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The main reason Amanda Hocking gave for going pro-publisher after making a zillion dollars as a selfpub author is that she was tired of doing her own publicity. For real, selling oneself is hard.

I'm still working on marketing research but I'm also realising I should be managing my existing online assets with slightly more aggression. I feel somewhat ridiculous about it, like I'm pretending at being a Real Author, but it's reached the point where entropy no longer smooths over the chaos on its own. I keep a clippings file, but that's about it, so today I got on LibraryThing and added tags and cover images to my books there. Is anyone running a Sam's Cafe group on LibraryThing? Imma fire one up, if not, but I didn't want to supplant anything already in place.

And just in case anyone wasn't aware, you can follow my (very rare) tweets at ouija_sam on Twitter. I'm on Google Plus under Sam Starbuck, and technically I'm on Facebook but I never log into Facebook. There is a Sam's Cafe group there, however.

My hand to god I will stop talking publicity soon. I'm just incapable of processing things silently when I have the internet to talk to.

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Do send it! I'm all prepped for RFM so it's easy to add. :)

I really want to write up something better for this, but I've been at a con all weekend, and I am totally braindead. However, it's Kickstarter, so there's a time limit. Here's a bit of a mish mash of the stuff I know; hopefully this isn't completely useless. Sorry it's so late!

First link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1738994529/kikori-open-source-cnc-gantry-router?ref=video

My friend Judah just graduated with a degree in industrial design. He's designed an open source Computer Numeric Control (CNC) Gantry Router, which is demonstrated/explained in the short (but extremely informative) video. I believe that people should be able to make a living doing what they love, and that's basically what he is trying to do. The other emphasis he has is that he's trying to make these machines available to others in order to create jobs. Hence, open source. The highest Kickstarter reward is the parts for the machine itself, which is only $600.

His blog/website: http://sindrianarts.com/
His post explaining what CNC is: http://www.sindrianarts.com/2011/07/06/so-what-is-this-cnc-stuff-anyway/

The last link, the blog post, is what really demonstrates his passion (and intelligence), short of meeting him, which is why I include it.

Is that enough that you can pull it together into something coherent? Given the hour, I may not wake up before you RFM this and therefore probably can't answer questions, but he's still got 20 days left on the project, so if it has to wait for next week, that is okay!