Friday, June 29, 2012

5 Golden Coins is accepted by Apple

I am in shock.

Yeah, Not only did the App get approved first time. It also got approved in record time. 1 Week after submission it went into review. Then just hours later passes and says it is now live.

Though we have to wait for it to become truly available to see on ther AppStore and be able to buy it.

Still, this is a great thing and 1 less submission for me to worry about. One startling thing is the fact that Amazon are still reviewing the Book App for their store :O

WOOHOO!  I am so happy this has passed.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Apple is now Reviewing 5 Golden Coins

I just received the email from Apple stating that my game is 'now in review'. I sure hope things go smoothly, as I still have not managed to get anything published on iOS devices.

Ok, so I only tried with Hot Chicks the card game, but being so incredibly adult and mature, iOS device owners were not able to stomach it. Oh, sorry that is a diservice. Apparently noone with that brand of device even saw it, ONLY the tester.. He or she must have an Iron constitution to handle the explicit nature of the game (joke of course).

Hopefully this time I will get some less pomous reviewing done and it will pass with flying colors.

finger crossed here...

Da Voodoochief

ps. and no, i AM bitter!

ADatZ sample Elephants

My new and most excellent artist, Nathan is his name and he is busy working on 'A Day at the Zoo' artwork. This is for my series of adventure books for children as Book Apps. www.b4ir.com

he just sent me some sketches of Elephants to look over and pick one of his examples to run with and paint up . this is so exciting, I have choices haha, which I love to have. Only...

Well....

How the heck do I choose which one to go with ? Maybe you folks have an opinion?

I like the top one because it is so playful, as is the bottom one. But the middle one is so classic, gah!

Da Voodoochief

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Wasting Time on Game Changes

Time of development can quite easily be considered Money. That is you are being paid for the development in hand. Indie devs can believe that this rule does not apply to them as they are busy creating their vision and are not being paid for doing this development anyway. However this is not strictly true even for Indie devs. Simply because time is still money, or potential earnings.

Consider that if each game took you 6 months to complete you would have 2 titles in a year, earning whatever they earn. But if you did their development in only 4 months, then you would have three titles, Three chances at catching Lightning in a bottle! If it is due to change of something that already works great, it is costing you.

I am sure you are wondering why this is important and if in fact this is relevant to anything. Well it is, simply becasue a lot of changes to gameplay only add a very small percentage of increased exposure, or increased profitability. So you could add 4 new powerups for you platform game to the 6 you already had, then you would have a nice round 10 powerups, yeah, that sounds most excellent (yeah, even to my ears :). The real question is, did you really need to add them. These bits of coding tend to be the most fun to write, but can also eat up a lot of time if done well. Implementing and timing effects can take a considerable amount of time to get nice. So did you need those extra powerups? They were not in the original design, so most likely NO, but they do add a bit of pizzaz. That is called feature creep and is not the point of this Blog post, though it is related, as it can be a real waste of time/money.

So back to creating your game and doing game changes for the sake of making things line up, or seem right, or balance in an OCD way better. As with the 6 powerups becoming 10 to make it a nice round decimal number. Changes in game can be very costly and could easily put back any title (AAA titles also suffer from this). It tends to be worse when more people are involved in the dev process.
  1. Can ya change the way the hair looks
  2. Can the hair bounce programmatically
  3. Instead of counting up the numbers and making them Glow, can they flash and count down?
  4. Can the countdown cross fade and not be separate?
  5. Although that moving effect looks ace and took ya a week, can you make it stationary?
All these are examples of what I have seen and dealt with myself. There was nothing wrong with what was there, and in some cases it was better before the change. But somone wanted it changed for the sake of change.

Tip:
Late in a project all changes should be considered for the enhancement potential to the game alongside their cost in time and money.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Blog Followers Count so low

I like writing this Blog about my creations and sometimes my meanderings into different aspects of my life. Yet I try hard to keep it on track and I blog often.  I currently get approximately 80-100 visits a day, although that would be in the week, weekends are a lot more lax.

I write in a way that I believe is interesting and sort of storyish, giving what I hope is a unique perspective into games creation and all that entails. Which is of course a complicated and many headed beastie.

The real questions is How Do I Get More Followers and Visitors to my Blog?

I tried in February and upped my readership from 20ish a day to the current 80ish. Now I did this by getting myself listed on Blog directory sites. And I also Ping my Blog posts every now and again. I used to ping them all, but I am not sure it has any real effect. As far as I can tell most of my visitors are in fact bots, crawling through whatever I post for 'I don't know what'. This is disappointing as I believed if people checked out my blog, they would come back occasionally.

Instead it seems that I have very little retention. Or maybe I just cannot reach new people with what I am currently doing. I got the big rush back in Fenruary when I joined the Directories and started Pinging my posts. Only that should have allowed me to continually grow my audience if in fact it really worked. Even if the audience grew slowly.

As it happens a lot of my new audience came from the fact i work on Playstation Home stuff. Which is interesting, as there are a lot more people who play Device and Phone games than play in Sony Playstation Home. So surely I should get more followers for that development, but so far that does not appear to be true.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not griping at all, I would write this Blog even if the only people reading it were my Mum and family back in England. Still I feel it is a missed opportunity if I do not grow it. I do hear about blogs that get posted to once a month that have more followers than me.

Maybe I can get more Blog followers from expanding my Twitter follower list (which is at about 900 at the moment).

Time will tell, but if YOU have any ideas of how I can get more followers, then please let me know :)

Thanks for reading,
Da Voodoochief

Friday, June 22, 2012

Amazon submission continues

After getting notification that 5 golden Coins had failed submision with Amazon for the external link not working. Well I messaged them back and told them the situation. Today I got an email (maybe 36 hours later) that all is good and they will carry on with the submission process. This is great as I expect most parents to buy this Book/App for their iPads and Kindle fire Pads. It does look do much better and appears more like a real book on these machines.

A guy who happens to have followed me on twitter cos for my day job I sometimes do Playstation Home stuff. I am very thankful right now as we are in the process of final contract negotiations for artwork for my next Book/App 'A Day at the Zoo'. His artwork looks great, and I will reveal more when the contract is signed etc.. (VERY EXCITED!!!)

I spent a buncha money a couple of nights ago to buy some audio equipment, like Mikes and mixer and stands etc. I have spent a bit of money, but the gear I am gonna receive is gonna be great, not only for my Book/App audio (and videos). But it will be amazing for Karaoke as well. So I am also very excited to think in several weeks time I might be having a Karaoke party at my house, haha! Yeah baby, living the dream. Only reason why it's several weeks is becasue the mixer is on back order, bah!

Well that's a quick catchup for now.. More laters...

Da Voodoochief

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

5 Golden Coins failed Amazon submission

It failed and within 24 hours of being submitted. I wonder if Amazon are pushing testing for Apps through quicker now, or maybe there is not such a large backlog nowadays.

Anyway... My App failed because of the credits screen. Yes, it's true. In fact it failed the credits screen because I use links to partner or credited web sites. In this particular case the 'Adventure Books for Children' web site was the cause of the issue. When they clicked this live link it sent them not to www.b4ir.com (like the link is inside the app, but to m.b4ir.com instead.

As it happens that web site redirection was setup already to have it's OWN web pages (I did not know this). So it ended up on a web page saying that the address could not be found. GARH!

After about an hour with Tech support on my web site we found the issue and removed the redirection. So now it goes right through to  www.b4ir.com instead, like I always wanted it to. In fact in my testing this is what it did for it's behaviour, so I am unsure what changed recently.

Still, a very aggravating set of circumstances, and now I have emails Amazon to ask that they continue with my Apps submission process as this was not anything wrong with the App, but an external web page redirection issue. Time will tell what Amazon will do, but I hope I don't have to needlessly re-upload the Apps apk file.

Laters all
Da Voodoochief

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

5 Golden Coins on Google play

5 Golden Coins on Google play.

I took this weekend to make sure all my submission extras were created and written up. I know I still have to put my list out into the Blog, but at the moment it is too untidy. I will conitinue to work on that. Then later I can use the Blog post to make sure my submission extra items are done properly.

It took most of my weekend working through creating extra icons of various sizes (so many!). there were several redesigns along the way for the extra small icons (36x36, 48x48), but I like the iconic look of these now much better than when they had words in them.

I ended up quite enjoying creating the marketing blurb and game descriptions, even the features were fun to do. Not something I typically enjoy doing. However this time I used a whole lot of my research to help me out. I did this by using comps, or comparison titles. There are a lot of childrens interactive books available for Android and iOS devices, so I searched out approxiamtely 10 or so of them, but a couple of diferent companies, such as Disney. Then i grabbed all their marketing and description text for the 10 games. Then I deleted stuff I dislied or did not match my game. Then I ended up with what I would call a suggestion or hint list. This also had the side effect of my accumulating some more common descriptions for this type of App. Such as 'App Book' or 'Word for Word narration'. That was especially useful for me, as I was not familiar with those terms. Then I wrote my own blurb from the notes I had accumulated from these other titles. This worked out so well and I did not copy a single line in the end, just used it all as inspiration. After all they have some clever creative writers at these big companies.

Once I had all this informations and the artwork accumulated, it was time to setup the game on the 3 main stores Google play, Amazon App Store and Apples App Store.

I had some issues with Apple, as i usually seem to. This time I needed to read some legal blurb they had and mark it done. However the web site did not function corectly with my Windows Explorer browser. In the end I got rather frustrated and eventually downloaded and installed apples own Safari browser. This worked seamlessly of course (thanks Apple). Once that was through I found I could not charge for my App. So once again I had to go through more information to eventually have to setup my bank account details. Makes sense though I guess. Once this was done I got to upload all the assets as usual, the only issue being the fact that the screenshot upload is nervous and sometimes just stops working. So I just kept refreshing the screen.

The Amazong setup went as smooth as usual and this time I did not have any extra paperwork to submit, as I already have a full setup with them and my bank details. I was worried at the point where I was uploading my apk file. As the screen said any apk file bigger than 30MB needed to be sent via another methid and not web page upload. I checked and realised my apk file is in fact 29MB, and that wasn't designed that way. So I felt pretty lucky.

The google play setup was good, only at some point after I was about done I needed to upload a new apk file. I wasn't sure what to do so I decided to delete the old apk file from their system. This had the annoying side effect of removing the App completely.... So I had to start over, gah! Still with all the information in a text file and folder for the artwork, the re-submission went very smoothly. then Setup my Bank details once more as I wasn't able to charge for an App, and hey Presto the title went live.

After all that it was Sunday night about 12:30am or so. I was waiting fro the Google play link to become active so I could put it into my web pages. but got too tired of waiting an hour later.

Still the game is NOW live on the Google play store HERE.
Amazon should take about 7-10 days, then it will be live for Kindle (YAY!)
Apples App store will hopefully have it live in approximately 3 weeks or so.

So that leaves me 3 weeks to get all my stuff togetehr for marketing and promotion etc.

Da Voodoochief

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Invalid APK File?

Ok, so i am talking the Android package names here, not the names of the apps everyone sees.

Ya have to use Jarsigner to sign ya app and that appears to work great. However when I try and send the APK file to the Android device I get this error 'INSTALL_FAILED_INVALID_APK'. It took me a while of trial and error, but eventually I have found the issue.

The only thing wrong is I called my APK file '5gc.apk'. that was a mistake, and I never even got a warning about it from the Deploy_Tool, which disappoints me a bit.

Ahh well, I hope this snippet of information helps others.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Friday, June 15, 2012

To Name an App Rules (marketing)

Or not to Name an App, that is the question.

Ok, it might not really be the question, but it IS a big question when it comes to making apps for devices. Ya want something that is
  • memorable
  • stands out from the crowd
  • easy to spell
  • quick to see in a list
  • unique or derivative? (this depends on what ya after ;)
  • Short (why short?)
  • describes ya product (if possible)
Some of those above are simply ridiculous to try and get right, right? Well maybe, but ya have to try as best you can. I can also tell you that there are people out there that can really help. People who know the buzz and have their finger on the pulse. Marketing people... good ones that is can come up with this kind of thing much better than most of us.

But there is only me....

So out of order I will describe what happened with those points, as I use them to describe the many hour ed process with my latest App, 5 golden Coins.

The name of Five Golden Coins was created to describe the most important feature of my Book, and now the App. so that part is good (check i did 'describes ya product'). Or is it? Just because the name I came up with names the most important element inside my book app, it does not actually tell anyone what it is. It does not say fro example '5 Golden Coins Book App'. Now that would have been a much more full description, and in fact still erroneous to my mind. Lets try again... '5 golden Coins Navigable Adventure Book App' ... now that's got it. Only now it is HUGE! and that breaks one of my other criteria, shortness.

I want shortness because if you look at your Android or iPhone desktop you will notice that App names get shortened if they are longer than a gnats proboscis. So keeping the name intelligible on these devices desktops is of paramount importance. Imagine if my game was named 'Navigable Adventure of the 5 Golden Coins', all anyone would see is 'Navigable' and that would seem like a navigation app.. gah! So shorter is better for Devices.

I also recently changed the 'Five' to '5' for the name. This was for two reasons. To keep the name shorter, but also to allow the game to be more quickly picked out from a list. I was reading an article on the web about how people see shapes faster than anything else, and number shapes much faster than word or letter shapes. So 5 it is.

Now is my title memorable? or does it stand out from the crowd? Well I am certain it is unique, which is nice, but stands out etc is harder to figure out. I ma hoping the number will help on this too, and Golden is such a good shiny word, I am hoping it will bring sunshine to this name. then there is Coins, which is good because money is always in peoples minds, and so is one of those magic words people can pick out fast.

So this is it, all my ducks in a row. A darned good reason for all the aspects of the name in place. Now I just have to hope I am correct with my assumptions.

So good luck if you are also working on creating a good name for your App.

Da Voodoochief

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Where have I been at?

I have been busy this last several days. After my very in depth and informative conversation with a nice marketing professional on Friday morning. I was in a bit of a quandry as to what to do about my marketing situation. I really want to use her services, but could I afford to?

Well I shall do a separate post on marketing soon, i have my notes ready to decipher for that.

I also went to my very first Graduation ceremony for my daughter aged out of middle school. This is a first for me (I am british so it was all odd). It was truly a fantastic celebration of all good things. I really enjoyed the whole process and thjat has distracted me for a few days as well. thinking about what it all means, life the universe, legacy for my kids etc.I went deep on the reflective thinking on this one, but it has been a blast.

I have been working on and off with my submission list, and also the submission items themselves for 5 Golden coins. The most important thing that has come out of all my thoughts is the fact I will name the game 5 and not Five Golden coins. A slightly shorter name and faster to read, if all that stuff I read on the internet about image retention and recognizability is true. Yup, I read some interesting stuff.

I am about through with all my introspection, and so expect more stuff to be happening, and therefore more posts as well.

Take care,
Da Voodoochief

Friday, June 8, 2012

Hot Chicks TCG Passes 3K downloads


YAY, I started a Blog post with a picture... of letters and numbers.. Ahh well, I tried.

What does this all mean though? Well It shows that yesterday my Google.Play passed a milestone in of download numbers. 3000 is a cool number and then you can also compare it to the Amazon numbers as well, with over 1200 downloads for a whackig great totlal of over 4K downlaods. Yeehaw!

The 2 errors  you see listed are in fact me testing the live version (and crashing it) on a friends Android phone. I have since fixed that error of course.

I figured I would show what these two downlaod reports looked like for those curious.

Enjoy,
Da Voodoochief

Thursday, June 7, 2012

E3 report #1

Ok, so this is no Reviewers report, so let me make that clear. This is about ME and my Day job at Mass Media Games and also accompanied by my Night Job as Sorcery Games.

ALL opinions are mine own, and not anything to do with Mass Media Games per se.

So in this report I will talk about My general experiences and the story of my opening day at E3.  Now I am missing out parts here that pertain to my Indie developments, that will all be in another report.

The day started early and I went to catch the Metro train from Simi Valley as I tend to each year. Driving into LA does not excite me at all. As it happens this year I was not arranging to meet anyone at E3, as all my mates appeared to be going on Wednesday and not Tuesday. I had to go opening day as Wednesday was gonna be a busy day going to my kids awards for Academics and Boy Scouts (in that order). Being a Dad has responsibilities and I love em.

Well as it happened the moment I stepped onto the train, there was me mate Nick, an ex-employee of Mass Medias from a short while back. I was so pleased to see him, as he has been working away in Colorado.As we sat down on the bottom seating area I looked up into the top seating area upstairs and Woah, there is another mate Geoff. This was awesome and he came down to join me and Nick, though they did not know each other (which surprised me). We somehow managed to talk ALL the way into Union station and then the rest of the way to the Staples Center.

Well we arrived and quickly got our badge holders and were ready to go go go. Only.. It was opening day, which means it does not open till 12 noon, and it was about 10am, gah! anyway Geoff went off looking for excitement and me and Nick caught up on whats been going on with him since we last chatted. I also filled him into on my current status with my latest Indie endeavour with Five golden Coins.

The excitement inside me and Nick kept growing as opening time approached. Yeah, it's sort of odd in some ways, after all the E3's I have been to and Still I get so excited about the next one hehe. We wondered through the initial crush entering the West hall and walked around fairly randomly looking at everything that was so exciting. Checking out all the people playing on the Wii U and such in the Nintendo booth. That place was so packed I hated it, the crush of people never ending, and chance to get hands on was frustrating, so we moved onto the ..

Sony booth. Now Sony is one of my main machines.We have done a lot of conversion for their machines and also we are very active in Playstation Home. I really wanted to see about how they were advertising the Big 50 Thousand Dollars Sweepstakes that they and we are currently running in  Midway3 and Home. But after we walked around the whole booth twice we were not able to find hide nor hair of Home. How odd I thought, so I asked at the information desk. Only they didn't know. Maybe it was in the restricted upper area, but the guard would not let me pass to go look. So after one more go around the whole booth we gave up. It seems Sony was not advertising OR even mentioning what I consider to be a powerful gaming tool in their arsenal. I was angry about this, and just don't quite know what to think at the moment. Maybe I just missed it?

After that I really wanted to get some BorderLands 2 gear for my Niece in England. So we joined the Queue and waited for about 30 minutes. But the line did not appear to move. How odd, so i went and asked a guy that was working the booth what was happening. To my chagrin I was told that the player would be pulled in 10 at a time and they would play for 20 minutes.. Yeah, you read that right, 20 minutes a person playing. So I estimated I would have to wait for nearly 2 hours. At which point I was done. I tried sweet talking the guy into giving me a T-shirt anyway, but no go.
I also came by later but the line was still huge, and I tried once again to sweet talk a couple of staff members into giving me a shirt, but to no avail once more.I really have no idea what they were thinking though, 20 mins a player, and not just funnel people through at whatever rate they want. Gah!

Then we went wondering off and got a nice expensive sandwich, which was a bit dry, but quite tasty. Then off we went again. This time collecting several shirts as we wondered around. Looked at plenty of stuff, like the new Assassins Creed, which wa sa baffling display of battle on the seas, only you appeared to be driving cars or motorboats the way those triple masters handled. Still the visuals were very nice. I also got to play some Warplane game and shot some peeps down, till I dived too far and could not recover.. the ground hurt me bad :)

The Xbox booth was a bright affair and in some respects I felt like i was in some part of a Tron movie. Still a very active place. It was amazing seeing so many fitness and Dance games around now. The only one I disliked with any passion was the one called 'Wii Fit U', which seemed a bit embarrassing with all it's bits of hardware required, and so far behind the Xbox and it's Kinect. Well it must be a big market whatever.

Last up for us was to walk around and I got some excellent T's for my kids with Wrekit Ralph on them. Initially everyone thinks they are mincraft images, but they are not.

By now we had to catch our train back to Union station and barely made it, as the train pulled into Pico, we ran behind it and up onto the platform to get in, phew. then when we arrived at Union Station, we had 5 minutes to get all the way to our Metro train to Ventura county. Though we made it with more seconds to spare. What a great time, what a great day.

E3 rocks.

Da Voodoochief

Monday, June 4, 2012

Ready for E3 2012?

I can honestly answer this as a big fat NO.

In fact it is now 11pm on Monday night and I will be leaving my house in approximately 8 hours to travel into Los Angeles to the convention center for the fun and frolics that is E3.

I love E3. I have been going for many years now, and I find the excitement each year to go again. Though what I am looking forward tends to change each year. This year I have several desires.
1. Try to make contact with a publisher for my New Edutainment products (Five Golden Coins)
2. Meet up with friends (love this one every year)
3. Check out what everyone else is doing and see what is upcoming I can be excited about.

So here is more info on number 1...
What should I take with me? Simply take the iPod and I'll be able to show my finished product? Hmm, but it is so much more than a shiny app. It is what the title can do in the right hands, am I really gonna convince anyone of it's value by whipping out an iPod? Wouldn't it be better if I take my printed book and the coins to go with it? People seem much more excited and receptive when I have done this to promote this new title. But being encumbered at E3 is a bit of a pain. Maybe I need a man purse or something. Still I will take the business cards.. how many ? 2-3? Or maybe 20, cos yeah right.. I'll never get rid of 20. Though if I take less, I'll be guaranteed to run out, doh!
Still E3 is mostly setup before the event if ya didn't know that. Cold calling on any booth usually ends up being a card in your hand and a promise that they will follow up with you. Though most likely I will  be given a card and asked to call them after the E3 hangover.. So about a week or more after Friday.
But.. This is always worth a try and THIS year I have something slightly more unique than 'just another video game'. - Wish me luck :)

Number 2...
I am fortunate to know so many people in this industry, and I like em all it seems. When E3 comes around I always manage to find several old workmates or buddies that have travelled from some far flung place like Colorado and meet up to have a good chin wag and drink a beer or two (Yard house anyone ?). One of the things I look forward to each and every year.

Number 3...
I am not a huge FPS fan. It isn't that I don't like or appreciate the genre.. only my stomach now gives me fits when I try to play them. so unlike most of the population of E3 drooling over the next Call of Duty or clone, I run around looking for more arcade game style experiences. I also of course look around any Indie scene games that I see. Mostly they tend to be ones that are fairly successful already, but not always. Still a very exciting time as I love to not only create games, but also play them.

So my preparation for E3 starts now, after I have finished this Blog post, i will take a multi-vitamin (i hate the smog, and I simply hope this helps). Then get my cards ready and set my alarm.

Then I'll play a bit of Diabl3 cos there is no way I will sleep for a while as I am so excited!

Later I will see peeps at E3,

G'night all, have a great week.
Da Voodoochief

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Be Seen AMAYC

Be Seen 'As Much As You Can'. That is a motto that all developers should adhere to, big companies do it through money, however smaller devs like myself have to rely on something else.. I like to call it Persistence :)

I am persistent in the way I update my web site as often as I think it appropriate. Though sometimes I have nothing new. If it has been a couple of months, then I will simply alter it instead. Try and say my message in a different way. Mostly I hope for more information to present to the public eye. This is usually a devs Main interface to the public, though of course Facebook could also be that public face of your company. Still the message is the same. Update it or people will never bother coming back to check on it, if it never updates.

This weekend is dubbed 'Website weekend' for me. It means i will try hard to update my various websites and get them up to date and all the dust cleaned off them. I have updated my main site is a way I am very happy with www.sorcerygames.com , it also now promotes my current title the 'Five golden Coins' book/game/adventure. Then I also linked to the main site for my children's adventure books at www.b4ir.com .

On the Adventure books for children site I have added in the fact that I have an electronic version, and of course added a few screenshots., as well as mentioning it will be available on Android and iOS devices soon.

Usually i have to be honest, I do not like doing the web sites. It takes me a while to get what I like and yet, it never quite seems to live up to my minds eye vision I had at the start of the day. Now I do not know if maybe I am getting better at this, but this weekend went very smoothly. So smoothly I think I enjoyed it :O

So if it has been a while since you updated your interface for your company to the world. Then how about dusting it off a bit like me.

Have a good day,
Da Voodoochief

Friday, June 1, 2012

Marketing My New Game

I am a man who believes in marketing his product. Simply put.. If it was worth creating and spending al that time working on, then It is worth putting in some effort to market the thing.

In the past I have tried quite a number of different methods to market my Xbox games, and mostly I would call the effort unfulfilling. Then when i went to the Windows Phone I couldn't find a good way to really market the products so I did very little. Then I got to the Android and iOS devices, well I feel a bit abashed at marketing for the game I created on these platforms, so have left them their to catch on or not through simple searching of those stores and the games keywords.

So as you can Tell I have done very little real marketing myself since a year ago when my last Xblig title came out. I have continued to research this area though and feel pretty knowledgable on the subject. Though in all fairness it is REALLY HARD to market to Xblig Gamers, xbox owners.

So two days agio I went and met with a Marketing professional to discuss Five Golden Coins. Her name is Laurie and here is a link to her Web Site http://www.thesocialnetworkingnavigator.com/ As you can see she offers a lot of advice and a lovely suite of services for those people in need.

Why did I go seek a professional I hear you mumble if you know so much about marketing your products already. Well there are essentially two reasons in my mind.
1. We all need help with such things. And knowing what I already know, I realise I need help, most notabley with Facebook (Which I hate!)
2. My new App/Game is really a book, but one that is NOT targetted as my other games were at Gamers. In fact this particular creation targets a whole different demographic.. that of the Parent. This means I need help, becasue I do not know how to find all these parents, and it would take me a fair while to do that. If I am busy spending all my time marketing I am not creating new products, and that is the part I am best at.

My Meeting with Laurie was very nice. I have to say that the hour went VERY quickly for me and I think we discussed my project very openly. she made several intelligent remarks and agreed with me on several points, whilst also pointing out several new or modified aspects to what I would or could/should do with my marketing time. she was not pushy in any way and has in fact led me down a path that could possibly lead me away from requiring her service. This kind of help from a professional I love. No BS, just really trying to help me out. I personally hope my path crosses agin and I do believ she could make me more successful.

So next time you are wondering what you are gonna do to promote or market your Invention, book, game or whatever. I suggest looking up a professional, most likely one close to you, though with the internet anyone is now 'close'.I am sure they will help with insights and more.

Good luck out there,
Da Voodoochief