(no subject)

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.

(no subject)

I think I'm disappointed by the book Edison's Eve not so much because it's not a good book as because it's drastically false advertising.

Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life is a pretty specific title, and I was really looking forward to a book about the progress of robotics through the ages -- like Different Engines was for the Science Fiction genre.

Man is subject to time, to its inevitable march towards death, whereas the clockwork automaton merely marks time without falling prey to it. --p. xvii

( Edison's Eve, by Gaby Wood )

Final Verdict: I guess the point is that a lot of the message of the book, the extrapolations and philosophy, gets lost in minutiae. And I want to go easy on the author, because this is her first full-length book and reads a lot like an expanded doctoral thesis that went a little wonky at the end. I know how it is; it's easy to want to share ALLLLL THE INFORMATION. But this book could have done with a good editor, a timeline, and a few more drafts, I think.

(no subject)

I just spent like ten minutes coming up with punny titles for a theoretical sitcom a friend could star in. This is the most fun you can have without moving. For example, as she lives in Texas, one of them was "Death And Texas".

I favour "Sam Old Story" for mine, which is naturally about a neurotic writer living in Chicago. Though if you want to go wacky there's there's "Sam And Delilah" which is about me and my robot best friend, D3L1L@H.

Come on, you guys know you want to spend Friday night making puns on your names and inventing sitcoms. I bet we can have Two And A Half Men replaced by morning.