A few months ago, I stumbled upon a Web site describing National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as it is known in the trade), which is held annually in November. Initially, I thought this might make a good Interesting Thing of the Day article, but the more I read, the more I became convinced that I should be a participant, rather than just an observer. And so, during the month of November, I’ll be writing a novel.

I will be one of roughly 50,000 participants this year. Since NaNoWriMo began in 1999, the numbers have steadily grown to the point where it’s a worldwide phenomenon. NaNoWriMo novelists are looking for quantity, not necessarily quality. The event’s founder, Chris Baty, arbitrarily declared 50,000 words to be the threshold for success. The point of this exercise is not to win the Pulitzer prize or even to get published; it’s to make good on that promise most of us have made to ourselves at some point in our lives: “One of these days, I’m going to write a novel.”

The rules are simple: You must not write even a single word before 12:00:01 a.m. on November 1, and you must stop by 11:59:59 on November 30. You can write in whatever genre, and on whatever topic, you wish—as long as it’s fiction. NaNoWriMo’s servers will validate your word count, but as to what you write, you’re on the honor system—you could “win” by writing “a” 50,000 times. Of course, there are no prizes; it’s all about personal achievement. So participants have little incentive to cheat. Local and regional groups meet during the month at cafés and pubs for “write-ins”; participants also offer each other support and encouragement virtually in online discussion forums.

In order to reach 50,000 words (about 160 pages) in a month, one needs to write, on average, just under 1,700 words per day. Because I make my living writing, it’s a rare day when I write fewer words than that, so I’m not particularly concerned about sheer quantity. But I’ve never written fiction, so that will be the challenge.

Needless to say, it’s not as though I had nothing else to do in November. I have articles and ebooks to edit, programming to do for Interesting Thing of the Day, and a long list of personal projects I’ve been putting off since June. In the grand scheme of things, writing the short, first draft of a first novel that will probably never be published is not among my top priorities in life right now. And yet, somehow, it seems like the right thing to do. Some of the best decisions I’ve made in life were ostensibly irrational but just felt right, and I’m expecting this to turn out the same way.

Ordinarily, I’m not much of an autograph enthusiast. Or, rather, I’ll enthusiastically sign autographs, but I don’t collect them. I made exceptions for Douglas Adams and Umberto Eco, and a few other geeky types whose names most people wouldn’t recognize. Earlier this week, I made another exception. I went to a presentation and book signing at a local Sur La Table, where two legendary food scientists (if food scientists can be legendary) came to share their expertise with the small assembled crowd.

The celebrities were Shirley O. Corriher and Harold McGee. I knew of Shirley mainly from her frequent guest appearances on Good Eats with Alton Brown. Alton himself is no slouch when it comes to cooking science, but he likes to bring in specialists from time to time, and Shirley happens to be an expert who is also a colorful TV personality. She is the author of CookWise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed and has a new DVD called Shirley O. Corriher’s Kitchen Secrets Revealed!

As for Harold, he’s the author of the encyclopedic On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Originally published in 1984 and known among the cooking intelligentsia as “the blue book,” it was massively revised and updated last year, and is now “the red book.” It runs to nearly 900 pages and contains not a single recipe—my kind of cookbook. Instead, it describes (in a very friendly, readable style) the history, chemical and physical properties, and cooking methods for virtually everything edible. It is amazing, and I don’t use that term lightly. If its subject matter were English, it would be Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Those who know, know what I mean.

Anyway, I went with a desire to have two burning questions answered. First was: How do you pronounce “Corriher”? The staff person who introduced the authors just said “Shirley,” so I asked Shirley myself after the presentation. She replied, “It rhymes with sorrier.” Excellent. I never would have guessed that.

The other question has been bugging me for years: Why should I salt the water used to boil pasta? Every recipe, and every cooking show, says you must do this. But I’ve boiled hundreds of pots of pasta in my day and have seldom bothered with the salt, yet this has never diminished the final product in any way I could discern. I know enough about chemistry to realize that a teaspoon or two per gallon is not going to raise the water’s boiling point enough to make any difference. The other rationale I’ve heard a few times is that salting the water seasons the pasta, because some of the salt soaks right into the noodles. That’s fair enough, but if you serve your pasta with a sauce—especially a salty sauce—you’ll almost certainly be unable to taste the salt in the pasta itself. So I find that reasoning unconvincing.

Courtesy of Harold McGee, I now have two other crucial pieces of information. First, according to the red book (p. 576), salt can help prevent noodles from sticking together during cooking. It “limits starch gelation and so reduces cooking losses and stickiness.” That’s something I can get behind, although the book also mentions that you can reduce stickiness in other ways, including stirring during the first few minutes.

During the presentation, though, someone was asking about cooking dried beans. Harold mentioned that what takes the longest when cooking beans is for water to penetrate all the way to the bean’s interior so that it can soften. And salt, he said, inhibits the osmotic process by which this occurs. So salting the water in which you cook beans can increase the time it takes for the beans to get soft in the middle (or make them less soft with the same amount of cooking time). After the presentation, I asked if the same principle holds for pasta, and he said that it did. I asked whether that could be an argument for not salting the water—whether it outweighed the advantages. He replied that it depends somewhat on the thickness of the noodle, but if you have a thicker noodle and you’re more concerned about the fastest possible cooking time than its absorbed flavor, definitely skip the salt. In other words, rather than reducing cooking time by increasing the boiling point, salt can actually increase cooking time by slowing water absorption into thick noodles.

That’s cool. If I’d known there was such an occupation as food scientist when I was a kid, that’s what I would have wanted to be when I grew up.

At a party a few days ago, someone asked me what I do for a living. When I told him that I get the bulk of my income from freelance writing, he asked whether I found it nerve-wracking to wonder if or when the next writing assignment would come in. I said that was the least of my worries—I have far more writing jobs than I have time for, and that’s been true for nearly a year now. Most writers, consultants, and other freelancers are happiest when jobs line up sequentially, with as few gaps as possible. For the past many months, I’ve had the dubious fortune of having as many as half a dozen jobs stacked up at the same time. This is my very least favorite work state, because I don’t believe in multitasking. But that’s another story.

I’ve been making my way through this long list, which included four different new or updated ebooks in the 140-plus page range, some smaller updates, and a bunch of longish Macworld articles. Today, I reached an interesting milestone. Counting the article I sent in today, I now have the first drafts of four different manuscripts sitting on four different editors’ desks—three different Take Control editors and a Macworld editor. (If they’re all really slow, I might get as high as six manuscripts out to five editors, but I’m not counting on that.)

All of these, of course, will come back to me marked up with all sorts of edits and queries, and will have to be rewritten to some extent. (Generally, there are two or more iterations of that process, and then the manuscripts go on to technical reviewers and copy editors.) But rewrites of this sort are, for me, a far easier and quicker task than the initial draft.

I’m not saying I’ve been an especially fast writer, or that my editors have been especially slow. This is just the way things happened to pan out right now. Still, I’m feeling pretty good about the fact that my current list is down to just a couple of not-so-huge projects, and then, after the rewrites, I have at least a slight shot at returning to my ideal situation of working on just one project at a time.

For those of you keeping track, the manuscripts that are now well on their way to ebookhood (ebookdom?) are Take Control of .Mac, Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, and a fairly significant update to Take Control of Mac OS X Backups. Next on my list: a minor update to Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail, mainly to address some changes in Tiger. Later (as in, early next year), there’ll be a larger rewrite of that ebook to cover spam management in all Mac OS X email clients. Last but not least, look for a minor update to Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact around the time Now Software ships version 5.1.

Tragedy struck this evening. I lost my Moleskine notebook. I was on my way to meet Morgen after work, pick up a bite to eat, check out a new bookstore, and then go to the 2005 San Francisco kick-off party for National Novel Writing Month, which begins on November 1. I’d brought my trusty notebook along to record the inevitable flashes of inspiration. Instead, my notebook and I parted company along the way—I’m guessing probably on the subway or in the station somewhere.

Following Bruce Chatwin’s advice, I put my name and contact information in the front of the notebook, along with the promise of a reward if the notebook is found and returned. No one has contacted me yet, and BART’s lost-and-found office was closed, so there is yet hope that some kind soul—or, hey, some greedy soul who wants to pick up an easy $100 reward—will yet come through with it. But I find it hard to be sanguine.

It feels a little bit creepy to have lost it, sort of like losing a wallet, or maybe a diary. It didn’t contain any money, or big secrets, or million-dollar business ideas, or details of sordid affairs. In fact, I think it had nothing in it of any value whatsoever to anyone but me. Still, those were personal thoughts and ideas, dreams and observations. I would be annoyed if it had been destroyed, but I’m much more disturbed that someone else could be reading through that little corner of my brain right now. That stuff wasn’t meant for public consumption, or even for private consumption. It was just for me.

Ironically, I’ve been working the past few days on updating my ebook about backups, and this data (analog as it is) was not backed up. I’m not even entirely sure what all was in this particular notebook. At the party, when I mentioned my loss to a couple of fellow novelists-to-be, they sympathetically suggested getting into the habit of photographing each page as it’s filled or faxing myself copies of the pages. Those sorts of tactics would, of course, provide the necessary backup (albeit at a significant inconvenience), but they still don’t protect the information already in the notebook from prying eyes.

It’s funny, too—I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit worried about losing my computer. Everything important on it is heavily encrypted (and religiously backed up) and the hardware is insured, so I’d simply report it to the insurance company, go buy a new one, reload my data, and continue on my merry way. But paper, for all its virtues, denies me that security. I could write in code, but that’s way too much bother. I could use a PDA, but I’ve found them just too cumbersome for taking notes. I did buy a replacement notebook, but there’s no way to replace the lost ideas, or the lost privacy.

Last Saturday, after months of writing interrupted regularly by delays of all sorts, I finally breathed a deep sigh of relief as I submitted to my editor a manuscript for my next ebook, Take Control of .Mac. This is a project I’d hoped to complete during the first few months of the year, and which was getting in the way of finishing some long-overdue updates to my other ebooks. What with my ebooks on upgrading to Tiger and Now Up-to-Date & Contact, Macworld articles, Interesting Thing of the Day, and other interruptions too numerous to mention, I simply couldn’t make it happen sooner.

So this morning I woke up, sat down at my computer, and discovered within the first 30 seconds that I now have a major revision ahead of me, before the first edition even goes out! Not to mention the fact that I’ll need to revise Take Control of Mac OS X Backups more significantly than I already knew I needed to.

The main reason for these revisions is that Apple has done something truly unexpected: they’ve actually made Backup a useful backup application. I can’t overemphasize the significance of this move. I’ve made no secret of my disdain for earlier versions of Backup, which lacked basic features I consider crucial. Although I’ve only spent about an hour so far testing Backup 3.0, I have to say that so far I actually like it. I might even use it. In fact, I might even go so far as to recommend it—for certain kinds of users in certain situations—in lieu of my old favorite, Retrospect.

Most importantly, Backup now performs additive incremental archives, which means that (a) it keeps old copies of files when they change, so that you can choose which one you want when it comes time to restore; and (b) it copies only new or changed files—not every single file—when performing a backup. It has other useful new features too, but I haven’t worked with them enough to say how much I like them.

Added to this is the fact that Apple has quadrupled storage space available to .Mac users for email and iDisk (from 250 MB to 1 GB); you can still buy another gigabyte if you want for $50 per year. Now, 1 GB still isn’t enough to back up your entire hard disk online (and it’s far behind the 2 GB+ limit of Gmail), but it’s certainly way better than before, and at least beginning to get into the territory of practicality. Limited storage space is yet another thing I complained about in the first draft of my ebook on .Mac, and about which I will now have to say somewhat nicer things.

Apple has made some really great steps in the right direction, and this makes me quite upset happy. (I’d like to think that my criticisms played some small part in their decision, but who am I kidding?) I now have to squeeze a few more days of writing into this week, which definitely makes me unhappy, but at least it’s for a good cause.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an unexpected package in the mail: a large tin of delicious chocolate-covered cherries, sent by my publishers as a sort of congratulatory token for having finally completed the very long project of writing Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact. There’s just nothing better than getting goodies in the mail. Actually, many things are better than that, but let’s just say it’s really nice.

I’ve had a real run on surprise goodies recently. Last month, a reader who’s a professional photographer sent me a lovely print from a Moxy Früvous shoot he’d done in the early ’90s. A couple of weeks ago, I received a large gift basket of hot sauces, which I agreed to review and write about as a follow-up to my Interesting Thing of the Day article on Tabasco Sauce and my blog post about Measuring Spiciness. (Stay tuned. The wheels of progress are spinning slowly this summer.) A couple of days ago, I received two CDs from This American Life, courtesy of a reader I’d helped out with some technical questions. Just this morning, the Fisher Space Pen Company offered to send me a prototype of their latest model for testing—with purple ink, natch—as a result of my article on Space Pens. And yet another message in my Inbox this morning was from a reader and regular correspondent who wanted to know if he could buy me a gift subscription to Z Magazine.

Well, this is all quite extraordinary. I’m pleased, touched, grateful—even in the cases where a commercial motive is perhaps lurking behind the scenes. Of course, I would never, ever want someone to feel obligated to send me stuff—or even a thank-you note—for doing them a favor. Favors shouldn’t have to be repaid. But if you choose to send me stuff simply as a way of spreading some good karma around, I am certainly happy to accept. (Well, usually. When I wrote about Castor Oil, a reader offered to send me some castor bean seeds. As I have no outdoor space available where I could plant them, I had to decline.)

Because I’ve spent so much of my life at trade shows and conferences, I’ve become accustomed to using the term “schwag” to denote free merchandise, usually of a promotional nature. (Trade show attendees invariably walk away with all sorts of odd tchotchkes, usually emblazoned with corporate logos.) So by extension I’ve been referring to the items I’ve received recently as “schwag” too. Some cursory research this morning, however, turned up some curious facts. Apparently, there are three distinct spellings: “swag,” “shwag,” and “schwag,” which—though sometimes used interchangeably—have developed rather different primary meanings. As nearly as I’ve been able to determine, they (usually, not always) break down as follows:

• swag: Typically used for stolen goods. Please do not send me any of this.
• shwag: Typically used for marijuana of poor quality. Please do not send me any of this either. (And no, I don’t want it even if it’s high quality.)
• schwag: Typically used for free merchandise (promotional or otherwise). You may send me this if you wish.

But please do me the courtesy of letting me know in advance if I should expect a package from you. As much as I enjoy surprises, I prefer to have a general idea of what I’m opening, times being what they are.

During the years when I managed software development for a living, I came to realize that any time estimate given by an engineer is a complete fiction. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, maybe it’s a desire to please the boss, or maybe it’s simply denial, but engineers always underestimate how long things will take—usually by quite a large margin. I’ve heard of various ways of dealing with this (such as “Double every time estimate, and then double it again” or “Replace ‘days’ with ‘weeks’ and ‘weeks’ with ‘months’”); I eventually learned to pad engineers’ estimates significantly before creating my personal timeline, and pad that timeline again before passing it on to my manager. That usually worked out pretty well. “Underpromise and overdeliver” became one of my mantras.

Alas, it appears I’ve now acquired exactly the same problem: my own time estimates have recently been grossly out of sync with reality.

As recently as April of this year, I imagined that by the end of May, I’d have completed half a dozen ebook projects on my list (new titles and updates) plus several Macworld articles, and be all ready for a nice, relaxing vacation month in June. I was SO looking forward to June. I further imagined that by the end of June, I’d have recuperated from all that writing, completed several much-needed household projects, and polished off umpteen ITotD-related tasks, so that I’d be ready to launch version 3.0 of the site in July.

Well, now that mid-August is here, I suppose I must finally admit that I’m unlikely to meet my May 31 or June 30 deadlines. I could get close to the May 31 deadline by September 1, though. Give or take a month. Although I did manage to take a full week off in June, it was a far cry from what I’d envisioned earlier—and I returned to a huge pile of work.

It’s not that I’ve been lollygagging around all these months. Quite the contrary: I’ve been working quite hard (for the most part)—long hours, late nights, too much caffeine. But things happen. Software misbehaves. Ne’er-do-wells in India try to hack my server to send thousands of spam messages. A magazine asks me to write a “quick” article on something or other. Readers email me with perplexing questions. Friends call me with computer problems. Something that I thought I could explain in a paragraph turns out to require three pages. These are all perfectly ordinary things, but things I didn’t budget for in my time estimates—and they’ve happened again and again. Bottom line: June is now scheduled for September. I am SO looking forward to September.

For those keeping score, however, I have at least made progress on my to-do list: I finished Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact, wrote several Macworld articles, migrated my domains to a new server, fixed half a dozen significant ITotD bugs, pruned our lemon tree, saw a bunch of movies, organized half the junk in my office, bought some colorful new T-shirts, and toured the Sharffen Berger chocolate factory. Just for example.

And for all of you wondering when you’re going to see the next (much-needed) update of your favorite ebook, allow me to assure you that I’ll soon be starting work on the next versions of Take Control of Mac OS X Backups and Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger, doing a major rewrite of Take Control of Email with Apple Mail to cover the new Tiger version of Mail, and expanding Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail to cover not only Mail 2.0 but other Mac OS X email clients as well. And all this will happen as soon as I’ve finished writing yet another brand-new ebook I’m working on, about which more later.

This week, after many months of preparation, my latest ebook was finally released: Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact. This title is different in several respects from all the other Take Control ebooks I’ve written. It’s much longer, for one thing: 249 pages. It’s also the first time I’ve written an ebook that will be distributed with the software it describes (in place of a conventional manual). So although you can download it free, it really costs $120 (since it’s of no use unless you have the software). The arrangement we have with Now Software is such that they get high-quality documentation quite inexpensively, while we forgo high per-unit royalties for (what we all hope and expect will be) high volume. So all parties—including readers—should benefit from this arrangement. After all, as with all Take Control titles, we’ll provide free updates to the ebook as new information becomes available.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this software, Now Up-to-Date & Contact is a highly regarded, cross-platform, network-ready scheduling and contact management package. If you’ve outgrown the capabilities of iCal and Address Book (on Mac OS X) or don’t wish to sell your soul to Microsoft in exchange (sorry) for Outlook on the PC, Now Up-to-Date & Contact offers a great solution for small and medium-sized businesses and even individual users. The just-released version 5.0 has a thoroughly updated interface, several major new features, and lots of bug fixes.

Before I started working on this ebook, it had been years since I’d last used Now Up-to-Date & Contact. Now I’m apparently the new authority on the software—even before the ebook was published, readers (having heard that I was writing it) sent me email asking technical questions. (While I’m flattered and everything, I don’t get paid to do tech support, so kindly direct such questions to Now Software in the future!)

Now Software is hard at work on the Windows version of the software, and I’ll be producing a Windows version of the ebook to go with it. There’s also a version 5.1 for Mac OS X coming, which will include some Tiger-specific enhancements (such as support for Sync Services) as well as, of course, yet another updated version of the ebook.

There is some irony in the fact that during the months I was working on this title, my schedule felt incredibly out-of-control. In theory, Now Up-to-Date could have enabled me to manage my schedule and to-do list masterfully, but I’ve learned through experience that one should never put “live” information into a program one is testing or writing about; the process of experimentation usually results in data loss. Countless times I thought, “This is a great program—I sure wish I could use it myself!”

But then, the real problem is that I habitually pile far too many projects onto my schedule. I’m working on that, though. I’ve added “Decline next project” to my to-do list. I’ll get to it eventually.

Anyone who reads Interesting Thing of the Day regularly has probably noticed that Umberto Eco is one of my favorite authors. Last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Dr. Eco—OK, it was more of a live interview with Michael Krasny, from local NPR affiliate station KQED. Eco talked for about an hour and a half, then answered questions from the audience and signed autographs. I picked up a copy of his latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and also got an autographed copy of Foucault’s Pendulum, one of my favorite novels of all time.

The thing that struck me most about Eco was that he’s not only incredibly smart, he’s really funny. The audience laughed a lot—though admittedly, there were a lot of “in” jokes that only made sense to those with substantial literary chops. And the talk was inspiring, too. As someone who’s immersed in the somewhat tedious work of writing one technical book and article after another, I found it fascinating to hear about his process of constructing novels, which sounds like great fun. In fact, to hear it put the way he described it, it sounds like something I could enjoy.

I’ll add that to my list, right after I get caught up reading all of Eco’s books. So, maybe 2009 or so.

Although I never intended to update this blog as frequently as Interesting Thing of the Day, it’s looking like the next few months will be an especially lean time. I’m working on several new ebooks and articles that have quite challenging deadlines, and my free time is unbelievably limited. I currently anticipate that around June 1 my schedule will become significantly more relaxed, but until then, expect very few new posts here.

Part 2 of the two-part excerpt from Take Control of Mac OS X Backups is now available on the Macworld Web site. (Also see Part 1.)

Last week Adam Engst sent me an email in which he mentioned that Macworld magazine was going to have an excerpt from my latest ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, on their Web site. Apparently there had been some discussion about putting it in the printed magazine, but for a variety of uninteresting reasons everyone agreed that it made more sense just to put it on the Web site. I was not part of those discussions, and I really didn’t think about it much. I’ve had articles published in the print edition of Macworld, and excerpts from all my ebooks have been made available in many different forms. This didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I didn’t even bother to visit the Macworld site or ask which portion of the ebook had been excerpted.

A few days ago, I began noticing that sales of the ebook were up significantly, and I also started getting email messages from folks who had read the article. These are both normal occurrences anytime I have something new published, so again, I didn’t really think about it. Then I got a message from a company whose software I’d referred to in passing; they felt that perhaps I’d given their product short shrift. Before I could reply I had to go over to the Macworld site to see exactly which portion of the text they’d published. And there, to my surprise, was my article at the very top of their home page—the equivalent of front-page news in the Macintosh world.

On the one hand, I was delighted: publicity is always good, and the extra sales don’t hurt. On the other hand, I was a bit embarrassed—I hadn’t updated this blog in a long time, and readers have been checking it out. D’oh! It’s like having company on a day your house is a mess. Oh well. I guess that’ll get me typing. It’s not as though I have a shortage of things to write about, only a shortage of time.

I’m happy to report that my fourth ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, is now shipping.

When I began writing, I fully expected it to be a quick, easy, 50-page book. Many weeks later, I found I had to leave out a fair bit of interesting material just to keep it under 100 pages. But I’m pleased with the result; it’s the only reference of its kind for Mac OS X. My goal was to cut through all the confusion and marketing hype about backup software and hardware, giving readers sane, helpful, and comprehensible advice on how to keep their data safe. If you’re a Mac OS X user, I think you’ll find the book extremely useful—and a bargain, too, at $10.

Although writing Take Control ebooks sometimes requires me to put in long hours and late nights, I find this writing some of the most enjoyable and rewarding work I do. Compared to my other current sources of income, these ebooks generate the best ratio of reward to effort. I’m looking forward to doing several more in 2005, most notably a Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) edition of my Take Control of Upgrading title, which was extremely popular around the time Mac OS X 10.3 Panther was released.

When I set out to write about Apple’s Mail application for the Take Control series, I had several long discussions with Adam and Tonya Engst about how to divide the material into chunks of the right size, since we generally aim for 50-page ebooks and we clearly had much more than 50 pages worth of content. But as I started writing, I quickly discovered that the subject matter didn’t lend itself to the kinds of divisions we had come up with. After several false starts, I gave up on splitting the information and just wrote it as one very long document, hoping that a logical way to split the text would emerge after the fact.

After a great deal of mulling over that manuscript, Tonya suggested that I could split off the portion about fighting spam (roughly 20 pages) and expand that into its own complete ebook. The rest of the material would then be reorganized into a second book. It took quite a bit of additional effort, but the final result was a $5, 59-page ebook called Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail and a $10, 89-page ebook called Take Control of Email with Apple Mail.

Now, after all that tedious splitting, the two pieces have been rejoined into a printed book from Peachpit called Take Control of Apple Mail. It’s a gorgeous book, in full color, and includes our trademark free updates—anyone who purchases the printed book is entitled to free downloads of any future editions of the PDF version we produce. Quite a deal.

The only problem was that the book was printed a few weeks too late to meet the reset deadlines for certain large retail book chains. So although you can find it on Amazon.com and in a few bookstores, most brick-and-mortar shops probably won’t carry it until after the first of the year, at which point its days may be numbered, depending on how dramatic the changes are to the version of Mail that ships with Tiger. (A complete rewrite of the book, for example, would be beyond the scope of the free updates.)

Still, it was very nice to get my name on the cover of yet another printed book with barely any extra effort.

My first ebook, Take Control of Upgrading to Panther, came out just over a year ago. It has sold incredibly well and received rave reviews; it’s also now available in printed form as part of Take Control of Panther: Volume 1. In addition, it’s the first one of my books to have been translated into other languages. The arrangement the publisher has is that any willing and able party may translate the text into their language of choice but with no money paid up front. The translated ebooks are sold at 150% of the cost of the English versions, so that author, translator, and publisher can all receive equal shares of the profits at the same rate as the original. In other words, a translation becomes worthwhile for the translator only if he or she does enough marketing, and sells enough copies, in the target country to justify the time spent.

The first translation to appear, back in February (four months after Panther’s release) was Japanese, of which a respectable (if not stunning) 181 copies have been sold so far. In June (release + eight months), a German translation appeared; it’s sold only 26 copies, meaning the translator received a paltry reward for his efforts. Amazingly, just last month—a full year after Panther came out—a Dutch translation was released. Total sold so far: 17.

As cool as it is to be able to say my work has been translated into three other languages, I really feel for these folks who have invested so much of their time for virtually no pay. And yet, the reason seems fairly obvious to me: by the time the German and Dutch translations had appeared, the vast majority of potential customers had undoubtedly already completed their upgrades to Panther, with no further need for a book to help them. As it is, I’m only selling about one or two copies a day of the English edition (down from hundreds a day in the first few weeks), because most Mac users who have not yet made the move to Panther are now more likely to wait for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), due out some time in the first half of 2005.

Computer books always have a relatively short shelf life, because the products they describe change so rapidly. Thus, any hopes of making significant money from a translation require that the work be done as rapidly as possible after the book’s release. There will of course be an English edition of Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger when the time comes, and though no one has said anything to me yet about translations of that book, I certainly hope that if they happen, they happen quickly. Not just for the sake of the translators, either, but for the sake of the readers!

Yesterday I got my first sample copy of Take Control of Panther, Volume 1, a compilation of the first four Take Control ebooks. These should be appearing on the shelves of your favorite bookstore any day now. It’s nice once again to have my name on the cover of a (more or less) current printed book.

I wrote my portion of this book back in October of 2003, and though I’ve revised it several times since then, it seems kind of strange that it was nearly a full year before it appeared in printed form. Stranger still: I won’t see any money from this edition until January at the earliest, and possibly much later. That’s because of the odd way print publishers still work, even in the 21st century: royalties are computed quarterly (or, in some cases, biannually), but then the publisher generally has another full 90 days to actually send out a check. So in this case, since we’re just at the end of the third quarter, the publisher has until the end of December (i.e., 90 days from the end of Q3) to send out a check for whatever books were sold this month—less a certain percentage as a reserve against returns. The check will actually go to TidBITS, which will in turn send each of the contributors their cut. I don’t think very many copies will be sold in the next two weeks, so if I get a check in January it’s likely to be quite small. Maybe in April I’ll get a bigger check—just in time for the book to become obsolete as Apple releases Tiger!

More than a year ago, I started working on a book about AppleScript Studio, having signed a contract with a certain publisher—let’s call them Publisher A—stipulating the amount of advance, royalties, schedules, and so on. After I turned in the first batch (maybe one-fifth of the book), the publisher said they’d had a change in their strategic direction and were no longer interested in publishing Mac programming books. So they dropped the project and my manuscript was orphaned.

My ever-diligent agent decided to shop around for a new publisher, and several—let’s call them Publishers B, C, and D—expressed interest. Publisher B made me an offer, but had a condition in the contract I couldn’t live with (more on this in a moment). Publisher C offered high royalties but a low advance (more on that, too, shortly). And then Publisher D offered a reasonable amount of money and a great contract, except for one tiny little phrase that I absolutely refused to agree to and they absolutely refused to change. Thus, after having gone through four publishers, the project is once again orphaned (for now, at least).

The problematic phrase in Publisher D’s contract (which was also one of the sticking points with Publisher B) basically indemnified the publisher against claims of breaches of my warranty that the material is original and free from copyright violations. In other words, it means that if someone were to sue them claiming that I violated a copyright, then even if the claim were completely unsubstantiated, even if I proved in court that I did nothing wrong, and even if the claim were in fact completely frivolous, I would still be responsible to pay the publisher’s legal fees for defending the suit. This cost would almost certainly be far more than I’d ever received for writing the book in the first place.

Although it’s extraordinarily unlikely that such a lawsuit would ever occur, clearly something of that sort must have happened at some point, or the publisher wouldn’t have been so adamant about leaving that language in. I know several other authors who reluctantly agreed to this language because refusing to do so would amount to a career-limiting move. But I said no, because I don’t think it’s ethical to hold an author financially responsible for actions over which he or she had no control whatsoever. Nor is it ethical for me to put my financial security at risk to protect a big company against unscrupulous litigants. I can warrant that my work is original, but I can’t agree to pay legal fees to fight off someone who has a random grudge against the publisher.

The real pity is that I truly like and respect the publishers and editors involved, it’s just that their lawyers are being intransigent and corporate policy dictates that no contract can be signed that the lawyers don’t OK.

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I’ve always marveled at the role sheer randomness has played in my career.

For example, when I got the contract to write my first computer book (about 10 years ago now), it was only because I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I was doing tech support for Nisus Software, and I happened to be answering mail sent to one of the company’s email addresses. A publisher wrote to the company at that address to ask if we knew of any Nisus-using authors who might be willing to write a book on the program. I mentioned a few names, and then said I myself would be extremely interested. One thing led to another, and I got the gig. And the fact that I’d had one book published gave me enough currency in the publishing biz to do a second one, and so on.

In today’s mail I found my copy of the October, 2004 issue of Macworld magazine, featuring an article by yours truly—my first for the magazine. Again, the way I got the assignment was pretty random. I’d written an ebook on dealing with Spam in Apple Mail, and just before the ebook was published, a Macworld editor had joined our Take Control authors’ mailing list. She read about my ebook and told me that another editor at the magazine had been looking for someone to write an article about spam, and would I be interested? Absolutely—I’ve wanted to write for Macworld for a long time.

But here’s what I find interesting. For its first couple of months, Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail did not sell particularly well. However, its publication led to interviews for radio shows and Wired News, not to mention the Macworld article, so it’s had the biggest PR impact of any of my titles. After the companion ebook Take Control of Email with Apple Mail came out, the two titles seemed to boost each other’s sales, and now both are quite successful. So even though the ebook by itself didn’t generate a huge amount of interest, it spawned other processes (so to speak) that indirectly reinforced its sales. And with the upcoming publication of these two books together in printed form from Peachpit, I’m hoping the exposure we get from appearing on bookstore shelves will make even more people aware of the Take Control series and perpetuate the cycle further.