “I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people.”

69: Classic GM Cruise Control

My ears refuse to pop. Everything sounds flat. I hope this bit from the unnamed fiction WIP came out.

Every three years, Dad paid cash for a brand-new Chevy C/K pickup with all the features. AM/FM/cassette stereo, rip-resistant seats, and the classic GM cruise control that worked perfectly on straight dry roads. Even air conditioning, although using AC was for pansies. A truck birthed to haul sheets of plywood or a small fishing boat, except Dad had people to haul anything and the creek needed boots not boats. Dad didn’t allow anyone to eat or drink in his truck, but sometimes when he’d taken young Will out to the barrens to look for lizards and rocks they’d end the day with a trip to the drive-in for the slopburgers bigger than Will’s hands could hold, with ketchup and pickles and the thick tomato slices that slid out the back. Always right before trading the truck in, sure, but Will’s bones had burned with privilege and trust.

Being allowed to eat slopburgers in Dad’s shiny new truck is the highest of privileges.

68: Flying Crabs with Teeth

Today you get a snippet of the unnamed fiction WIP.

Here’s the problem: evolution doesn’t do what works. Evolution does random things. Some random things survive. Most do not. Entirely different branches of life tried making solar panels to absorb energy, and survived. Leaves “work.” Neighboring branches tried absorbing energy from stone, or wind, or indie rock, and died.

Raising the solar panels a little higher meant the creature survived better than those around it. Stalks “work.”

Raise enough of those solar panels, and you need a thick stalk. Call it a trunk. Boom. Evolution has yet again produced trees, or eyes, or caffeine. When humans reach civilized space they’ll discover flying crabs with teeth, because those things all “work.”

Study their ancestry and you’ll discover that oaks are strawberries. Mesquite is a pea. They diverged at the invention of the seed, and those branches of the family haven’t talked since. Two wholly separate things survived because they randomly wound up in similar shapes.

Is this a novel or a rant? I fear that’s not an “or” question.

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“Networking for System Administrators, 2nd edition” cover art

The inimitable Eddie Sharam has finished the cover painting for the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. It’s a parody of Giuseppe Zocchi’s Pietre Dure of Architettura. It’s a wraparound, but you can see a mockup of the front cover at the sponsorship page.

Eddie painted this. Like, on paper. With paint. The current plan is to include the painting as a Kickstarter reward level, much as we did with the cover for Run Your Own Mail Server.

At this moment, N4SA2e has 98 print sponsors. Two more sponsors and I have to do a challenge coin. If I have to do a coin, it’ll have the usual rat and bear the words NEVER MY FAULT/ALWAYS MY PROBLEM.

Mind you, my plan is that I will get exactly one more print sponsor and then y’all’ll stop backing it, so I don’t have to do any extra work.

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New Releases: Dear Abyss, The Last Hour of Hogswatch

It’s the end of the year, so I’m shoving a couple titles out the door at the last minute. Like you do.

First up we have Dear Abyss: the FreeBSD Journal Letters column, years 1-6. The ebook is on most platforms now, and print is leaking out.

For the folks who are into solstice holidays, my story The Last Hour of Hogswatch is now available standalone. It’s only in my bookstore; I don’t bother putting short stories on the big stores any more, or in print.

Happy holiday-of-your-choice, folks!

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November’s Neurypnological Sausage

[This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of November, and to the public at the beginning of December. Not a Patronizer? Sign up at https://patronizemwl.com. Okay, fine, technically, you don’t sign up there. You get to choose between my Patreon and my private patronage system. Still, you all get treated with the same confusion and astonishment. There’s no way these silly posts are worth $12/year, let alone what the daft folks like the infamous First Wildebeest send me. But here you are anyway.]

The important thing first: if you’re reading this on tiltedwindmillpress.com, and you want to receive announcements of new posts by email, you need to sign up again on the right-hand sidebar. I previously used Jetpack for emailed announcements, but the WordPress.com/WP Engine feud moved “ditch Jetpack” up to the top of my “annoying tech tasks” list. This is the last announcement that will go out via the old system.

Also: the RYOMS online launch party (a result of the Kickstarter campaign) will be held on 23 November 2024. There’ll be one session at 1500 UTC (10AM EST), and another at 2400 UTC (7PM EST). That’ll give the Europeans and the US West Coast reasonable sessions, and once again welcome the surprisingly robust contingent of Australian insomniacs. Mark your calendars.

I don’t have links yet, because this launch party will be different than previous ones. My last one was for Prohibition Orcs. That campaign had 197 backers, plus y’all. 26 folks attended. If I scale that up to RYOMS’ 1966 backers, that means I’ll have about 260 people. Even divided between two sessions, that’s a lot. My Zoom account can handle 100 attendees. I’m running a survey to see which backers wish to attend. If there’s anywhere near 100 per session I’ll need to beg, borrow, or steal videoconference facilities and probably suck someone into playing moderator.

Watching the rest of the RYOMS Kickstarter fallout is kind of mesmerizing.

My big experiment for this Kickstarter was dropshipping direct from printers. After the IOSS saga and resolving delivery problems, it comes out that I had about a 7% error rate. A few packages just… didn’t arrive. Some places, like South America, needed 45-60 days to deliver. Most problems fell into three categories:

  • EU shipments without phone numbers
  • Non-ASCII addresses
  • Canada

Each of these are mostly fixable, except for Canada. My loss rate for dropshipping to Canada was about 35%. It didn’t seem to matter if the recipient provided a phone number or not. Some packages took two weeks to arrive: others, six or eight weeks. I suspect Canada customs loathes international media mail and puts it at the bottom of the processing pile.

The current Kickstarter (Dear Abyss) does not offer dropship outside the EU, UK, and Australia. I need to figure out the failure patterns and what I can do about them before I dropship across national borders again.

I also launched sponsorships for the second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. I declared that if I got 100 print sponsors I’d do another sponsor-exclusive challenge coin. About a month in, and there’s 77 print sponsors. Many of them are first-time sponsors, lured in by the RYOMS Kickstarter. Just wow. Sucking people further down the Customer Acquisition Funnel works! And there’s a good chance I’ll have to follow through on the challenge coin.

Making new words has been difficult, what with the buildup to the most consequential US election in my lifetime. By the time this post hits the public we’ll know the outcome, but at the moment I’m hoping these posts don’t turn into “the difficulties of being a self-published writer building an entirely new legal infrastructure while living on a Digital Nomad visa and learning a new language.” At the time I write this, that’s a real possibility. Yes I’m a straight white middle-aged guy, but I’m also an insolent anti-authoritarian writer who throws around words like “neurypnological.” As soon as the list works through “women” and “queer folks” and “PoC” and down to Q-list celebrities, I’m on it. Creative work while carrying this sort of mental overhead is like losing half your RAM, and the human platform has incredibly poor paging and swapping performance.

If things go well, though, I’d like to crunch to finish Project IDGAF by the end of the month. It’s not a long book. All I need is time and spoons. I mean, I had time to write a Fediverse bot, so it should be perfectly doable. If. I’m amusing myself by imagining how I would market this ridiculous atrocity.

I am going through the N4SA manuscript, marking stuff to check and places to add stuff and discussions I need to have. Overlay networks like VPNs and MPLS are much more broadly used today than ten years ago. TLS, which was the main driver for this edition. Lots of little warts. It doesn’t matter how large a wart is, though; it’s still a wart and should be removed.

The nice thing is, I’m about out of inventory for Things I Need To Sell. I have an assortment of short fiction collections that are nearly ready. My Christmas collection needs a Prohibition Orcs short story, but I don’t want to launch that until next June so that’s okay. I have about 50,000 words of Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales, which is 1-2 stories short of a collection. There’s about 25,000 words of uncollected Prohibition Orcs, just short of half a collection. I could finish up any one of these but the truth is, I want to build up some inventory first. I want to do some damn writing.

So I’m going to try to do that now.