Ever want to learn how to create the next ANGRY BIRDS? Did you know that Angry Birds was created in .lua; the same language you'll learn how to use when you become a Corona Developer. You'll have access to hundreds of free sample code that you can borrow from to create your own apps. That's just one of the many perks of becoming a Corona App Developer. Join me at the all new Corona SDK: Phoenix Meetup Group. I'll show you all the cool apps you can make, show you how much easier it is to code in .lua than in Objective-C and give you some basic information about Corona SDK. The goal of the group is to engage individuals and organizations interested in learning more about mobile development using Corona SDK. Meetings will consist of networking, troubleshooting, product demonstrations, and Corona Tutorials. I encourage programmers and non-programmers to join us. If I can program in .lua, you can. I have had no prior experience in programming other than Cobol in college and that was years ago. There are some great third-party tools and extensions that I'll cover where you don't even need to program; you can use your talents in Photoshop.

Ansca Mobile is the creator of Corona SDK, the world's #1 mobile development software. It allows users to produce apps and games in a fraction of the code used with traditional methods such as Objective-C. Corona is more than a software development kit, it's a community of developers who are creating some of the top games and apps in the industry. Nick Nebelsky, CEO of Intense Media, a Gilbert-based mobile development company, will be leading the meetings. He was recently selected as an Ambassador for Corona, by Ansca Mobile. "The meetings will be informal for folks who want to learn more about using Corona, and I'll present some background of Corona as well as what is needed to become a Corona developer. There is no cost to attend, but hurry, there are only 30 spots available for the first meeting.

Corona SDK Phoenix Meetup  (Click link to go to Meetup.com and sign up)
Held at:
University of Advancing Technology (UAT)
2625 W. Baseline Road
Tempe, AZ 85283-1056

Room 208
Time: 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Date: 4/18/2012
Spots Available: 30 (waiting list)

Event Organizer: Nick Nebelsky

If you have read our last bog entry, we mentioned how we were working on our latest book on Christmas. We figured we probably wouldn't be done with it until late December and would only have a couple of weeks on the market. Well we are working on something, but we've pushed the Christmas book to 2012. This way, we can have a full-fledged book just the way we want it and give our customers something they haven't seen before in an app book. The script has been written, and now all of the artwork, and special effects have to be created and programmed. Look for an announcement on that 3rd quarter of 2012.

What we do have is a Holiday Bonus for Hippos Name. This bonus was slated to be a part of our new Christmas book, but my partner and I decided that we could get it to market a lot quicker if we pulled it out of that book, and inserted it as a Holiday Bonus for Hippos Name. It appeals to both Christmas children and Hannakuh. There are a total of five bonus areas where kids will have a blast creating, designing, baking, and assembling arts and crafts for the holidays. Visually, this is our best work to date. It seems that I become a better drawer every time I sit down. I really loved how this came out, and I'm sure your kids will love it too. These are high-quality drawings and activities you can do with your children and then you can go back and read Hippos Name anytime you want.
We'll release some illustrations of our new version when we get closer to the release date. Thanks for reading! –Nick

Wow! It has been more than a month since my last post. I did a little experiment for the first 22 days of the month; I did zero marketing. Course I didn't plan it that way, because I was busy, but wow what a difference. Yes Virginia, Self-Marketing does work! Even though my web traffic has been down, my sales for my first app are pretty consistent. I think lowering the price helped a lot. Hmmm that could be the best marketing so far! I did lower all my apps to $.99 so we shall see if that does do the trick! I do have 9 days left in November to make some marketing noise and will start to blow some horns. As I am really excited about two new announcements. 1) I just made some really cool additions to Hippos Name and Hippo Mini. We decided to improve the apps a little before starting our new book for December. So we flushed out the map page and took each character, regardless if it appeared in the book or not, and wrote a little bio of them. The new artwork was so good, that we're going to up the bar and strive for Disney-like quality from now on. Hey, we have great characters and strong writing, why not go for even better artwork.

So look for the new version coming out in one week. Heck, buy the app now to see how much it will change. It's a great story and now has even better characters.

I struggled with the original script for the new book. It took a long time to write this one. I think it's because I wanted something that was as good as my hero's, Charles Schulz. And I went down that way, even creating a skating scene with all of my characters. Well that wasted about 2 weeks of artwork and story lines that were going nowhere. I finally did what I did for Hippos Name. I just started with one idea and started writing and finished the script in about 20 minutes. I've edited it quite a bit, but it's ready to go. I'm very happy with it. And because of the additional work we did on the last app, you can be assured that the artwork will be 10x better than what I've given so far. The characters are well-defined, and well thought out. I can't to show off my new book app to all of you. Look for the announcement on December 20-21! I should have a trailer made for it by then as well. And This Time, I'll Price it Right!
–Nick Nebelsky

As more and more people are self-publishing books, apps, and e-books, they also need to figure out how to sell their work. Apple, Amazon, Smashwords, and others are doing their part to distribute the work, but how does one go about marketing oneself? Well it's not easy. It has to be a consistent, well-planned out plan that has to be done every day, and every hour after your book has been published. I even recommend you pre-market your app at least 60-90 prior to it being published as well.

When I set out to market our first children's book, I spent a month blogging, writing articles, tweeting, telling people on my facebook pages, and sending articles to Digg. I created a movie-trailer for our app using software from Apple and posted photos of some of the drawings. I did notice a substantial increase in traffic the few weeks before the announcement and for around one week on and around the release. I believe the pre-marketing helped. Looking back though, there was and still is so much more I can do. Small publishers usually have small budgets and little time; so what can be done. In addition to the places I mentioned before, here is a partial list of some of the things you can do at little to no expense to you.

1. Go to Kickstarter.com and start a new project to raise money. Kickstarter allows pretty much anyone who has a creative talent and needs to raise funds. I have seen amounts raised from as little as $250 to hundreds of thousands of dollars. One such fellow is Joe Murray, a professional animator that lives in California. He created two very popular cartoons (Rocko's Modern World, and Camp Lazlo). His idea for a project was to raise funds to create three cartoon shorts of his new animation, Frog in a Suit, and to build a web site that showcases independent animators. The idea is to give more creative control to the creators and not the studios. Fox, Cartoon Network, and NICK are three studios that buy properties from their creators. They retain all copyrights and in turn they pay out a royalty or percentage of sales to the creator from what they get. Depending on the licensing contract, this can also include licensing deals like (mugs, teeshirts, stationery). Joe raised more than $20,000 to fund his project. The great thing about Kickstarter is that not only can your friends donate, but so can anyone in the world. In turn, you provide them with gifts for their help. All the info is on their site. It's a win-win for everyone involved because you're raising money, while raising awareness of your company and building a following of fans that are invested in you.

2. Another great idea is to create a group on LinkedIn.com. It's free and you can create one on your craft, or your message and build people who are excited about the same things you are.

3. Meetup.com is another way to get people excited about what you are doing. They do charge a fee, but it can be offset with advertising that you sell.

4. Try writing for Examiner.com, Helium.com, or Yelp.com. These are three social networking sites that have national audiences that will read your articles. The first two will actually pay you but more importantly, they will give you a national voice. I almost got a book deal from a very popular publisher from an article I wrote on Examiner.com

5.Tweet at least 10-15 tweets a day, but don't use the forum for spamming. That's when you send out the same tweet over and over again. Spamming if frowned upon.

6. Set up a page just for your book, imprint, or app on Facebook. Then send out blasts to all your email contacts and encourage people to "Like" your page.

7. Also in Facebook, post your Youtube videos on your site to give your friends and the public ways to see your movie trailers or sample chapters

8. Make a Movie Trailer on Youtube.com. It costs nothing and if you get a lot of hits, you can ask Youtube to monetize your video.

9. Send out composite drawings of your characters and tag you and your friends on them and send them out to your friends and fans.

10. Blog, blog, and blog as much as you can. And then send out your blog in your tweets, on facebook, on linkedin, digg, and examiner. Also don't forget to send tweets to those people and companies that you talked about.

This is a full time job, so until you can hire out an agency to do this for you, try these helpful tips and watch your web site traffic and hopefully your sales sky rocket! If you have additional ideas, please let me know. Every little bit helps!

Thanks for reading! –Nick Nebelsky, www.intensemedia.com

Our studio has been one person for most of its short life, but that's changed when my wife came on board to do most of the coding. She fell in love with the simplicity of .lua and the great articles and resources from Ansca Mobile the creators of Corona SDK. Although she isn't on board full time, it's great to be able to bounce ideas off of her. She is most definitely the Left-Brained side of the buisiness, but is very creative as well. As I write this, we're testing two really cool features for the next major update to "Hippos Name" which in its third day is selling quite well. On its second day, it topped "Miss Spider's Tea Party" and "Toy Story 2" which I thought was quite impressive. So our original plan was to pump out four books a year. As I was finishing "Hippos Name", I was also writing the script for the next book because our schedule was so tight. My wife realized that I was a bit overwhelmed and thought that we should "ReThink" our plan and devote more time to Marketing the first book, before tackling all of the new issues of the second book. Since Marketing is such a crucial role for any small studio, I agreed. We were originally hoping to get the second book out for Christmas, but we realized we would only have about four weeks to do so. And we'd much rather have a quality product out there than one that was rushed in to meet a deadline. This is fine by me as I actually love the marketing aspect of the process just as much as I enjoy the creative.

And while my wife is busy making "Hippos Name" even better, I can try to get as much exposure for the company as I can. Now let me tell you, this is no easy feat! Your best bet is to have a marketing plan. I have a general plan of tweets, announcements, blog posts, and articles that I need to write. But it also means building a detailed plan for specific marketing objectives with deadlines built in. I probably won't be able to build that plan until next week, since I'm taking a small break this week.

I will tell you though that what I am doing is working. My stats on traffic have increased 1000%. I had somewhat modest figures to start. On an average day without any marketing, I was getting about 25 unique visitors; a real drop in the bucket. I noticed that when I increased my tweeting, blog posts, and such, that those numbers doubled! And each subsequent month, it was increasing by 20-25% across the board. This month is entirely different. My numbers for the month to date, is now three quarters of what last month were. My goal for hits was 8,000 for the month; still very modest. I should see closer to 12,000. And I'm now averaging 200-250 visitors a day! Why is the reason for the uptick in traffic, you ask? Well for one thing, any time I introduce a new app, my traffic always spikes. But it's different this time. It's very probable that September and October will equal Jan-Aug for traffic. And there's good reason for it, I'm working even harder to make sure that people see us. I'll talk more about that in my marketing plan that I'll release in November.  I'd love to hear from you with a comment if I'm on the right track. It will help me to deliver better content. Thanks for reading! –Nick

It has been almost a week since I heard of Steve Jobs' death, and I still get choked up. I know that there is more than one brilliant person at Apple and that Apple will be fine without him. But when I think of the driving force behind a team of great people suddenly disappearing, it's sad to think of the possibilities. Apple has always brought us great products and I'm confident there will be more coming down the pipeline, in fact, I can't wait. R.I.P. Steve!

Here are some contests I've found to enter your book and or iPad app book to:
Most of these have deadlines that are fast-approaching!

1. www.Commarts.com
2. www.ibpabenjaminfranklinawards.com
3. www.livingnowawards.com
4. www.moonbeamawards.com
5. www.independentpublisher.com/ipland/ipawards.php
6. www.jenkinsgroupinc.com/our-services.php
7. www.publishinginnovationawards.com
8. www.cybils.com/basic-contest-info.html
9. www.momschoiceawards.com/enter.pho#Dates
10. www.pitchengine.com

Let me know of others, and I'll post them here.

If you're like me and love to create, then you'll love the present. It's a great time to be alive! I was fortunate in that I have this creative talent that has been unlocked! I love what I do and couldn't be happier knowing that God has given me the talents, and Apple has given me the tools to help me succeed! I just celebrated my first year wedding anniversary, and Apple has given me a gift that I'll never forget; the permission to sell my new app, Hippos Name in the App Store! This is only the beginning, but it's the start of something big. I've already started the wheels turning on the second book and have a mile long list of things I need to do for the first one. But this is where the fun continues. I get to tell people about how much fun it was to create this app. How I started with an idea almost 18 years ago telling stories to my niece and nephew and taking those characters today and weilding them into something more than words in the air. It was my nephew who at age 18 told me to take those characters that I created and make them real. Draw them out. Give them names and personalities and traits. That was eight years ago. And I did do that that three years ago, but it never came off the ground. I had trademarks, logos, a web site. But it just wasn't there still. So I changed the name of the collection, kept the original names, and changed the focus. It's now turned into something wonderful and I'm very proud of it. I'd love to one day be able to hire my nephew and write books together, but I'll have to sell a lot of apps to do that. In the meantime, I hope you will join with me in celebrating this great feat. In the next few days, I'll post some of my original pencil drawings and how the characters have matured over the course of three years.

How can one man make a difference? Just read the headlines of one of the most prolific men in our century. Some called him a brilliant marketer! Others called him one of the greatest inventors of our time and that he should be mentioned along side with Einstein and Edison! I merely knew him as someone whom changed my life. I remember seeing my first Mac in 1984. My coworker and roommate bought one and brought it to the office at a local Time Warner Cable branch where we worked. 

Fresh out of college, I created parodies at college even before the "Onion" was around. From 1980-1984, we cut and pasted from copy machines. The desktop publishing revolution happened in the mid-to-late 80s. I graduated in 1984. The Apple Macintosh was this little beige, box with a mouse. All I remember is how fascinated I was with the prospect that not only could I change the text or font from Courier to Palatino, but that I was learning about page layout, typography, and design. These were things that were not taught in college. And even if they were, they couldn't have accomplished what I learned in those fleeting moments sitting in front of a Macintosh, this game-changer. I like many of my college graduates wasn't sure what direction my life would take. Here I was, a promising business graduate from the largest university in New York State and I had no direction. Steve Jobs helped change that. Getting my hands on the Mac as much as I could was not only my mantra but a hunger. I quit that job, went back to school to learn more about this crazy machine called the Macintosh. From that point on, I worked at jobs that had large Macintosh installations. I worked for the first magazine to incorporate the Macintosh in 100% of the production, design, and editorial of the magazine (American Demographics magazine). I later went on to work at an Apple Retail store where I took classes from Apple on how to sell more Macs and educate the consumer. I founded two greeting card companies (NickCards and Fishlip Greetings) where I created my work on a Macintosh. The latter is where I was awarded a Finalist award for the LOUIE awards. It's the most prestigious awards given out to greeting card writers and illustrators. I later became a graphic designer with an award-winning, advertising agency in New York State where we worked on Macintoshes. And now here I am more than twenty-seven years later, an Apple Developer, Apple stockholder, and Apple owner of some of the most amazing technology that was ever designed. And behind every design, and every conceptual idea, Steve Jobs was there helping me along the way. Providing me with the tools to succeed. I followed his every step. I have all the magazine covers, have attended numerous Mac conventions. I followed him at NeXt and Pixar.

Steve Jobs is personally responsible for my successes and helping my dreams become reality. He has taught me that you can dream and do whatever your heart desires. Just believe in yourself and go do it! And for this, I will miss you. Thank you for your contributions to my life and those around me. You are an inspiration, and I'm thankful I got to know you.

Some cool facts that book publishers should be made aware of is that there are now 250 million iPads out in the world now. It used to be that you wanted to stretch your reach, you would need to publish on the iPhone to reach the 400 million iPhone users and only 50 million iPad users. But now that we're reaching more and more iPad users, our content won't be compromised. That's great news for us as we try to create experiences only on the iPad that would simply be futile on the smaller screens of the iPhones and iTouches.

The other thing that is very exciting is that Apple has reported that there are now 1,000 schools participating in a program to award one iPad per child  in their schools. So if we continue to provide great content aimed at children, we'll have even more eyeballs directed at our products.

Some other news in the news is Adobe. Back before the Flash debacle between Adobe and Apple, Adobe was creating apps using their software. And then Apple lowered the iron fist on third party software developers and told them only xcode would be allowed to make apps. Well the reigns have loosened and now you'll see more and more companies that are building software frameworks that sit on top of xcode. One of which is a new software title called, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Create single, custom iPad applications for a one-time payment of just $395. Leading publishers and companies are already using Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite to deliver their next generation content—and soon freelancer designers and small design studios can too. Starting next month, create dynamic reading experiences, attract new audiences, and broaden your business capabilities. With new Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, you can use the classical design qualities of print, add interactivity, and draw on your imagination to develop engaging content for the iPad—all within the Adobe InDesign® CS5.5 software you already know and love. More to come when we hear more about this.

If you don't know by now, we use Corona SDK to build our apps. The first one, My Basketball Stats was built directly in xcode using Objective-C. The last one, "Opening Rome" and the new one, yet to be released, "Hippos Name" was built using a combination of "Kwik" extension for Photoshop and Corona SDK. Both work very well together. Corona gives us the flexibility to create special effects for our app that would have taken months to figure out in Xcode alone. Granted this process isn't entirely easy. We've had some hiccups along the way we hope to resolve soon, so that you can see our great new book, "Hippos Name!"

All in all, it's an exciting time for all of us involved in technology and publishing. We're off to a great start in 2011, and 2012 promises to be even better! Keep coming back for more info. Enjoy!