Digital Publishing Blog by PressPad Posts
In today’s entry on Mobile Publishing 101 I’d like to shed some light on your Newsstand app description and screenshots appearing in App Store.
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.
Working with publishers, we can see which activities have a real influence on the sales of their issues in their applications in App Store. One of them is simply being available in Newsstand, but that’s the easiest part. This month on our blog, we’re going to devote a few entries to the topic of how to boost sales in your applications in App Store.
Until today we informed our customers, who have own apps, only about number of sold or downloaded issues. Today we are pleased to inform you that in your panels there are available very extensive reports and stats.
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
Most likely when researching the possibilities connected with publishing magazines on mobile devices (iPad and iPhone) you have been able to observe two trends: native and web apps. Today I’ll try to describe the pros and cons of these two approaches to facilitate your choice.
There are two trends in the field of magazine apps for iPad; the first one is building dedicated applications, and the other one is about web apps. This article focuses on the first approach and describes the process of creating a dedicated newsstand app for iPad ready to conquer the App Store by magazine publishers.
Let’s take a short trip back in time.
It’s 2012. Apple introduces the fourth-generation iPads and the iPhone 5 (the last smartphone overseen by Steve Jobs). At the same time PressPad launches an iOS app dedicated to publishers who wants to go mobile with their content. Over the following years, Apple develops the iOS system and introduces changes in the App Store, determining PressPad’s app evolution.
Together with creating a newsstand app for iPad, PressPad also ensures permanent supervision over Apple’s updates. From now on, all of the magazine apps created by PressPad are compatible with those following the iOS version. In practice, it means that publishers may forget about technical stuff and dealing directly with Apple on their own; instead they can focus on the things really important for them – the magazine content.
Accordingly, an iPad app for magazine publishers becomes the core product of PressPad.
Suddenly, a significant change comes along.
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.