The O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, held this year at New York’s Marriott Marquis Times Square, is the place to try and keep up with the technological advances currently flooding the book publishing industry.
I attended three workshops yesterday. The first was titled “Selling in Mobile Markets” and was presented by Rana Sobany author of the O’Reilly book Marketing iPhone Apps.
She gave some interesting history:
The 1980s, she said, was all about carriers establishing the substructure necessary for cell phones. The first cell phone call was made in 1983.
The 90s were about cell phone size with, in 1999, Motorola unveiling the StarTAC, the first cell phone to weigh in under one pound.
Today there are a reported 4.6 billion cell phones in use. This approaches the population of the world, which is approximately 6.8 billion, but there are lots of third-world countries without land lines to most places, forcing the use of cell technology and, apparently, many people carry more than one cell phone.
Sobany, an articulate woman in her 30s (I’d guess) who is passionate about her subject, said she’d bet many in the audience were carrying more than one. I doubted that, but later in the conference I was speaking to the sales rep for Publishers Weekly and he fielded calls on at least two as we spoke. I felt underprivileged with only a single iPhone in my pocket.
What does that proliferation of cell phones mean for authors and publishers? It means we had better plan on having a presence in the mobile world. It is predicted that within a few years more people will access the Internet via mobile devices than from PCs. Mobile apps are today—and will be more so in the future—important ways to support book sales.
Here, in no particular order, are a few new nuggets I gleaned from Sobany’s talk:
• She says this decade will be the “iPhone” decade. Not meaning that iPhone will be the only player, but is the one currently defining the industry.
• Publishers, in designing apps for mobile devices need:
—a brand vision, by which I took she meant working single titles would result in loss of momentum and subsequent impact. She said, at the least, use a common logo. This would suggest book authors should consider writing series or leave the apps to your publisher.
—to make data-driven decisions. Metrics, metrics, metrics…one great thing about mobile devices and the web in general is that you can obtain lots of data. Using it to ferret out what actions are best is still art as well as science, but ignore it at your peril.
—iterate quickly. Updating to keep your app current to the needs of today’s user is important if you don’t want your app to be replaced by another’s.
—keep in mind that the attention a user gives to his device is given in short bursts of about three and a half to four minutes. This isn’t all bad, it is a highly-focused three and a half to four minutes, but an app that requires 10 minutes of concentration….
There was much more. I’ll try to get to some of it later, but, an interesting prediction I heard more than once at this conference is that Twitter will, in essence, be a thing of the past by the end of the year. Twitter, a short-lived fad? Who could have predicted?
Just a write thought.