A Gateway to Great Books on Your iPhone

Penguin Classics, that more-than-1,500-titles collection of English-language literary classics, has a new free app for iOS devices available on Tuesday.
The paperback publisher, celebrating 65 years of the Classics collection this year, has created a catalog of its titles (which basically includes every author you have heard of, ever) and put it into an easily searchable database.
Not only can readers find book information by title and author, they can discover unknown classics by searching by subject, genre, time period and region. So, for example, if you wanted to find a nature-theme bildungsroman in 18th century America, you would find several books that fit that bill, including Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” and “The Morgesons” by Elizabeth Stoddard.
Of course, not all options combine so productively — try searching for postmodern psychological literary criticism from Haiti and you will come up snake eyes.
Each book page contains a summary, as well as a link to buy the paperback edition from Penguin USA’s online store. Social-media buttons can broadcast your love of “Homer’s Odyssey” or Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” to your friends, and a “More Like This” button will direct you to related titles.
Most enjoyable, however, are the quizzes contained within the app. There are 65 books in the app that have quizzes associated with them so you can test your knowledge of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” (“To what animal does Archer compare May and the rest of Old New York?”) or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” (“What do Huck and Jim find inside the floating house?”). The app also has quizzes that ask questions across all 65 titles (you can choose a quiz that takes one, five or 10-minutes long) if you want to relive that comp lit class you took freshman year.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/a-gateway-to-great-books-on-your-iphone/

iPad App Marketing Case Study: Flickpad

Getting your app noticed in the iTunes App Store is a monumental task. With 330,000+ iPhone apps and 60,000+ iPad apps at last count, having a solid marketing plan is a necessity if you want to even have a chance at success. When I launched Flickpad on the day that the iPad was released, I had been so busy coding, that I had given zero thought to any type of marketing plan. Thankfully I quickly recognized the huge oversight. After 8+ months, Flickpad has come a long way and I have tried a plethora of marketing approaches; some successful, some not even close. My hope is that you can learn from this experience, and that it helps you effectively market your iOS app.

Release Early, Release Often? Not on the App Store

As I mentioned above, we released Flickpad on the day the iPad launched. We made the decision to launch early because we wanted to participate in the initial launch of the iPad. The benefit of this decision was minimal, but the long term effects continue to hurt. That first release was not nearly as robust as it should have been, and as a result we got a healthy number of 1 Stars on it. Those 1 Stars, rarely, if EVER, go away. Once a user deletes an app, it is highly unlikely they will ever come back to it. So Release Early, I don’t recommend it.
The second part of course is Release Early. It is great to constantly be refining and adding features where they make sense, but it tends to work against you in the App Store. This is especially true if you didn’t follow the Release Early guidance above. Prior to getting five ratings on any app update, the App Store displays ratings from all your versions up to that point. You also start over with reviews on each new update. Small things can make a big difference. When a customer sees an app with zero reviews and a rating that doesn’t accurately reflect your latest update, it sure doesn’t help your case. You should therefore try to plan larger releases and only push an incremental release if there is a critical bug that needs to be patched.
This is a little bit of a tangent, but still related. If you are developing an app that relies on any type of 3rd party service (in my case Facebook and Flickr), make sure you include some type of mechanism in your app that can notify your users of problems/outages with these 3rd party services. Otherwise your users won’t differentiate between a problem in your code or one originating with the 3rd party. Remember that you will be getting the 1 Stars, not Facebook. If you explain any outages promptly, most of your users will understand. Facebook in particular caused me huge headaches when they were going through their permission model changes, OAuth authentication, and Graph API transitions. I think server changes broke the Facebook authentication in Flickpad 3 or 4 times. Hello 1 Star… Yes Sir, May I have another?

Falling on Deaf Ears

The first avenue I explored in app marketing was in trying to get some review site coverage. I tried all the major ones that I could think of – TUAW, MacStories, Macgasm, TiPb, 148Apps, iPhone.AppStorm, AppShopper, theAppleBits, etc. with varying levels of success. Understandably, the smaller the review site, the quicker they get back to you and generally more willing they are to cover your app. However, some of the bigger names are really cool as well. The guys over at MacStories have been amazing since day one and I can’t recommend them enough. Developer friendliness aside, they are probably my current favorite app/news/review site. On the other end of the spectrum, some won’t respond to an email unless you sign over your first born child …. you know who you are, lol. Remember not to take it personally and stay persistent. Your best approach is to network like crazy. You will be amazed how interconnected everyone is, and it carries a lot more weight when an app is recommend by a friend instead of by the app developer.
Unless you can get some type of exclusive with one of the bigger sites, get as many as possible to cover you. If you can organize the reviews so they all come up simultaneously or at least close together, that should give you the biggest benefit.

And the Money Started Raining Down from Cupertino

Ah, the Apple recommendation, it is a thing of beauty. More than any other type of press, getting featured by Apple on the App Store opens so many doors (not to mention makes your sales numbers explode). We were fortunate enough to have Flickpad featured by Apple in the ‘New and Noteworthy’ section for almost a full month last summer. Unfortunately, your marketing plan can not just be ‘Get Featured by Apple’. There is not much guidance I can provide here, other than to polish your app as much as possible and market it in all the other ways possible to hopefully get someone’s attention at Apple.

Yeah, big spike #1

Oh, and remember all those Facebook server changes that resulted in outages of Facebook access for Flickpad …. yep, they happened right in the middle of us being featured. 1 Star, oh how I love you, let me count the ways. We only just recently surpassed the number of 1 Stars with 5 Stars. Our ratings are crazy, large spikes on each end of the rating scale and a small number in the middle.

Curse you, 1 stars!

Professional Screencast – Worth the Money?

It really depends on what your app does as to whether it warrants the cost of a professional screencast. For example, I don’t necessarily think a calculator app warrants a screencast, even though some of those have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. In that case, the app design speaks for itself and people are familiar with the concepts presented by the app. We had great success with having a professional screencast made by the guys over at HiLo Media. In our case, a big part of the allure of Flickpad is the fluid and dynamic manner with which you can interact with photos. The screencast was a great, concise way to expose the user to this. A screencast also boosts your chances of getting picked up for reviews by the app review sites. After reading through a ton of ‘Review my App’ emails, I’m sure reviewers love being able to watch a great screencast to make their decision.

Review Site Advertising

Money talks. If you can’t get review sites to pick up your app, and you really feel it has a great shot at hitting, explore advertising on some of the them. You will get exposure to the same users, albeit with a little less but more sustained impact. I have advertised on two different review sites and overall have been really happy with the level of exposure for the cost. Regardless of how long you advertise with a site, it also starts a relationship with the site. Foster that relationship and you may just have an ally next time you are planning an app release.

Speaking of Money, Daring Fireball

For the release of Flickpad 2.0 (added support for Flickr), we planned a multi-prong advertising/marketing push. One of those prongs was a week long sponsorship of Daring Fireball. Pretty much how it works is, for a good chunk of money, you get a mention and John’s opinion of your app/product on Daring Fireball at the beginning and end of the week. The level of exposure was great and I definitely think it was worthwhile if it falls within your advertising budget. If it takes up more than 50% of your advertising budget, I would recommend closely looking at whether it is the best option for you.

Yeah, big spike #2

I believe the impact of the Daring Fireball sponsorship, while large, was much less than it could have been due to my own mistakes in app pricing. Prior to version 2.0, Flickpad was priced at $4.99 and had seen pretty stable sales numbers. Remember we were still coming off the high of the Apple recommendation as well. $4.99 for a Facebook photo app. Ok, add Flickr and you get two photo apps in one, making it a fast, one stop shop for keeping up on all the latest photos your friends and family are posting. Price: $9.99, seemed logical. What you will come to find is the $4.99 price point or the “What? You want me to pay more for an app than my morning latte. No way!” price seems to be the current inflection point where customers start seeing the app as ‘expensive’ (at least for iOS apps). Had I known then, what I know now, I would have lowered the price to 99¢ for the entire week of Daring Fireball, and blown out a ton of volume. Don’t worry about losing money on short term price changes. There are millions of potential customers, and millions more new ones each week. Instead, focus on getting your app in front of as many people as possible.

Tweet, Tweet

Another prong of the Flickpad 2.0 release was a twitter contest. The idea was simple – give away one Flickr Pro account daily for five days and one iPad as the grand prize. I have mixed feelings on the effectiveness of this effort. It did attract a lot of attention, but I think maybe the iPad was too valuable, and it shifted the target Twitter audience too far away from “iPad owners interested in photo apps” to “Twitter users who just like to participate in giveaway contests”. Regardless, some of the participants, contest types included, have been some of our strongest supporters, and continue to recommend Flickpad to their friends and family on Twitter. It did provide a large Twitter following to help get the word out about new Flickpad updates, so it still continues to pay small dividends today.

Too Lite or Not

After Flickpad 2.0, I released a feature-limited free version of Flickpad. The idea was to allow those who only wanted to follow a small number of people to use the app for free. Well that backfired, as people didn’t see enough photos from the limited number of friends, and ended up deleting the app and rating it poorly. I have since tested out an ad supported version of Flickpad and it has seen quite a bit of downloads. The only reason I mention this is that, if you are considering a free version of your app, carefully consider what functionality it will support and make sure it is enough to provide for an enjoyable experience. I find that people who rate free apps tend to be the harshest of all, as there is zero cost to participate. They start off not being sure if they liked the app, but since it was free, they try it. Once it is confirmed they don’t like it, you rarely get anything other than a 1 Star. The only other comment on free versions is that I think they only make sense when your paid version is priced $2.99 or up.

Price Changes

No app marketing post would be complete without at least a short section on app pricing. What can I say – I don’t have any answers here. I think it is a little bit of a black art. Flickpad has been priced all the way from $9.99 to 99¢. There are a couple things I can say for sure though. One, keeping your iOS app at $4.99 or under will make life a lot easier. And two, use short term price changes and specials to your advantage. There is rarely if ever any negative feedback from users on running specials, and you get nice bumps from when the price drops are picked up by all the app watchers.
I recently had the thought of a new pricing strategy for our next app release. The idea is to decide on your target price for your app, say $3.99. At launch, clearly outline that the app will increase in price periodically until it reaches it’s final price of $3.99. Sell it at 99¢ for a week, then $1.99 for a week, then $2.99 for a week, and then settle at $3.99. The idea is to reward those early adopters, while also quickly seeding the app to generate some word of mouth advertising. I’m curious to know if anyone out there reading this has explored a strategy like this. It is the opposite of what most do, Apple included, where early adopters pay top dollar, but it sure makes a lot more sense to me.

Post Mortem

Looking back, I learned a lot from the different advertising and marketing strategies I tried. Hopefully you have as well. Overall, I am pretty happy with all of the decisions I made. One thing that I would have done differently, however, is to spend a little less on advertising over the long haul and instead put that towards a larger design budget up front. Easier said now though, when I have the resources for a design budget, as opposed to early on when that money didn’t exist.

What Next?

Flickpad is at a crossroads and we are trying to decide how and if to move forward with it. I have recently hired a great designer by the name of Dustin Schau to create a new app icon for Flickpad, as well as explore some new Flickpad 3.0 UI ideas. I’m not sure whether it makes the most sense to put the effort into a 3.0 update or to instead focus solely on our next app. Also, in the short term I have lowered the price point to 99¢, as well as pulled the free, ad supported version from the App Store. I will probably just let it ride for a little while and see if we can increase download numbers.
I hope you enjoyed this post and learned something from it that will help you in marketing your own app. If you haven’t tried Flickpad, and you like Flickr or Facebook, please give it a shot at it’s new, limited time, special price of 99¢ . Any help you can provide me in burying those dreaded 1 Stars from early on in Flickpad’s life, would be greatly appreciated.

http://mobileorchard.com/ipad-app-marketing-case-study-flickpad/

Blurring the Line Between Apps and Books

STEPHEN ELLIOTT, a 38-year-old from San Francisco, just introduced his first piece of software for sale: an app for the iPad and iPhone called “The Adderall Diaries.”

He’s not exactly a programmer — better to call him a writer. And the app that he conceived looks a lot like an electronic book. That is, most people who buy the app will do so to read the text of “The Adderall Diaries,” his “memoir of moods, masochism and murder” based on his childhood in Chicago group homes, which was published in hardcover last year by Graywolf Press.
But Mr. Elliott says he has good reasons for producing his own iPad app, separate and apart from the e-book version of “Adderall Diaries” that is for sale, say, for the Kindle or the iPad reader from Apple. But those reasons are not the artistic, meta-fictional ones you might suspect — you know, so that when characters enter a bar, you suddenly hear music and a glass dropped by the waiter, or more fancifully, you can make them turn around and go somewhere else.
Rather than exploit the multimedia potential of an app book, Mr. Elliott said he wanted to include tools that cater to a special group: Stephen Elliott readers.
“As an author, I want you to have the best experience,” he said. “People want to talk about the books they are reading with other people. Why, with everything we know, wouldn’t you include a chat room with your e-book?”
Once readers buy the app, he says, they are beginning a relationship with him and other readers; they can leave comments and read responses and updates from the author. They may even be told down the line that he has a new book for sale and then be able to buy it through the app.
This practical, business-oriented focus is something he shares with the developer of his iPad app, Electric Literature, a company with offices at the foot of the Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge that was founded by Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, who met as Brooklyn College M.F.A. students in 2006.
Electric Literature is a literary journal that enlists all manner of digital formats, like PDFs, Kindle, iPhone, YouTube animations. The money saved by not using a printer ($5,000 by their reckoning) goes to pay five authors $1,000 each for appearing in the journal.
In the more than a year since the founding, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum said in an interview at their offices, the challenges of marketing a digital journal have taken up the bulk of their time, rather than finding great writing to publish. Early on, the novelist Rick Moody worked with Electric Literature to produce a short story in little bursts on Twitter, generating a lot of free publicity.
“We really care about the community of independent publishers,” Mr. Hunter said. “We’re publishers. We’re not going into the game to be software developers.”
Nonetheless, last weekend, Electric Literature introduced a separate service at electricpublisher.com, to create an inexpensive book app along the lines of what it made for Mr. Elliott. The pricing starts at $600 for a single book app, with additional charges for creating an app-based bookshelf that contains more than one book for sale.
To create a book app, Electric Literature had to come up with its own e-reader software: before you can consider tools that allow for sharing comments or sending messages, or incorporating video and audio clips, for that matter, Mr. Hunter said, “the experience has to be equal with iBooks,” referring to Apple’s e-reader software.
And how can a little company come up with software to equal Apple or Amazon? Motivated programmers who believe in the literary mission, he said: “That’s what technology is all about. It’s a disruptive force, where a very small group can compete with the big guys.”
Right now, Electric Literature has only a few book apps either made or in development, including the journal’s. Mr. Elliott, the author of seven books, says he has sold apps only in the “double digits,” substantially fewer than in print or e-book form. Dennis Johnson of Melville House Publishing says he is working with Electric Literature to introduce an app book before Thanksgiving. He will not disclose the title now, for fear of stoking interest before it is for sale.
The attraction is obvious, he said.
“If you publish work that is hard to sell in the American market, say literary fiction in translation, this is another format to hardcover, paperback and e-book,” he said. “A fourth line of revenue.”
In an interview, he imagined the possibilities, such as having readers whose devotion is deeper than merely dipping into a title, who would install a piece of software onto a phone or tablet. “I love the idea of putting books on subscription,” he said, “of having a membership in your publishing house, of having a readership invested in your books.”
Of course, for all the independence an app gives a publisher, especially a small publisher or individual writer, there are tolls along the way: Apple gets 30 percent of every app sold and every “in-app purchase,” which is processed through its iTunes store. Mr. Elliott pays that charge, as well as the share his publisher, Graywolf, takes for an e-book sale. (Thus the iBooks version of “Adderall Diaries” costs $9.99, the iPad app $14.99.)
And Apple makes no bones about being more intrusive in dealing with apps, which it “curates,” as opposed to the books it sells. As Jesse David Hollington, the applications editor for the Web site iLounge, described last month, Apple has particular guidelines for apps developers: “We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app.”
Which means that to Apple, Mr. Elliott is a programmer, not a writer.
“They have some kind of rating system,” he said. Before approving the app, “they asked me if there was sex and violence, and I said, ‘Yeah, a lot.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/business/media/25link.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Replacing a Pile of Textbooks With an iPad

When I’m not blogging away about technology for the Bits Blog, I’m also an adjunct professor at New York University in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
The program is a technology-focused graduate course, so it came as no surprise when four of my students walked into class in early April with fancy new Apple iPads in hand. After the students got past the novelty factor, a debate ensued about how the iPad would fit into their school life. One factor the students discussed was the ability to carry less “stuff” in their backpacks: the iPad can replace magazines, notepads, even a laptop.
Now there’s an iPad application that could further lighten the load. A new company called Inkling hopes to break the standard textbook model and help textbooks enter the interactive age by letting students share and comment on the texts and interact with fellow students.
Matt MacInnis, founder and chief executive of Inkling, said in a phone interview that the company wants to offer a textbook experience that moves far beyond simply downloading a PDF document to an iPad.
One unique feature the service offers is the ability to discuss passages of a book with other students or professors. By selecting a piece of text you can leave a note for others to read and develop a conversation around the text.
The application also breathes life into textbooks by giving publishers the tools to create interactive graphics within a book. In a demo version of the application, available for download in the iTunes store, “The Elements of Style” includes quizzes that help students learn by touching and interacting with the screen. There’s also a biology book that offers the ability to navigate 3-D molecules from any angle.
Some other features include the ability to search text, change the size of the type, purchase individual chapters of books, highlight text for others to see and take pop quizzes directly within the app.
Mr. MacInnis said that some universities began using the textbook application this week, including the University of Alabama and Seton Hill University. “Professors are really excited about the ability to leave notes for the class in specific areas of the book and to also see commentary from their students,” he said.
One question that will likely come up for college students is the price. The program is currently only available for the iPad, a device that starts at $500. Inkling hopes to solve that problem by reducing the cost of the digital textbooks as compared to their paper counterparts and by allowing students to buy books one chapter at a time.
The cost of college textbooks on paper can easily surpass $1,100 a year. If students find that the price of the iPad and the digital textbooks balance out, then the iPad investment could quickly make sense.
And finally there’s the weight factor. Inkling’s frequently-asked-questions page points out that even if you fill your entire iPad with Inkling books, it will still weigh 1.5 pounds.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/replacing-a-pile-of-textbook-with-an-ipad/?partner=rss&emc=rss