How did the authors of the book and application developers find each other?

We wrote a book, made its layout, collected money for its printing, printed it, and now we deal with sales. In the modern world, this is the most irrational way of passing a book, which one can think of. Any sensible person will say: “Guys! You are too much "steaming"! Release the book in electronic form or make an application and you will be happy. " So after all, we would gladly have done so! But for some reason they went a long and crooked way, which, in the end, led to a shorter one. It's like in the fairy tale "Alice through the looking glass", where the opposite is true.

Now I will tell why it all went that way and not otherwise. When it was decided to write a book, first of all I thought about its electronic version. But immediately the question arose: how to distribute and sell it? After all, with a paper book, everything is clearer: you can hold it in your hands and evaluate whether it costs 350r or not; it can be bought as a gift for a nephew or grandchild; when she is on the shelf, the apartment creates the feeling that educated people live here and they don’t live for days on the Internet, but READ!

And what can you say about ... an application for a phone or tablet? Nothing good. The child is staring at the screen of the gadget, which means that he burns his childhood; To give a birthday application means that you simply forgot about the holiday; and so on and so forth.
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And the most important obstacle is ... how to make an application? When I tried to find out where and how to do it, and, most importantly, how much it would cost, I received more questions than answers. I am not a programmer, otherwise I would have sat down and did everything myself, like I did pictures for a book or started a project to raise funds for its printing.

Learning the whole production cycle of a paper book was not so problematic. And, interestingly, the cost of developing an application and printing an A4 hardcover book and a circulation of 5,000 copies. estimated at comparable amounts. To be precise from 300 tr. That is why I chose “paper”, not “virtuality”.

Nice meeting

But somewhere on the third of the way to create a paper book, we received a proposal to release an application. And that's how it happened. We launched a project to raise money for printing a book on August 8, 2013. After 10 days, the required amount for printing the first volume was collected . Then I received a call on my mobile phone. The man said that his name is Andrei and that he wants to propose to create an application for the iPhone and iPad with our book. At that time, someone often called me and offered all sorts of things related to our project. But Andrey spoke so calmly and in the matter, that after a minute we discussed how it might look in reality. He spoke about the existing schemes of cooperation between content authors and developers, explained how mutual settlements with Appstore and many other interests occur, which I tried to figure out so much earlier. Twenty minutes later we "shook" each other's hands and agreed to contact after a week and get to work. It was webcreator , the head of Kinderfox studio from Belarus. As a result, we agreed on the following: content from us, development and maintenance of the application from them, and profit in half.

No sooner said than done. All I had to do was to send the children the source of the book, which I did. But no one knew then that we would redo the whole book. The decision to change the layout, I took after test printing the book. I feel that this decision of mine gave developers a lot of problems, but they silently listened to it and redid everything. Maybe, of course, they had my photo and at that moment they threw darts at it, but I prefer to think that it was not.

The application release was scheduled for the end of December, which was to coincide with the release of the paper version of the book. But for some unknown reason (something they did not approve at Apple, plus Christmas overseas), the release did not take place and was postponed to January 15, that is, today. And I am pleased to submit to the court habrovchan an e-book for iPad.





Until recently, I tried not to look at the pictures that the guys sent me. And even more so, did not install the application in a test form. I wanted them to do their job the way they do it and no one (not even me) bothered them. And, I confess, I was even pleasantly surprised when I saw the tablet version and how cool it fits in with the book. Laconic and simple, the guys entered our layout in the horizontal single-page iPad format. Big respect to them!



Some nice buns were made in the form of pictures that move when you click on them or when, together with the video player screen, a mechanism with gears appears and scrolls the video.

While available only for the tablet, but soon there will be a version for the iPhone.



And it turns out that crowdfunding not only allowed us to print the book, but also released the application. To those who still doubt the power of crowdfunding, I will say one thing - quit this venture. Join now!

Promotion

The application is ready and you can sell it. Yes, I forgot to say that the guys made two versions: a full one for $ 1.99 and free with in-app purchases (one section from the book is available, three others cost $ 0.99). And again the question arises: how to sell it? I asked my friends who dealt with sites related to Apple, and they said that they need to somehow bring applications to the TOP. To do this, you need to provide several downloads of applications per day and that there are few traffic-generating sites for applications: iPhones.ru, Appleinsider, Planet iPhone, Wylsacom and a few more. But I feel there will be not very active support from them. Found here in the vast note about applications for children.

Today we will try to maximize the promotion of the application to determine our capabilities and capabilities of our book.

But the main promotion, I think, should be started when the version for the iPhone appears, because there are so many more users. And now I would like to ask all of you to take part in testing the application and detecting curves of places, bugs, incomprehensibilities. Offer your ideas how to make the application more understandable and convenient. It will be very useful to us. In Apstore, we were given a number of promotional codes for free download of the paid version of the application, I can share them with those who wish. There are not so many codes, do not swear if I answer with a refusal when they end. Write in lichku.

Well, according to tradition, I publish a link by which you can buy the original, that is, the paper book “Simple Science” .