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!

Word of the Day is "Timing"

When I first started on my new book app (August 4th), I was anticipating completion after six weeks. Well I've reached that deadline. However, I didn't account for the testing that needed to take place. We're about a week into the testing and have a few hiccups which is a bit frustrating. The book is great, I love everything about it. It works great on the  Simulator but when we build it on the iPad, we have some screen freezes and we're trying to address that. So I went back to my ambitious plan (6-8 apps a year) and decided to change my plan for 2012 and do 4 apps a year. This will give me 6-8 weeks of development, two weeks of testing and feedback, and two weeks for marketing. It's hard, I admit it, when you believe in a project of this magnitude and you can't wait to tell people about it, but you can't. It's frustrating. So I've decided to push back the release date to October 4th, 2011. (Apple needs one week to review it). This will give me and my programmer a little breathing room, time for polishing the app, and also a week and a half of pre-marketing. In fact, what I'm reading in many blogs is that marketers are now saying that you should set your release date far into the future 60-90 days and start to market it before it's released. Many developers I've spoken to have said the same thing. So perhaps this extra time needed was, and is a blessing. It gives me time to get all my ducks in a row before I release the app. I have started on the promo video. It's cool, I hope you will all enjoy it. The other thing about good timing is when you're looking ahead to 2012, be smart about your timing of the release of your app. I know when I was in the greeting card business. I made the mistake of coming out with my Christmas line in October. Only to find out that buyers had already purchased their cards for Christmas back in February. In my downtime in January, I plan of putting together my Media and my App Plan. I'll share the basics with you at that time.

"They" say timing is everything. So let's hope that we get this figured out in time for October 1st Release! Keeping my fingers crossed! I'd still like to squeeze out another app for Christmas. You can bet, I'll be ready in 2012!

I'll send out a tweet when I get the promo video out.

A side note: Read Billboard, and Entertainment Weekly and some of the other top movie mags out there. Try to get a feel for what's hot or what's coming out and put out books or apps related to those items. Looking back on this app, I probably should have included a lion or a dolphin into my app.

Nick

I decided to write two entries this weekend. Today's posting is about the last few days and hours before a submission. We're in our final hours and we've actually pushed back our deadline a couple of days. There really is no "deadline" per se. We're not trying to get it out by a certain date but we need to get it done quickly so that we can start our next project for Christmas! As we were setting up the schedule, we didn't account for the hours and hours of testing that's needed. Sometimes things work so beautifully on the simulator but when you build it to your device you notice some artwork needs tweaking, or volume controls aren't consistent. That's what we're doing now. I have a little time to write as my programmer is taking a much needed nap before the big push.

For narration, I decided to make it a "read to me" book because I wanted it to be read to someone at night and I wanted it as a complete package. The ultimate in its capability. Afterall, eventually the book will be made available as an ebook, and in print so we wanted to have each character's voice to shine. Since that was me who was narrating and I have a very deep voice, some of the character's personalities just weren't making it onto the mic. So we scrapped that idea for now and after we changed all the narration, we think it actually sounds better! This goes back to my last posting about learning to "ADAPT!" So here we are and I'm now writing down all of the places we still need narration fixes, sound FX fixes or insertions, and last-minute copy changes. Now let me speak to the copy for a minute. We went through 6 revisions in the script and we thought we finally had it until we played it all out on the iPad. And low and behold there were two places that just didn't sound right then when it was read. So we're still brainstorming some text towards the end of the book to make it sound perfect. But you know, that's what I love about this gig! Each day is different and we always expect it one way, but it always ends up something else.

I really can't wait to share this story with you. It's a cute story that is great for all ages and we hope that the story will remain timeless. So I'm heading back into the trenches. Look for me tomorrow where I will finally share some artwork with you and my plans to market the app. Oh now it gets really fun!

Today's word is "ADAPT!" When I set out on this project, it first started as an ebook. I didn't know it was okay to put a book out there as an app. And though many people have published books as apps, the truly great ones are interactive and engage the reader somehow.

About two weeks ago (third week of development), I was ready to publish my children's book. Three weeks! That's pretty amazing. I created everything from the ground up and worked hard at the story, consistency of characters, etc. And then I found a tweet from someone I barely know. She posted a link to a wonderful app, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore." All she said in her tweet, was go get this book, or something like this book changed the way I thought of book apps. And she was right! And to you, my faithful and new readers, GO GET THIS BOOK! Overnight it changed my vision for what I wanted my company to be and it set the bar for all books. Granted this was a short film before it was a book or an app, or maybe it was a book first, but regardless, the app is polished, has a lot of cool features, super interactive, and just fun to read. It brings together ideas from the Wizard of Oz, Buster Keaton, and all book classics in general. I was blown away. And I immediately pulled back my sleeves and adapted my book to something that was more fun and more engaging. I worked on the story until I thought it was magical. I created an opening scene that people said WOW to. And I made sure my characters were as lovable as they should be. Mr. Lessmore set the bar for me and all interactive book publishers. And I'm grateful for his contribution to fine literature. Oh and by the way, did I mention that "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," tops all sales charts in iTunes!

I wanted to also address something about this book. Moonbot Studios the publishers of Morris Lessmore, isn't a one-or two-man show. They had 28 people work on this project and their content came from pre-existing work that was written by William Joyce. They also brought in professional narrators, music composers, and programmers. They have a huge building to work in. Most of us little app studios are one and two-man shops. And it doesn't mean we can't pull off great work too.

If you take one thing from this blog post, take this. Be willing to "ADAPT" to make your work shine even brighter and also stay true to your vision. Don't be afraid to change a few words or paragraphs to make your work stand out even more. Look at what your competition is doing and embrace it. It just may take you in a different direction. But it's okay! It's the journey that makes all the difference!

Okay, now that you've got some of the logistics out of the way, I have to throw some more at you.
This blog is for anyone who doesn't have the foggiest where to start, is an author or designer and pretty much anyone who wants to or has always wanted to create their own app. In essence become a software studio. That's what I did, and I'll show you how too!

I have little to no background in coding aside from HTML 3.0. But if I see something that is popular and alows me the flexibility to publish something that I've created, I'm going to do my best to figure out how to do it.

Today it's easier than ever to create your own app without the need of a programmer. But that wan't the case in 2009 and 2010 when building apps was in its infancy stage. Since I'm not a programmer, I found one on Craig's list in my area and hired him. He did a great job coding my first app, MyBasketballStats which is available on the app store. I believe it took between 3-6 months to complete. For my second app, I wanted to have more creative control, decrease the production schedule, and save money. I thought about going the route of someone else publishing it for me and their are lots of companies out there that do that, but their terms didn't seem that attractive to me. I wanted complete ownership without paying any royalties to anyone, aside from Apple of course. (By the way, Apple takes 30% off the top. More on that later).

Back in June of this year (2011), my old college roommate asked me how to start making apps. I told him about the Apple Developer program he had to buy ($99), and that he had to own a Mac ($999 -$2,000), and that he needed to learn Objective-C. Although he was a programmer, he didn't know Objective-C and asked me if I had ever heard of Corona. I checked it out and after reading what they were about, my jaw dropped. Yes I reached Nirvana that day. Thanks Mike!

Corona is from a small but quickly growing company called Ansca Mobile in Palo Alto, CA. Started by two ex-Adobe engineers who worked on Flash-lite. They started their company just this year and have a huge following. More on them later. Corona is much like X-Code, but it uses .lua instead of Objective-C as a language to write code. Lua is very easy to learn and was made for newbies and professionals too. In fact, do you know that little app called Angry Birds was built using .lua.
With .lua, you can drastically cut your coding down to minutes in what would normally take weeks! I'll cover Corona more later. So here is the nitty gritty. Corona will help you make apps not only for the iPhone, iPad, and iTouch, but also Android apps, the Nook, and other tablets in the market today. So your book/or app can be seen by twice as many people as you thought possible.

I also recommend using Kwik, which is a Photoshop extension. It's great for anyone who doesn't want to write a line of code and still produce their very own interactive book or comic book. Great tech support and new features added all the time. My first book and second app in my store was created using Kwik, Opening Rome!

If you want to do this, you can. And here's your shopping list.

Corona works on Windows too but you will need to have a Mac to compile it in X-Code before you upload it to Apple. Here's the list of items you'll need.

Apple Developer Membership  ($99)* Yearly
Apple Mac, ($699-$2,000)
Corona Subscription ($199 -$349)* Yearly
Kwik ($79)
Photoshop (check prices)
Word Processor (check prices)

Nick Nebelsky, is CEO and Creative Director at Intense Media, LLC. Intense Media focuses on products that entertain, enrich, and empower their customers. They create and publish their own line of books, ebooks, CDs, and software for the iPhone and iPad devices. You can reach them at nick@intensemedia.com or www.intensemedia.com.

Nick's Daily Design Diary 08312011

Today, I have a full plate. I have about twenty things to do before the day is out, but wanted to grab a few minutes before I started. Words can't fully convey the joy I have for this book. It has been a long time coming and I'm proud how it's coming out. We're in the final phases of production but there is so much more that needs to be done. It's true that time flies when you're having fun. It also flies when you can't figure out a problem. Thank God for my wife who is an excellent programmer. I've enlisted her to finish up the coding in .lua so that I can continue working on the design and production aspect. To give you an idea of what has to go into this book, I've listed the top ten things you need to do before you even start.

1. Research your idea
2. Research your title and make sure your characters are original
3. flush out your story in word or another text processor. (I use Text Wrangler)
4. Storyboard your idea on a sketch pad (leaving room for text, notes, and SFX)
5. Grab a pen and pencil and list your assets for each page. These will become your layers for each page.
6. Allow for a title page and credits or instructions before numbering your book. (I learned this the hard way)
7. Before you lay out your book, think about how many pages you will actually use.  Although it's possible to renumber your pages, it's a pain in the but when you have to change it.
8. Use Photoshop to organize your layers (assets) on each page
9. when cartooning, use a color page and an outline page so that your strokes around your characters are crisp and clean
10. If using KWIK to create your book, export your images once, and then turn off export images so that only your buttons and animations will get exported. This will save you time in processing.

Check back tomorrow for more tips and some design tips!