What Alice for the iPad and The Elements have in common is not that they were first out the door - although that helps - it's that they were, and still are, built with quality. By quality I mean not only great design but nearly flawless execution. Both books are wonderful to behold and work great. It's a lesson that I don't think app book developers, in general, take to heart.
The fundemental reality is this: People don't want to buy app books of low quality. Seems simple, but time and time again I encounter people who believe that its all about the special effects, or manipulating the ranking system, or producing lots and lots of low quality books cheaply (a numbers game), or, and this one gets me the most; its all about marketing and has little or nothing to do with quality. I hate that last argument most of all because it explifies a business strategy that has, as a fundamental tennet, that consumers are idiots.
Well, I got news for all those entrepreneurs who are trying to win at app books by gaming the consumer, you will lose. You will go belly up. You will not be remembered. Consumers are not stupid and they are not going to fork over their money for anything but the best quality app books.
One of the companies that I admire is Touch Press, the company that was formed by Theodore Gray, Stephem Wolfram, and Max Whitby. Their first book, The Elements, has (as of Feb 2011) sold over 180 thousand copies at $13.99. After Apple's 30% cut that's $1.7 million in net income. Their second book, The Planets, has sold 30 thousand copies in less than three months (net in excess of $300,000). Both books are of the highest quality and while marketing has certaintly helped, the real reason these books succeed is because of quality which results in postive blog posts, news articles, and a ton of word-of-mouth. Here's a quote from Max Whitby of Touch Press from a September 2010 interview.
... we got some incredibly good reviews and comments, and Steven Fry Tweeted his very kind comment that our app was alone worth the price of the iPad. That was a really nice endorsement. I think that something else it taught us was just how impossible it is to market an electronic book in an old fashioned way, you just have to really produce something that’s extremely good so that it gets recommended by word of mouth and that is the single most important thing you can do to ensure you’re successful.
For every really good app book publisher there are probably 20 really bad ones. I'll list the app book publishers that I think are the best of the best right now: (listed in no particular order)
Touch Press
Loud Crow
Moving Tales
Oceanhouse Media
Anthony E. Zuiker and Hooray Society
Callaway Digital Arts
Atomic Antalope
PadWorx Digital Media
If you want to succeed in this business you have to emulate these app book publishers. Download their app books, study them, read interviews with the designers and founders, and learn how to do it right.
I'll leave you with one more quote from that September interview with Max Whitby where he gives advice to app book developers:
Focus on quality. Concentrate on doing really good things, and it goes back to what I was saying a few moments ago about how you market these titles, but the bottom line is what you produce has to be just excellent, and if it isn’t you might sell a few hundred, you might even sell a few thousand copies, but you’re not going to have a really big hit so concentrate on quality. The other thing I’d say is don’t try to do it all yourself. This is a new medium that really needs a collaboration between designers, software engineers, authors, writers, photographers, animators, and you don’t want too big a team, but you do need a combination of talents, so if you’re a individual and you want to get into this area, see who you might work with who have skills that match yours and compliment yours.
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