The website FreeAppReport.com has selected That Word as one of its showcased applications for September 1.

I didn't know about FreeAppReport.com before this; I only learned about it because they sent me a note indicating they selected That Word to be featured. This is exciting for me. It's always nice to receive validation and exposure. It'll be interesting to see how much exposure this gives That Word. I'll be writing a future blog post to share how the whole free promotion experiment turns out.

A good sign I don't…

Just a quick note—I'm running a “back to school” promotion right now, and That Word is available for FREE till September 6.

There are two ways to learn stuff: realizing success to learn what works, and realizing failure to learn what doesn't work. This is about the latter. Specifically, it's about what types of marketing activities are ineffective for promoting iPhone apps on the App Store. Unfortunately (for me), I realized a 100% success rate in learning what doesn't work. I'm posting this because I hope it will be useful to other small indie developers trying to market their wares on the App Store.

When I released the original version of That Word in 2009, I did essentially no marketing

I was inspired by a blog post by Joachim Bondo about how he had custom sound effects recorded for his Deep Green app (a chess app). This—and a great deal on the Snowball mic from Dell—prompted me to record some of my own sound effects for That Word 2.0. I have some audio experience from developing speech applications with VoiceXML, but this is pretty limited, so I started out with a bit of research and perused the collection of audio books at Safari Books Online. After skimming through Creating Music and Sound for Games, I went to work.

My favourite…

While developing That Word, I tried to learn as much as I could about the subculture occupied by word-game aficionados (aka “wordies”). A quick search on Amazon.com led me to Word Freak, which chronicles the lives of several competitive Scrabble players on their quest for word-nirvana and championship titles. Even if you're not that into word games, Word Freak is a surprisingly entertaining read. The book provides lots of interesting history on Scrabble, but the more compelling story is the human one—about the word-obsessed, genius-misfits…