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72: Arthritic Camels

Folks have asked me for hints about the Kickstarter I’m launching 1 April. Yes, it’s an April Fools’ book. Just like the Networknomicon, Ed Mastery, and the Savaged by Systemd audiobook. After many requests, I am capitulating and reading a bit of the project description. This is the only hint you will get before the project launches.

The book can be drop-shipped directly from printers in the UK, Australia, and the US. This shipping is cheap. Not merely cheap as in “inexpensive,” but cheap as in “crap.” Not as crap as this book, but crap. It’s not trackable. Postal services prioritize these packages beneath everything. Canada and the Netherlands are particularly slow. I suspect that the delivery logistics involve arthritic camels. I will have them copy you on the shipment notice so you know it’s left the printer, but the links in that mail are accessible to only me and any tracking numbers therein are unabashed lies. You’ll get it in 4-8 weeks, barring an outbreak of Rift Valley fever amongst the livestock.

Why not use the printer’s trackable shipping? Because for most of you, having me sign and ship is cheaper than having the printer do it. Seriously. The printer wants to ship cases of books, not single copies, and charges accordingly.

If you really want to know what this is, ask Kickstarter to notify you when the campaign launches, or sign up for my brand-new crowdfunding mailing list, or subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed. Or subscribe to this podcast, I’m sure I’ll read a bit of the book when it goes live. Assuming the book is written in a human-readable language, that is.

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December’s Diptheroid Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of December, and to the public at the beginning of January. Not a Patronizer? You could be.)

Autumn is my favorite Michigan season. Cool enough at night to wear sweatpants, warm enough in the day to wear shorts. Oh well, it’ll return. Some distant day.

Mostly shorter bits for you this month.

The immediate news is that despite the election, we’ll be staying in Detroit for now. We’re under less threat than many other people, and there are family issues with leaving. All I can say about this is that we’re preparing for trouble. On to happier things. Among them, long-term and short-term goals, business structure crap, and what I’m doing next.

I have a daft career. Tales that I dash off in a day go viral. Books that I spend a year writing and that fill obvious needs crumple like tinfoil submarines. The good news is, I’m far from the only creator this happens to. Well, my favorite mainstream rock band is Blue Öyster Cult. (Who? That’s as mainstream as I get, sorry.) If you know nothing else about the band, you’ve almost certainly seen SNL’s Cowbell Sketch about recording their biggest hit. That sketch went viral. Decades after the sketch, guitarist Buck Dharma was interviewed about surviving that sketch, and how to have a fifty year career. If you make stuff, and intend to make stuff over the long term, it’s worth reading.

Also, be careful when you pick your nom de plume. You might be stuck with it in your 70s, so be sure it’s cool as hell.

Next up: taxes. I’ve been struggling with my business structure for a while now, and the RYOMS kickstarter has shifted reorganizing from “an item on the to-do pile” to “set it on fire and shove it up my nose until I fix it.” The trick is finding an accountant who can handle intellectual property. That’s a highly specialized field, even among tax attorneys; your local CPA ain’t it. I have a bias towards using local people as much as possible, so I’ve been hunting in Detroit and then through greater Michigan. I had a call today with a top tax attorney, who told me I wouldn’t find the person I’m looking for in Michigan. I’m now querying my out-of-state writer friends, many of whom have IP tax attorneys. I get access to the same tax rules as other IP creation companies, so I need an actual, legitimate Hollywood accountant. Dog save me.

Finding that person is a right pain, though. I’m pretty sure I could hire Ernst & Young or one of those companies, but I’d rather have someone a little smaller and with a brain that’s a little more twisted. Fortunately, a friend JUST sent me a couple firms that presented at Author Nation so I have a small amount of hope.

Finally, the bit that’s probably of more interest to folks:

My experience over publishing the last few books, especially RYOMS, tells me a few things.

  • People will sponsor tightly focused tech books.
  • People will back such books on Kickstarter.
  • If an ebook is not available on Amazon, people will come to my store or Gumroad instead–especially if you explain why.

Self-publishing and print-on-demand technology has improved over the last few years. I can now produce a reasonably robust ebook. Current POD binding techniques let us reasonably publish 600-page 7″x10″ books. I’m wondering if it’s time I self-publish a big tech book. Ideally I’d get the Absolute OpenBSD rights back from No Starch Press and do a third edition. (While I own the copyright on my NSP titles, that copyright is exclusively licensed to them.) If not that, a title like “Transcendent OpenBSD” would suffice. (NOT SAYING I’M DOING THIS BOOK, RIGHTS ARE COMPLICATED, THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL.)

There’s some risks in this, even beyond the time I’d spend writing the book. My back-of-the-envelope math 600-page print-on-demand book would retail for about $100, the ebook version about $40-$50. That’s steep. I know many tech books cost that much, but still. I’ve never even imagined charging that much for a self-pub title. The sponsorship and Kickstarter prices would increase. Basically, with that many words everything doubles or triples. Daydreaming about these kinds of numbers feels deranged.

Holding the price down that far assumes I make some fierce changes to the production process. I’d outsource indexing. A larger book would require several rounds of print proofs. The print Mastery books use a larger font. Squeezing an Absolute book into 600 pages doesn’t allow that; it’s basically “cram half a million words into this form factor no matter what it takes.” The result looked fine half a lifetime ago, but so did many other things. Here’s a page of RYOMS versus a page of AO2e. NSP’s print size is comparable to that used by other big tech book publishers, so I’m confident that they have achieved Minimum Viable Font.

Smaller print makes a huge difference, both in how many words you can cram in and legibility. This is clearly an Old People Problem.

On a related note, I have to do my production work on a commercial operating system. Microsoft is deprecating Windows 10 and my 9-year-old desktop can’t be upgraded to Windows Bloody Vomit11, so I bought a new workstation. I’m not saying I bought something with 128GB RAM because of this project, but Adobe has long considered my hardware a suitable replacement for their programming chops.

This whole concept is built on sand, though.

If I said, “Hey sponsors, I’m doing a giant book but ebook/print sponsorships will run $75 and $200,” would they nope out?

If the print book retailed for $100, would people buy it?

If I reclaim the rights for Absolute OpenBSD, the third edition would have a different production style than the first two editions. Would that alienate returning readers? Should I emulate the earlier edition’s cover art or use a Mastery-style cover?

Every book needs copyediting. Making changes after publication would be extra expensive, so I would need two copyeditors. Both would cover the entire book.

So, yeah. It’s tempting. A Kickstarter might break $100K, but have commensurate expenses. No reward without risk, no debacle without daftness.

But it’s getting late. I should put down the spreadsheets, put on Extraterrestrial Live, and be glad that SNL has never noticed me.

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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.