For the last couple of weeks, the SSH Mastery copyeditor has said “There’s something wrong with Chapter 13, but I can’t figure out what it is.” I told her that I had confidence in her ability to figure it out and to just do her best. (I wasn’t actually confident, but telling her that would . . . → Read More: Consistency in Writing
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For a year or so I’ve wanted to write a post about the impact of book reviews, specifically on Amazon book reviews, but Anne R. Allen has saved me the trouble. In short: Amazon owns my writing career. They make their decisions based on reviews by people like you. And when I say “people like . . . → Read More: Why I Give Books Away I now have three horror stories available on all ebook reader platforms and stores. For September 2011, you can get all of them for free via Smashwords. All have been previously published elsewhere. If you like one of them, please leave a review at your favorite ebook site. (Yes, this is a blatant, transparent attempt . . . → Read More: Free Short Stories I have a problem with Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd edition. It’s too big. The outline is 26 chapters. This brings the book close to 300,000 words, well over a thousand pages. I don’t want to write books that I don’t like. I don’t like huge books that I cannot comfortably read in the bathtub. One component . . . → Read More: Summer 2011 nonfiction project: OpenSSH So how does the traffic I get here compare to an established Web site, like the OpenBSD aggregator undeadly.org? Undeadly linked to my OpenBSD story… Can you guess when? No, they weren’t the only ones. But 6 of my top 10 referring URLs were in undeadly.org. The lesson is, do not feed the puffer . . . → Read More: blather versus undeadly.org I’ve started the next book for No Starch Press. There’s an outline, and I’ve written both the introduction and the afterword. All that’s left is the hard stuff in between, twenty-some chapters of it. Where to start writing? That’s easy: First, I write the stuff that’s most likely to make the book fail. Every project . . . → Read More: Fail Quickly So, you’ve figured out some incremental advance in your own education that you think would make a good book. Now you grab your keyboard, open a text file, and start typing. Not so fast. Just as a large programming project has a specification, a book has a design. You can start churning out text just . . . → Read More: designing a tech book This is the first of an irregular series on writing tech books. I got the idea from something Richard Beijtlich wrote in a review years ago. Unfortunately I cannot find the cite, and spending the day exhaustively reading my old reviews is psychologically unhealthy, but he said something along the lines of “tech authors could . . . → Read More: writing tech books: write what you don’t know I’ve surrendered to last years’ (or was it the previous year’s) information fad: Twitter. You’ll find me at: http://twitter.com/#!/mwlauthor. I believe that tweakers call that @mwlauthor? Anyway, you can expect random crap there as I figure out what I’m doing with it. I should say right now: I don’t follow everyone who follows me. I . . . → Read More: Another information channel: Twitter |
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