Update: Neil Ayres emailed me to make clear that the free version of the app only includes the first chapter and a limited amount of content from the book; to get the whole thing costs £1.79 ($2.99), and there is no print version of the book. I have corrected the following piece accordingly.
On the FuturEBook blog, Sam Missingham posts an essay by self-publishing author Neil Ayres looking at his reasons for self-publishing via an iPhone appbook, and the process he went through of creating the app. It makes an interesting contrast to the piece I posted yesterday about David Carnoy’s appbook experiences.
The New Goodbye is Ayres’s second novel, after his first was released by an indie publisher. However, when it came time to publish his second book, he realized that the global recession combined with the book’s subject matter might make it nearly impossible to find a home for it.
I may not know everything there is to know about book publishing, but I had the hunch that a 50,000 word crossover between literary and commercial fiction that couldn’t decide if it was an existential love story or a commentary on the global arms trade wasn’t going to have the gentlest of times on agents’ and editors’ slush piles, especially coming from an author who should have been on the road to landing a deal for a science fiction series. But I knew this was a good book; I knew a good proportion of readers would like it, so I came up with an alternative.
That alternative was to publish it himself, as an appbook on Apple’s app store.
Unlike many other appbooks,The New Goodbye might actually find the “appbook” label too restrictive, as the app contains quite a bit more than just the text of the book. It also contains a related story by Cervantes, and even a theme song (and Ayres writes that they’re working on a music video for the song, which will be made available as an update to the app).
Ayres reports that it has been hard to get publicity, lacking a mainstream publisher, but that the publicity he has been able to obtain has been largely positive. He advises people considering doing the same thing that he had some advantages that the average person might not, however—experience in putting together similar projects, and knowing people who were willing to volunteer their efforts to help.
I’d estimate that without the support the project has received, a working budget for something like this would easily come in at over £20,000. A major author would be unrealistically optimistic to expect to make this back from an app. I’ve had to spend around a hundred pounds, plus the £60 fee for registering as an Apple developer.
Ayres concludes that if this is the sort of thing one author on his own could come up with, there are even more things publishers could do with the same sort of apps—such as cross-promotion between similar authors, or providing easy access to on-line stores for impulse buying.
