Turkey Recovery Day

Happy Turkey Recovery Day!

So I haven't had much time to watch more of Once Upon A Time.  I'm a bit upset at myself for not forcing the issue, but I've been deep in writing mode recently and don't want to break the streak, or maybe I should say "didn't" because today Star Wars The Old Republic's stress-test beta starts and I'm almost certain that's going to eat my waking hours right up with a spoon.

What is a stress-test beta?  Well, I'm glad you asked!  It's a chance for the company (in this case Bioware- which by the way makes the most awesome games) to make sure their servers can handle the volume of gamers when the game actually launches.  Considering I think they're already up to 10 million pre-orders, it's a smart idea.  I'm just happy I get to preview the game!  (No, I don't think I get to tell you anything about it other than "awesome", which is a given.  I'm pretty sure I remember reading that in the TOS).

I also may have finally figured out something about Twitter I was missing before.

What's that, you say?  Well, I got on Twitter some months ago because it was very strongly recommended I start figuring out how to use it as a marketing tool.  I'm familiar enough with it now that I actually find it somewhat enjoyable to use (less intrusive and quicker than facebook updates), but I hadn't really seen how you could reach a wider audience with it since people actually had to know you existed to follow you, right?

Wrong.  Today I discovered the magic of the "#" key.

In case you don't know (as I didn't), if you do a search for, say, #scifi in Twitter, it pulls up all tweets and profiles with the configuration "#scifi" in them.  If you put #scifi in your tweets and profile, you become searchable in this way.  AHA! I say!  So I went back and changed my profile to include these things, and hopefully I will now be followed by legions of people with shared interests...

Or so the theory goes.  It feels a little bit like "idea-black box-profit!" but hopefully it'll work.

In other news I had a great conversation with my to-be cousin by marriage yesterday about marketing your stuff on Amazon.com.  I'm seriously considering it for the books I'm working on as I am not horribly optimistic about my odds getting an agent just yet, and because I want to keep my options open.  He said he thinks amazon lets you keep 80% of your sales money a.k.a. profits (at least in theory), so that's definitely tempting.  I'll have to research it more, but if the next year or so proves horribly disappointing in the contacting an agent department, that's what I'm gonna wind up doing.

My S-T-B cousin is Gian Stone, by the way.  He's a pretty kick-ass musician.  You can find his first album here at Amazon.  I haven't had a chance to listen to the second yet, but the first was really good (no, I don't think he reads my blog so you can be sure I'm telling the truth).  It's got a kind of light, folky sound that just sorta makes you smile while you listen to it.  I'm usually a hard-rock/metal type of guy, but I really enjoyed this stuff.  Anyways, check it out!

That's all for this time!  Be well!