There’s An App For That

I’ve looked in to quite a few means of marketing Forsaken By Shadow in the last few months.  I’m doing a big blog tour in May.  I’m looking into swapping chapters as end material with a few other indie authors.  I’m on Twitter, Facebook, etc.  But one thing that hadn’t occurred to me was making an iPhone app.

Today someone tweeted this link.  Apparently, for $25 (plus, I’m sure, a publishing fee), iSites will create an app that pulls in all your content–blog feed, twitter stream, Facebook stuff, and who knows what else.  Research on THAT led me to finding that you can turn ebooks themselves into their own app.

I am intrigued by this concept, being an iPhone owner myself, but I have to wonder about the marketability for fiction.  For non-fiction works such as Mark Bitteman’s How To Cook Everything, an app is AWESOME.  For $1.99, I downloaded an entire cookbook to my phone.  It’s indexed and searchable.  I can’t imagine, given that I have about 5 different reader apps on my phone, that I would necessarily want an entire app just for a work of fiction.  I rather like having them organized in libraries.  And as for the other web content…I can see this being pretty good for authors who are very popular and who have a lot of content on a regular basis, but I don’t see how it would be a worthwhile investment for someone like me who’s not known.

So I’ll solicit other opinions.  Would you be interested in downloading apps from your favorite authors?  Would you like books?  Would you like author specific content?  Inquiring minds want to know.

4 thoughts on “There’s An App For That

  1. Not to discourage you but since you asked for opinions, as an iphone user as well, I don’t think the screen size is large enough to accomodate a book. Cookbooks or comics maybe. But a full text of prose would mean a lot of zooming and scrolling (left and right as well as up and down). An App like that might be okay for the ipad but personally, I wouldn’t enjoy reading a book on my phone. I think you’re okay with the ereaders and scribd.

    In terms of marketing, maybe there’s an app that promotes books (I haven’t looked). Like an Amazon app.

    And did you do anything with Lulu? I’m a traditionalist – I like having a hard copy in my hands – and this could be another way to reach out (especially with that great cover art).

    1. At this time with a work this short, I’m really not interested in doing a print run. Depending on how sales go with this and its successor, I might consider doing a POD hard copy through Lightning Source down the line with both packaged, but it hardly seems worth it for something novella length.

      As to reading on the iPhone, I KNOW there’s a market for it, as there are a million reader apps for it (I have 5 of them!) and I read on mine all the time. The text is formatting for the phone so that there are more pages, but not a lot of scrolling. You can adjust the font size the same as you can for an ereader. But I’m not convinced there’s a market for apps that are single books. I myself prefer having them organized by reader in a library.

  2. I don’t have an iphone or ipad nor do I have any plans to get either at this point so I can’t really contribute.

    However, getting into the ebooks as I am I have to say I agree with you Kait in that I like to organize books in a library and wouldn’t invest in a single book app.

    I’ll be standing in line if you go to print! I like the idea of a Mirus Anthology.

  3. I use a Virgin Mobile Kyocera Marbl (approx $10-20 for the phone) which is not a smart phone. I have texting disabled to spare the additional expense. I have the $50/month +tax unlimited voice month-to-month no commitment.

    I don’t think I’m a good candidate for smartphone apps.

    However it’s probably a fine idea for the demographic that uses such things.

    -Steve

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