RYOMS preorders close 14 August 2024

For the next couple of days I’m reviewing the paperback print proof of Run Your Own Mail Server. I received the proofs just before I flew to Vegas, and while I glanced through the book in between my meetings, I spent most of my energy selling work and learning new ways to insinuate myself into the publishing ecosystem. I must dedicate time to examining each page, even though looking at the text triggers mental torment.

If it all looks good, or good enough, I’ll be closing preorders on this Wednesday, 14 August, so I can order paperbacks.

The hardcover proof is en route, because the printer screwed up shipping. The interior is exactly the same as the paperback, so I only need to review the cover and binding.

What exactly does “good enough” mean? Minor problems can be fixed by changing a word or adding a vowel mean I need to send the printer a new PDF, but I won’t order a new print proof. If I must redo the interior layout, including shifting content from one page to another or adjusting the cover text, I must order a new proof.

Between print sponsors and Kickstarter backers I must mail hundreds of these dang things. It’s especially important I get this one as correct as possible.

Once I can check the hardcovers, I’ll start those orders.

The art for the backers-only special edition has arrived. The special edition uses the hardcover as a base. Once I approve the regular hardcovers I can start on the special edition.

The ebook is based on the paperback. Once I finalize the paperback I can start on the ebook. Maybe this week?

56: Three Debacles in a Trenchcoat

I’m in Lost Vegas meeting with editors, publishers, and other writers, figuring out how to break publishing. It’s rather like BlackHat, except artsy. I suspect my voice displays every bit of my jet lag, but here you go.

One day the FreeBSD Foundation decided to start a journal, which is much like an author deciding to write an operating system. Cheered by the prospect of witnessing three debacles in a trenchcoat, I offered heartfelt encouragement. Before my popcorn finished popping, they asked me to join the editorial board.

Well. At least they knew they knew nothing. I accepted, thinking I’d spend most of my time writing scathing emails lambasting their foolishness and explaining that working in open source had badly warped their understanding of copyright law. Then Jim Maurer and the fine folks at S&W Publishing took over the real work. I should have bowed out then, but my juvenile concerns about appearing churlish had not yet completely atrophied.

They had an editorial board meeting at BSDCan. Lulled by indifferent sweets and a truly excellent fruit salad, I found myself volunteered to write a letters column.

With luck, Dear Abyss launches on Kickstarter in September. Without luck, it actually gets published.

July’s Japish Sausage

Because this all certainly feels like a jape.

Last month, I hoped the RYOMS Kickstarter might round out at $50k. It hit $76,883, with 1966 backers. $25K of that was in the last three days. Plus, there were a few hundred sponsors. This is what we in the writing business call “freaking insane.” My reaction once again proved that I am temperamentally unsuited to success.

This isn’t life-changing money. I’m estimating half for fulfillment. Half of what remains will be reserved for taxes. It does take the emergency fund from “busted water heater” to “totaled car,” and that’s most welcome. Before you ask: yes, I assign a specific definition to “life-changing money.” Life-changing money changes my monthly cash flow for the better without reducing my lifestyle. Paying off ongoing bills is life-changing, but we no longer buy anything on installment payments. The only big bill that can be permanently paid off is the mortgage. Once you have all your bills paid off, “life-changing money” is enough to improve your life without adding new ongoing payments. (Huh. Maybe I need another edition of the cash flow book some time?)

But BSDCan was successful. The Kickstarter is over. RYOMS is at the copyeditor. SWMBO’s leg is healing. This has been a rough few weeks–but in their defense, they’re all rough weeks.

I’ve been fighting with WordPress on tiltedwindmillpress.com. It uses the Jetpack module to send new Patronizer post announcements by email. For a handful of users, Jetpack was conflicting with the Woocommerce credit card module. I had to temporarily disable that function. I believe it’s fixed, but will be watching Patronizer renewals closely. Fingers crossed!

The crush of finishing RYOMS and running the Kickstarter has left my brain kind of wrung out. I have a stack of anthology invites that I’m writing short stories for. Short stories are quick hits of success. It doesn’t matter if the story sells or not. My brain needs to finish something.

It did prompt me to look at my spreadsheet of incomplete collections. A collection should be about 60,000 words or so. Twisted Presents, the Christmas collection, is over 40,000 words. That’s enough for a Christmas book. Books of Christmas stories should be small–nobody wants a doorstop of mayhem for the holidays. I still need to write an orcish Christmas story to round it out. Somehow I have over 40,000 words of Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales. A couple more stories and that’s a proper collection. Found Meat, the next Prohibition Orcs collection, has 22,000 words. Lots to go there. So I’ll probably launch Twisted Presents next June, for an October delivery. There’s some overlap there–does the Rats’ Man’s Lackey Christmas tale go in Twisted Presents, or the RML collection? My gut says both.

The last anthology call is due 14 July.

RYOMS is due back from copyedit 15 July. That’s the rest of July tied up, I’m sure.

Amidst the chaos of the Kickstarter, I’ve been looking at options for sponsors and Patronizers. Of all my readers, y’all are the ones I must treat best.

The general reaction to the whole “what if Patronizers had private chat instead of video” was met with “use Discord,” so I’m going to be setting that up this next week. Will people like it? Who knows? That’ll mean quarterly video hangouts for all Patronizers, as well as invitations to any release parties I have. The RYOMS Kickstarter did well enough that I’m having two release parties, one in the morning and one in the evening. With 2000 people, I’m thinking I’m going to need a moderator to help me out. Perhaps someone to interview me.

Then there’s sponsors. Sponsors get their names in the book as a thank you. The print sponsors have me slightly worried, though. The Kickstarter backers could get the same special edition that print sponsors are getting, but the sponsors pay me months ahead and have faith that I will finish the damned book. I’ve figured out something odd, unique, and limited for the print sponsors, but I have no idea how it’ll go over. If it’s well-received, I’ll do it for all future books that have 90 or more sponsors. If it’s rejected, I’ll do something else next time. Being creative is like cooking spaghetti: you throw stuff on your most enthusiastic readers and see if it sticks.

I’d been pondering doing a second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators next. I suspect that might Kickstart well. Right after the RYOMS Kickstarter closed my inspirational muse soiled my skull with the title It’s Always DNS, and what you should do about it. It is always DNS, but that’s because people don’t know DNS. That seems like it might do well.

And there’s the ugly part of a runaway success Kickstarter. It makes me ponder how I can make that kind of money again, instead of what I want to write.

So come mid-August, when I have RYOMS put to bed, I’ll start writing one of those. I’ll also need to make sure I spend a couple hours a day writing something for pure fun. I don’t want to do another RYOMS forced death march. It kills my joy in life. And if I’m not having fun, I might as well send my resume to an AI company.

At the same time, I’ll open the next tech book for sponsors. And launch Dear Abyss. Because the Lucas Book Machine never stops. NEVER. NO MATTER WHAT. THE BOOK MACHINE MUST WRITE WRITE WRITE GRIND ON AND MAKE MORE WORDS AND MORE WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS <bzzzt> <zap> <thud>

Las Vegas Gelato Meetup, 5 August 2024, 7PM

I will be at in Las Vegas next week for a private writing event. Coincidentally, it’s during Black Hat. Probably not a coincidence. Vegas hotel rooms go cheap during August. My schedule is absolutely jammed, but I’m slicing out an hour or so Monday night to get gelato.

7PM at Up In Scoops, 4624 W Sahara Ave #2, Las Vegas, NV 89102. It’s well-reviewed and looks nicely indie. Off the Strip, so parking should not be as big an issue as last time I tried this.

I’ll be eating outside because covid, but after a day of flying and a day sitting in a hotel meeting room it’ll be a good break.

Again, it’ll be about an hour and won’t run late. I’ll be jet lagged, and must return to the hotel for more meetings.

55: Eldritch Faery Queen Glamour

Been super busy with Run Your Own Mail Server page layout, but took a break to finish writing next month’s FreeBSD Journal Letters column.

These “generative artificial intelligences” scour the Internet collecting text strings and noting which characters often appear in which order. The programmers heard the phrase “the wisdom of crowds” and thought it wasn’t satire. When you enter a string into the system, they produce a string that looks like something that would appear after your string. In other words, if you enter something that looks like a StackExchange question, they provide an answer that looks like something you would get from StackExchange. The average answer on any public technology forum is a poison to the spirit that makes my Perl look glamorous. Not Hollywood glamour. More like Eldritch Faery Queen Glamour that winds up with you chained to your keyboard condemned to write for the entertainment of the Unseelie Court until you become the greatest author on Earth, which would give you lots of practice but as you no longer receive books from Earth you can’t perform the comparison that would conclude your deal. Still, don’t do that. The Faery Queen carries one heck of a grudge, especially if you smuggled lockpicks in with you.

I expect to launch the “Dear Abyss” collection in September.

“Run Your Own Mail Server” print layout: 348 pages

Making it the biggest Mastery book I’ve ever written. I was right to make the ebook $15, and I suspect the print version will wind up being $35. Won’t know until I feed it to the printer.

Now I go through the manuscript page-by-page with my red pen and highlighters, looking for layout errors. And content errors. Yes, I’ve caught content errors at this stage before. The best way to perceive an error in a manuscript is to change the form.

With luck I’ll have a clean interior to submit to the printer in a couple days, and a print proof will arrive the week after. I check the proof repeatedly for a few days. If that works, I’ll be ordering the regular books. (The only blocker for the special edition is the art, which arrives about 15 August. I’ll order that proof right away.)

It’s been over a year since I did this kind of check, and it seems that all of my highlighters except the blue and pink have dried out. I fear that this will turn into some sort of gender reveal disaster… but I knew the risks when I got into this business.

Wish me luck. I’m going in.

54: Immediately After This Book Escapes

I’m buried in final corrections for Run Your Own Mail Server so here’s a snippet from that.

You must be comfortable acquiring and managing TLS and the associated X.509 certificates. Email did not always require TLS, but certificate prices have plunged to zero so TLS is fairly standard. This book uses Let’s Encrypt certificates maintained by ACME, and presumes you can do the same. If your organization insists on purchasing expensive certificates and maintaining them by hand, you are welcome to do so.

We will also use outside services to support email troubleshooting. These are all services that can be replaced if you write custom code, a skill set that does not overlap with running mail servers. I’m certain that immediately after this book escapes someone will release a package that lets us easily handle said debugging.

From now on, I will toss around terms like network port and X.509 certificate and floccinaucinihilipilification and expect you to either know what they mean or how to look them up. You cannot suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and run an email server.

Fascinatingly, spell check recognizes floccinaucinihilipilification but not hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. Also, my copyeditor demanded–and got–combat pay.

Why My Web Store Uses Bookfunnel

A few years ago I switched from delivering books via WordPress downloads to Bookfunnel. Now and then, folks ask why. “Because it reduces my pain without escalating yours” is trite, but true. Here’s the full explanation.

When I first opened tiltedwindmillpress.com, I provided files at obfuscated filenames. By the third direct sale, someone had shared the link to eleven thousand of their closest friends. Pirating my books is a jerk move, but pirating them off my own server is downright insulting.

Woocommerce provides access controls for downloads, letting me limit the number of downloads. I set it to ten and moved on.

That eventually caused problems, though. Now and then someone would need to redownload their books more than ten times. People want help loading their files onto devices. Woocommerce’s download management is clunky, probably because they didn’t anticipate my use case. Bundles like The Full Michael took hours of painstaking labor to update. (I don’t remember if I actually launched TFM before Bookfunnel, but the thought of doing it the old way causes keyboard-trashing shudders, so my body certainly remembers.)

Bookfunnel lets me provide epub, mobi, and PDF, all easily labeled. If you create an account at https://my.bookfunnel.com, they’ll let you redownload your books as many times as you like. When I update a book, updates actually propagate across the accounts. They can help you load your ebooks onto whatever weird ereader you own. I pay them for this service specifically so they leave my customers the heck alone.

I’ve written before how the Internet’s business model is betrayal. What will I do if Bookfunnel gets bought and decides to exploit everything and everyone?

I’ll stop using them.

Yes, having my readers’ email addresses in the hands of an exploitative firm would suck. I am highly confident that exploitative firms already have that information, however. Many of you use disposable or filterable addresses for exactly that reason. I would take the money I spend on Bookfunnel and give it to a WordPress contractor to have them manage the files, or to even write a Woo-compatible WordPress plugin for ebook management.

So: ease of management, ease of re-downloads, and help loading books on your devices. That’s why.

53: Working with Delta

I’m working on the last FreeBSD Journal “Letters” column to appear in Dear Abyss. I’ll launch the Kickstarter after the column appears.

Once upon a time there was this person who vexed me so badly, I had to write a book just to complain about them. (Not why I wrote the book, nor why I griped about them therein.) My fierce vituperation was so all-encompassing, they not only changed their name but their gender so they could attempt to rebuild something from the ruins of their reputation. (Totally not why they changed their name. Nor their gender.) Now I’m gonna tell you about working with Delta. (Not that we ever actually worked together. They’re just an example person. Libel laws prevent me from explicitly naming Gabriel, though he will hopefully recognize himself. That new emotion you’ve never previously experienced, Gabriel? It’s called “shame.”)

You probably have a preferred public discussion platform for technical matters, something like Reddit, Mastodon, or the penal board forum. Delta’s that person who when they see someone ask a question, they search Google and post the first link it vomits up.

The trick in writing about issues you don’t experience is to check your work with someone who has that problem. If you don’t know anybody who has that problem, you probably shouldn’t be writing about it.

RYOMS back from copyedit, preorder time running out

Yesterday, the copyedits on Run Your Own Mail Server returned. This means that today I’ll be setting up a Discord and integrating into my Patronizer systems to replace the Video Hangout level, writing the next column for the FreeBSD Journal and, coincidentally, the last column for Dear Abyss. I asked Simon Travaglia if he’d be interested in doing a foreword but he sensibly declined, so I guess I better write something to introduce that travesty. (I’m open on suggestions for people to approach, mind you.)

Anyway.

Once I complete the copyedits, I start on the page layout.

Once I complete page layout, I order print proofs and make the ebook.

The print proof is my absolute last chance to fix errors. At that point, I turn off preorders and order sponsor, Patronizer, Kickstarter, and preorder copies.

I have no date for this. Depends on if the copyeditor can cause me as much pain as I caused her.

But it’s approaching. Preorder now if you want a signed book.

And before anyone else asks about a signed ebook: that was a Kickstarter-only item, sorry.