Blog

Any Ulysses user knows there’s an ePub export function. It’s right there in the export sheet. Sitting there, throwing shade with it’s little slanted “e.” Mocking me. This afternoon I was thinking about turning my sample chapter into a eBook. There’s lots of ways to build an eBook. The most common seem to be: Kindle Direct Publishing – Many file types can be uploaded and converted by by Amazon. This only makes Kindle books, which go directly to the Amazon bookshelf.

Writing a sample chapter for a possible programming book was quite eye-opening. I’ve never done any serious non-fiction writing other than a magazine article. Writing a programming book is considered non-fiction just as a humor book is. I find the classification funny. “Fiction” is defined as everything not-made-up. It can be anything from a story about a crime in your town to space battles. Non-fiction is everything else. In the sample chapter I realized there was as much fiction as truth.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. The sample chapter upped the numbers quite a bit.

(This is a sample chapter I put together to see how I felt about writing a programming book.) The Simple Script Before starting to build a more complicated program, let’s start with something simple. We’re going to hack together a short script that works. It will upload a single cat picture to a S3 bucket. We’ll learn the basics of both a ruby script and how cloud storage works. Lesson setup In your working directory create a new branch for this chapter.

By comparing the 1995 and 2014 pictures, astronomers also noticed a lengthening of a narrow jet-like feature that may have been ejected from a newly forming star. The jet looks like a stream of water from a garden hose. Over the intervening 19 years, this jet has stretched farther into space, across an additional 60 billion miles, at an estimated speed of about 450,000 miles per hour. #supernovaSaturday Source: Hubblesite.org

Lately, I’ve been dabbling in ruby programming. I’ve mentioned it a few times recently. I’ve also been thinking that what I’m doing would make for a decent beginners book. I’ve seen a few of the ones out there. The projects are much more involved and tend to focus on web applications. This would be more of a beginner-to-beginner style project. I’m thinking there might be a place for a smaller, focused book.

Last week I got sucked into a small coding project. I wanted a quick way to upload files to AWS S3. S3 acts like a FTP file server. But traditional upload methods like SFTP aren’t allowed. This makes the service tricky to use from the command line. I wanted a simple tool that I could use in three different ways: Directly from the command line. Inside of an Automator workflow “run shell scrip” action.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been plagued with sleep problems. This was more than not being sleepy around bedtime. This was not being sleepy plus not actually sleeping when in bed. I think it started with a few late nights. From there, I spiraled into becoming semi-nocturnal. I would be okay with the good kind of nocturnal. The kind where I could sleep peacefully and wake up as evening fell.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. There’s a slight uptick in total words.

From Amazon’s point of view, I could see this as a “why wouldn’t we” situation. They can squeeze both ends of the pipeline (customers and authors) now that the ebook gold rush is mostly over. Yes, I may be a little biased in my opinion, and I am open to being proved wrong, but I really do think that KDP Select is becoming less about selling ebooks, and more about taking money from self published authors’ already lean pockets.