Author: Paul
Co-founder of PressPad
When you add an application to App Store you fill in lots of information about you and your magazine. First things that your readers will encounter in App Store are: name, description, and screenshots I mentioned before.
Dan Counsell, the founder of Realmac Software, the company producing applications for iOS and OS X, shared very interesting observations on his company blog about the “featured” section in the App Store.
Realmac Applications has been recommended several times by Apple in the App Store and Dan, basing on this experience, has selected 5 reasons that may help Apple to choose your application. They are the following:
Build a Great App – obvious, but must be met
Target the “Latest And Greatest” – Dan mentions iCloud, but using Newsstand will be equally good
Today marks a milestone day for publishing. Newscorp’s The Daily is winding down operations.
Nate Hoffelder from The Digital Reader:
The Daily launched in early 2011 amidst a lot of fanfare, hype, and a massive advertising campaign. It expanded beyond the iPad in early 2012 with new Android apps, but clearly it was not growing fast enough nor was it currently covering its costs. It was reportedly losing 30 million dollars a year.
Very interesting decision by Newsweek:
We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue.
Newsweek will be renamed to Newsweek Global and published via The Daily Beast, most e-reades and OSes out there. We see this as a very important milestone in publishing history. We believe Newsweek is going to do just fine, since 2013 is seen as a year of change. This is going to be a year when publishers either move digital or will be forced to close/scale down businesses. This is how Baba Shetty of The Daily Beast sees it as well:
Journalism’s Sarah Marshall gathered in one article opinions about publishing with Apple’s iOS Newsstand. If you are interested what Future, Vogue, The Week and others think about Newsstand, introduced by Apple little over a year ago, go ahead and read Sarah posts.
This piece cought our eye:
“The most important thing is that we got on there quick,” he [Mike Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of digital editions at Future Publishing – Paul] told Journalism.co.uk, explaining that Future decided the best approach was to be ready for the launch of Newsstand by creating PDF page-turner apps of its titles.
“Some people didn’t see this as a particularly elegant solution or the most futuristic solution to what a digital edition should be on something as gorgeous as the iPad, but it enabled us to get on there, learn, get some analytics back, talk to customers and find out what they want,” Goldsmith added.
Publishers face this problem when launching a mobile version: how to let existing readers know about e.g. iOS Newsstand app.
Here are few examples that we find working. Some of them require you to sign in for Apple Developer Account. You can do that without paying $99 annual membership and still download those materials. We could just copy those materials for you but they change from time to time and it is better that you have always the newest one. If you wish we can always email you the newest one.
We have covered only technical issues here but will write another post about best business practices when launching on mobile.
Update: since this post was created we have changed our pricing. Now Newsstand apps are free for magazines publishers. Read more about our new offer.
When we first started thinking about PressPad we had plenty of ideas how it can work and what features it might have. But whatever level of advancement we were talking about one thing didn’t change: we wanted PressPad to be a self-service publishing tool.
You may ask why self-service is so important for us. When we first did research about publishing industry lots of products (not just mobile publishing, but all range of services) worked in old-school model: they let you contact a sales representative, next prepare a written quotation for you and get back to you when it is done.
