I got home at around 4:00pm to find 2 boxes outside my door. You guessed it. The print books have arrived. I opened one up and they look great, no additional glitches were introduced in the last 24 hours of furious revisions. I'm sure there are still a few typos in there, but this will work for a first printing. Approximately 40 copies will go out immediately (several folks asked for electronic copies instead of print so they could get the book earlier, but 2 copies have to go to the U.S. Copyright Office for registration). If any of you think of folks who should get review copies let me know and I'll get in touch with them. I've budgeted about 5 copies for reviewers, but am scratching my head trying to figure who/where to send them to for maximum effectiveness.

If you've already read the book and like it, you might want to know that there's already a GoodReads page up. Thanks, Todd!

Books will go out Monday, except for those of you who haven't provided your addresses yet. I'll put up a buy link on the official book site tomorrow and put up a blog post over at my blog, but I figured you early supporters should get notified early.

Thank you all very much!

Digital Book Sales are live!. I received the final proof, and it looks pretty good. I've corrected a bunch of typos, and uploaded a new interior text. I'll order another proof tomorrow and place a print order copy on Friday.

At this point, all my backers should receive requests for mailing information as well as options on how they want their books signed, etc. Thank you one and all for your encouragement!

I've been scrambling for the past week to:

1. Keep up with incoming feedback
2. Stay on top of the permissions process, to get everyone who was quoted extensively in the book to agree to be quoted.
3. Get a Proof-ready copy.

I'm happy to report that I've at this point consolidated all the feedback, and pending a few more changes will release the final "release candidate" for the book.

Everyone except one person who was quoted in the book have gotten back to me with approval to quote. Google's former SVP of Engineering, Wayne Rosing, and Facebook's VP of Technology Jeff Rothschild have even provided additional material that is both insightful and useful.

I ordered a proof copy last Tuesday. It's getting here by slow boat, so at this point, print copies are at least a month out (2 more weeks for the final proof, and then another 2 weeks for the first print orders). However, if you're in a hurry by February 24th and pledged at the $15 level, you'll get an option to either wait for the paper copy, or get the electronic copy immediately. Obviously, electronic copies will be unsigned.

Thank you all for your support!

My book cover is now ready. I first made on in photoshop, and then a friend of mine suggested a black and white version. Feed back on either (or both) would be welcome. One thing that surprises me is that I don't have any ultra high resolution photos of Silicon Valley. I'll have to rectify this in case the proof doesn't look good.

I'm currently going over the book with a fine tooth comb for final edits. That mean that if you're waiting for the ARC, I'm not going to have one out this week (unlike what I thought).

Part of it was because I ended up doing my taxes, which are more complicated than I thought this year, and the other part was I ended up in a meeting about a startup on the day I was supposed to work on the book instead. The combination meant that I didn't get through the re-reading/correcting that I was supposed to.

You may have noticed that we've now reached the fund raising goal for this project. Thank you all for the support! Now we start the business phase of the project. This is mostly lots of paper work, but also quite a bit of money too (California's an expensive place to do business). Setting up an LLC, applying for a seller's permit, getting a business license, opening a checking account... All this has to be done before I can sell books. I've kicked this process off today!

I've passed an exciting milestone this week, as I made advanced reader copies available to a number of backers! I know this is jumping the gun a bit, since the project isn't fully funded yet, and no money has been collected, but as with every other project, it's important to get something out there to a few readers to make sure that I'm covering enough of the topics that people would buy this book for.

I expect to make changes (maybe even big changes) to the structure and content as a result of early reader feedback. If you've pledged at the $50 level and haven't received your ARC yet, don't panic. I'm doing the ARCs in various stages, because for each draft, I would like to have both readers who've seen the earlier versions as well as a fresh set of eyes to see it, so hopefully if you get an ARC at a later stage, it will be more polished.

One interesting thing I'm learning is that it's not nearly as easy building a Kindle format ebook as I originally envisioned. I thought all I'd have to do is to strip off the index and table of contents (relying on the Kindle search feature), and run Mobipocket Creator on the resulting file. The reality is not that simple, since bullet points, for instance, don't show up well. Well, this gives me something to do while waiting for early reader feedback.

For those of you who are wondering about the book. I'm now close enough to the finish line that I'm starting to think about things like book sizes (5x8? 6x9?), font sizes (size 10? size 12?), font type (Garmond?), and who to get to do my printing (Amazon is the current leading contender).

And yes, I horribly mis-priced the book over at Kickstarter. The final price will be likely closer to $29.95 than $15 a book, but giving my early supporters a price break seems only fair. I'm actually really shocked to see so much support, so thank you all very much. Obviously, at this point, even if Kickstarter fails to generate $1000, the book will go out.

The electronic edition actually offers a major conundrum. I'm a big fan of the Kindle, as anyone who has traveled with me knows. But the royalty split between the author and Amazon is an astonishingly low 30%/70%. I'm not expecting to get rich off this book, but at this point, it seems like I'm better off going John T Reed style and accepting Google checkout in exchange for a DRM-free version of the book! Funnily enough, the print split between Amazon and the author is a much more reasonable 50/50 split. Even that's annoying enough for me to want to go John T. Reed on everyone and just inventory and ship the books myself. (I'm not egoistic enough think that this will be a best seller by any means --- it's a highly technical book on a very niche topic)