Two of my books are now available on Amazon!

The 3rd Edition of An Engineers Guide to Silicon Valley Startups is now available on Amazon.com. Since paper books are now a vanishingly small percentage of my sales, Im outsourcing the production and shipping of paperbacks to Amazon whenever I run out of inventory. This comes at a price: while I was able to store and ship books at a low price of $29.95 per copy (just $5 more than the digital edition), Amazon has public shareholders and thus I have to price the book much higher to have the same profit. Fortunately, the ebook is still at the same price of $24.95.

Coincidentally, Id finally sold out of paperback copies of Startup Engineering Management as well, and thats now also available from Amazon as a paperback. Given that this book started shipping September last year, needless to say it has outperformed my expectations for it!

The last book for which Im still shipping copies is Independent Cycle Touring. I have 5 copies left, and once those are gone, expect the paperback prices to go up substantially, just like it has for my other books.

Im now very close to automating my business completely. Electronic fulfillment is now done by , and integrates nicely with paypal and Google Checkout (the former better than the latter). Thanks to Gayle Laakmann McDowell for pointing me at them.

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My Books Are Discounted on Amazon

Those of you who visit my books website know that I dont believe in discounting. But Amazon believes otherwise, and for now, print copies of my book are being sold at a discount:

• An Engineers Guide to Silicon Valley Startups ($39.56)
• Startup Engineering Management ($35.96)
• Independent Cycle Touring ($26.01)

Independent Cycle Touring in particular is discounted by a huge amount (35%), and it works particularly well in print format, so if youve been holding off on buying it, this is the cheapest its ever been and probably the cheapest it will ever be. If you have any interest in the topic at all, this is the best book on the topic, and of all of my books is the least likely to be outdated.

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My Next PC Will Be Home Built

My 3 year-old HP m9600t is now starting to be flakey. 3 years is about the usual amount of time it takes for a desktop to die, but the nice thing about owning a PC (versus a Mac), is that you can usually reuse components over time, provided you didnt buy a proprietary machine and build your own. Since the machine is still mostly working, I can leisurely pick over components, etc., and buy stuff as they come on sale. However, Im happy to use my blog as a platform to shop for components. My suspicion is that Ill be able to keep my existing HDDs, and video card (Radeon 4850), though it would be nice if the machine gave me an upgrade path. Here are my priorities:

1. Fast enough to handle lightroom and video editing.
2. Quiet. This means large fans running at low speed.
3. Power efficient. No more desktop PC behaving like a space heater.

Requirements:

• Must have hot-swappable hard drive bays. I would like to have 4 hard drive bays, though I could live with just 2 if necessary.
• Must be easy to work on. No more pinching my fingers to install memory or hard drives.
• Plenty of USB slots (USB 3?).
• Room for upgradability
• Must drive my 27" monitor together with my 24" monitor.
• Reliable. Im not willing to put up with flakey BIOS and such.

Nice to haves:

• Built in memory card readers for SD cards and CF.
• High quality sound.
• Blu-ray

Non goals: small. Im ok with a big monster. Gaming is a lower priority than absolutely raw power needed to make Lightroom, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere Elements fly. I guess mostly what Im looking for is motherboard, case, fans, power supply recommendations. Its easy for me to shop for CPUs, memories, and HDDs myself. I look forward to recommendations from my social network. (No recommendations for Apple products need apply)

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Introducing my Consultancy Service

Ive been helping people on various things, ranging from linking up their startups with potential employees, helping various people vet their ideas, to helping engineers negotiate their compensation. All of these activities are time consuming, and do take quite a bit of my time. At this point, Im having to admit that unless I start charging people, all my time can easily be taken up by random interruptions.

Unfortunately, my hourly rate is not cheap. Nevertheless, given how much Ive boosted peoples offers, I can safely say that I could charge 10X my hourly rate and everyone Ive helped would still come out ahead. Unlike books or generalists, I dont work in platitudes and generalities. In most cases, I tell people exactly what to say to their managers to get a better offer/counter-offer.

If you need someone to help you negotiate your compensation package, see what I can do for you!

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