No12013

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted inany form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recordingor any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writingfrom the publisher.

Digital Publishing Guide authors: Paul Nowak – @nejt Wojt Szywalski – @wojteksz Bart Zimny – @BZimny Sylvia Szpuga – @szpuga Eva Ginko

Published in 2013 by PressPadOn the web: www.presspadapp.comPlease send errors to contact@presspadapp.com

Copyright ©

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FOREWORD

Of course, “free” is almost never really free. Several decades ago, “free lunch” was free only because the food was so heavily salted that diner visitors had to order a (paid, how else?) drink.

These days, it is no longer necessary to add salt to food in order for parts of products to be offered for free. Google offers e-mail and a search engine for zero dollars in order to learn more about us and to be able to highlight better ads. PressPad provides

Paul NowakCEO PressPad

Building a business for “free” is a very big challenge, probably the biggest challenge that a firm and its management can face. It is, therefore, especially pleasing that Apple has joined the group of companies offering some of their products for free.

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free magazine templates in exchange for promotion on Twitter or email. Apple is offering its world-class apps for free in order to increase the demand for manufactured devices and to draw more users into its ecosystem. What does a free operating system and iPrograms for PressPad clients mean?

I wondered about the significance of Apple’s confer-ence on Oct 2013 to our customers. Certainly, the number of iPads sold is a solid confirmation of the direction in which the market is tending and of

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Paul NowakCEO PressPad

what can be expected in the near future. 170 mil-lion iPads in just over three years is much, much more than anyone could have predicted. The state-ment uttered by Apple from the podium – “Who remembers netbooks?” – perfectly summarizes iP-ad’s strength today.

The second thing I noticed yesterday is free iWork software. Redesigned Pages are especially dear to us, because many of our customers compose their professional-looking magazines today using this program. We are already working to convert our free (free?) template to a version that will be ed-itable in Apple’s Pages.

We hope that the free Pages will inspire potential magazine and comics publishers to publish their content on iPads and Androids. If we can help in this process, we will be delighted.

Magazines go mobile here.

FREE MOBILE PUBLISHINGWe will add Your Magazine to the App Store for $0, today!

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FOREWORDFrom CEO

BUSINESSConvince Your Boss About Mobile Publishing

Make Your Digital Magazine App Profitable

What Have We Learnt in our Mobile Experiment

Become a PressPad Partner!

DESIGN6 Golden Rules To Design Successful Digital Magazine

4 of the best and low-cost tools for Designing and creating PDF’s

Your iPad Magazine Can Look Like That on Apple IOS7

There Are Lots of Great Selling Covers…Make Sure Yours is One

of Them!

How to Use Our Professional, Free Magazine Templates

MARKETING & SALESIs Digital Publishing a Great Content Marketing Technique

5 Things on How to Improve Your Digital Magazine Sales

Fastest Way to Increase Sales of Digital Magazine

New Feature: Use Magazine Sample to Help You Sell More

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IN THIS ISSUE

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HOW-TO’SHow To Publish a Brilliant Children’s Book on iPad

How to Write an Effective Magazine App Description?

How To Publish Comic Book Online

How Does the System of Tiers Work in Apple?

What Happens when You Order a Free iPad App with PressPad

THE ERA OF DIGITAL PUBLISHINGThe Washington Post Bought by Jeff “in 20 Years, Print

Newspapers Will Be All but Extinct” Bezos

10 Reasons Why Self Mobile Publishing Tool is the Best Way

to Get Your Magazine Published on iPad

What It Would Be Like to Build a System for Publishing

Magazines on Mobile Devices

Tablet User’s Habits. Discover More About E-readers.

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01BUSINESS

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Convince Your Boss About Mobile Publishing

Mobile Publishing is a necessary pivot for many titles. For some titles, it is the first me-dium for entering the market. In this article you will find out which arguments to choose, and how to present them in order to get your boss to like mobile publishing. After all, going mobile is a great way to reach new readers.

11Mobile Publishing is a very strong trend, which is supported by changes in the business model of many publi-cations. We have already witnessed the change of the distribution model and the transition to digital platforms, such great titles as Life or the NYT. Earlier this year, eMarketer made a prediction that “This Year, All Pub-lishers Go Mobile”. To convince your boss to come onto the App Store plat-form, present the information, which you will find below, in an appropriate form, relevant for your organization. 1. Provide Market Brief

More and more magazines discover mobile publishing. Smartphone and tablet users willingly use their devices to read the titles, which could be read in print until recently or which were never printed. According to a research conducted by “Alliance for Audited Media”, the year 2013 is a break-through because every American publisher plans to appear on mobile platforms, and by 2014 four out of ten

12publishers expect to generate at least 10% of their rev-enue from mobile publications.

Mobile reading opens up new business opportunities, which is why more and more companies, that have no publishing experience, try to fill this huge niche more boldly by publishing magazines, specialized buswiness content, and even books, which are a paid subscrip-tion of following chapters. The development and popularization of mobile technology (post PC era), and above all, the increasingly great popularity of Apple mobile devices have a huge influence on this strength-ening trend. iPad and iPhone users are at the top readers and customers when it comes to mobile con-tent. Almost 500 million of iPad and iPhone users have their credit cards linked to their accounts in App Store and they are used to payments. According to the research conducted by ‘Alliance for Audited Media’ iPad stays at the top of the devices, for which digital publications with paid access are published. What is interesting is that iPad and iPhone come in the first two positions, what classifies Apple us-ers as the largest group, at which mobile publishing is targeted.

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Publishers now want to, first of all, appear on mobile devices, and eventually, move completely into the mo-bile reality.

Key takeaways:¬ 100% of publishers will format their content for mo-bile in 2013.¬ The iPad saw the greatest percentage of publishers charging for content across publication categories.¬ Apple remains a primary device-maker for media consumers.¬ Download full AAM raport.

2. Highlight Advantages

Mobile publishing is an attractive market, in terms of the possibility of generating revenue. One of the most interesting methods of monetizing the content is re-newable subscription in App Store. In addition, users of Apple hardware more willingly make micropay-ments on a platform they know, where their payment details are preconfigured. As a result, it lowers the bar-rier of entering the process of buying, which is, in itself, frictionless sales.

Subscription model of digital magazines distribution combined with the increasing number of iPad/iPhone

iPad and iPhone come in the first two positions, what classifies Apple users as the largest group, at which mobile publish-ing is targeted.

14users let you reach the consumption-oriented client, who is used to micropayments in the App Store ecosys-tem, which he knows well.

Key takeaways:¬ Growing SalesBuilding customer loyalty through a subscription model in the App Store. It is easier to sell subscriptions across a large and well-targeted number of iPad and iP-hone users.

¬ A low barrier of entering mobile publishing with PressPadPublishing printed content you can, easily and at small expense, start publishing your magazine in App Store – without any technical abilities. From a PDF file you receive, you can create in PressPad a mobile app, which we publish in App Store for you. We take care of every technical aspect, including managing and maintaining the application in App Store.¬ Effective promotion by Push NotificationsWe offer our publishers the ability to send up to 5 Push Notifications in a month to the readers, informing them about, new releases or placing other promotional con-tent

“The Company sold 37.4 million iP-hones in the quar-ter, compared to 35.1 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 19.5 million iPads during the quarter, compared to 11.8 million in the year-ago quarter (…)”

Apple sales ra-port for the sec-ond quarter of 2013 (Q2’2013) confirms that there was a huge increase in mo-bile users:

153. Show OpportunitiesThere are many possibilities. If you are a publisher of a magazine, you can easily prepare a digital edition in PDF file, which we will transform into a native iOS ap-plication and put it into the App Store. Thanks to our new business model, we do it for free – you can read more about it here..

However, if the company is not a publishing house, then with the involvement of minimum resources, you can prepare a couple of specialist articles and enclose the whole thing in one PDF file with a designed cover.

Anyone who will start now with mobile publishing, will reach a competitive advantage in the future (in the future there will be much more mobile publications, so the publishers will have to put more effort in order to be recognized by readers). If a customer downloads your application with a magazine now, he/she will not have to download it in the future and the next is-sue will download itself automatically directly on his/her iPad thanks to our application.

Key takeaways:Publish magazines about businessTopical consumer magazinesComic books are a great niche, thanks to a unique user experience regarding rotating and zooming pictures.

If you have any questions click “chat with us” on our website, and if you would like to take the opportu-nity to publish your magazine in App Store now, totally free of charge, just fill out the registra-tion form.

164. Enter the decision-making process

Now, the most important thing. In order to convince your management to enter the world of mobile publishing, you have to speak about advantages, which are evident to every decision making division and implement your message in the decision-making process in the compa-ny. This is important especially if the organization has a well-developed structure of competence and your boss might have several superiors above him/her.

Prepare a document that comes into company workflowIn the headline, introduce the flow of decision-making people, who should get to know with a document e.g.: VP =>COO =>GM =>M =>YouEstablish a clear goal: “Enter a billion-dollar market”Emphasize the greatest benefit with one sentence, for example: “Revenue growth by 10% per annum”In a tabular form introduce the advantages of imple-menting mobile publishing (the last column should con-tain a statement of expenses)Organize a meeting or make the document you have prepared enter the workflowFollow up

We have prepared an example of an outline of such docu-ment for you for free. Tap here to download.

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Make Your Digital Magazine App Profitable

If you are seriously thinking about turning a profit with your digital magazine, you should start selling. There are, however, various ways of selling digital products. You can start charging your readers for access to your digital magazine, or you can provide it for free, generating exclusive, high quality traffic to your online store.

18Both sales strategies work well but there are few things every strategy has in common and which you should know about. In this article I will highlight five areas you must focus on in order to make your digital mag-azine profitable. 1. Deliver value

Surely there is a market need your magazine can, and should, fulfill. For example, there are lot of people passionate about fashion, so you can assume that beau-tiful, exclusive photos are what mainly grab their at-tention. Find the right angle and provide your readers with what they find most valuable. It can be literally anything. Give it a try.

Tip #1:Use Google Search to check what interests people the most.

192. Choose the right distribution platform

You can run your magazine as a website, but there are better ways to deliver a value proposition to your read-ers. A properly chosen distribution platform speeds up your digital publishing business, as well as gathering special, well-profiled customers who are already will-ing to read and actively seeking a new reading experi-ence. At PressPad we find the Apple App Store to be a great distribution platform. It offers millions of read-ers who can become your loyal customers when they find your magazine. We believe that publishers of all sizes should have the possibility to offer their maga-zines on the App Store. Since we have changed our model of cooperation with magazines, you can get your magazine to the App Store for free with PressPad.

3. Build loyalty and trigger sales

Put coupons into every second issue of your digital magazine and feel confident mentioning this on the cover. Not only does it trigger sales, but it can also en-courage customers to choose a subscription over a sin-gle issue purchase! Under-promise and over-deliver. Do your best to provide freebies and giveaways for sub-scribers, and people will love you. To accomplish this, offer space exchanges of your magazine to bloggers and other content creators.

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4. Build credibility

Your iPad magazine app can be profitable

Set up a schedule and publish new issues according to it. That way your readers will get used to your release cycle, and checking for new issues will become a habit. This is how you build a history of your magazine, so you can offer bundles of archive is-sues for every new subscriber.

Tip #1:Offer a free sam-ple issue of your magazine on popular blogs like Hongkiat.com – you’ll build traffic and improve your position in Goog-le search results.

Tip #2:Offer a special edition of your magazine as a “daily deal” with “deals” distribu-tion channels so your magazine’s iPad App will reach hundred of thousands of sub-scribers.

Tip #3:Learn about more best practices in selling digital magazines.

21Actually, subscribers to your magazine App will gain ac-cess to a full archive of past editions. That can be a great marketing tool for your magazine business.

Tip #1:Attract consum-ers of digital mag-azines with your free samples on Issuu.

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5. Invite your readers

Yes, invite them. Telling people about what you do is one of the best things you can start with, promot-ing your digital magazine yourself. These days our friends and people from all walks of life are easily ac-cessible online via social media net-works.

Tip #1:Use monitoring tools to monitor keywords in real-time (i.e. “fashion world”, “new look” etc.) to be able to reply instantly to your potential subscribers.

Tip #2:Subscribe to interest groups on the LinkedIn network. Use the search field to find the best places to talk about your iPad magazine.New technologies are changing the way people think, behave, and act. They also create opportunities for making profit online. At PressPad we believe that digital publishing is among the forces shaping the future, making our world more open and colorful. Join us for free.

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Mobile Ex-periment:

Just to remind you: we made a proposal to magazine publishers to make a free iPad and iPhone application for them, in exchange we would keep the first 199 USD that the application earns each month. From USD 200 above the income is transferred to the publishers with-

August 2013 we launched a simple experi-ment, which was supposed to verify a cer-

tain hypothesis and to help us simplify the way we settle accounts with the publishers. The response of magazine publishers made us (delicately speak-ing) frightened: we received hundreds of mails with requests to be included in the experiment, and one of the publishers even threatened us a little!

What Have We Learnt in Past 48 Hours

In

24out any interests charged by us.

We are extremely grateful for the support you show towards us. At the same time, we are aware that this means a great responsibility on our part. In the next few days we have a lot of work to do concerning the basics of our business in order for us to know wheth-er the model we proposed in the experiment should not be our key one.

We decided to include in the experiment all publishers who applied and will apply in the next few days. This way, we are going to increase the sample group on which we verify the hypotheses and nobody will be omitted.

Today and tomorrow two things will happen:

1. Every Publisher who replied to our offer will get the information con-cerning the next steps to be taken.2. In order to simplify a little the procedure of applying, please regis-ter in Press Pad, using this special link http://katalog.presspadapp.com/register?type=experimentThanks to that link you will be able to create an ac-count, enter your issues into the panel and easily order the application for your magazine. And we will know that you are in the “experiment” and we will not require any payment for adding the application.

25Below we compiled the answers for most frequently asked questions. If you have any other queries, please write at: sales@presspadapp.com. We will answer all of them.

You can also follow us/ask questions at Twitter @press-padapp or at Facebook: http://facebook.com/presspad

Frequently Asked Questions

If a magazine is free of charge, does it qualify for this offer?The proposed model works only in case of paid issues/subscriptions of a magazine. If you are willing to intro-duce a fee for your magazine on mobile devices, we are able to include your magazine in our offer. Providing extra or full version content via a mobile application could be a good solution.

Do I need to commit at any point?No. Neither in case of our standard subscription plans, nor the experimental one do we use long-term agree-ments.

What if I want to resign from PressPad?Should you decide to stop using PressPad, your appli-cation will be removed from App Store. However, your PressPad account will not be closed in order to:

261. Continue with the support for the readers who have already downloaded your application from App Store and have it installed on their devices.2. Provide you with the access to your archive sales re-ports.We do not charge any fees for such accounts and you may always reopen them.

Do I receive sales reports?Detailed reports on every previous month are dis-played in your panel on the 10th of each month. There is also a live estimate number of all downloads avail-able in the panel all month long.

Does PressPad offer subscriptions?Yes. The readers may purchase single issues or 1, 2, 3, 6 or 12-month subscriptions (you need to select at least one option).

Once I get a subscription, may I receive current and future issues exclusively (for six months or a year) without an access to archive issues at the same time?Unfortunately, not. Apple does not allow for such solu-tion.

Would my app be available on Apple’s Newsstand, or just in the App Store?We do add applications to Apple Newsstand, it is a de-

27fault option. It is possible to choose a standard appli-cation however, in this case you miss several bonuses connected with Newsstand technology: subscriptions, background downloading, pushing new issues onto readers’ devices, etc. Newsstand is a default choice of most readers and publishers.

If I make less than $199, do you just keep it as fee? So I could make nothing, and not get charged at all?That’s right. It’s us who take the risk in the case of your magazine making less than $199 a month. That’s why our goal was, among other things, to educate publishers on how to increase sales on mobile devices, so that both sides are satisfied (read our blog!).

Is this planned for other platforms, as well?We currently make applications for the Apple iPad/iPhone. Support for Android is planned for launch in about six weeks. We will most likely enable Android support without fees within the same model. We will have a more concrete answer closer to the launch. Sup-port for other platforms will come after Android (Kin-dle, Windows Phone, BlackBerry).

Is this an international offer?Yes, it is. We aren’t planning on adding any location-based restrictions.

28Who is doing all the uploading – you or me?Each publisher needs to register a PressPad account and upload their magazine issues in PDF format them-selves. The panel is very simple to use, and the work re-quires no more than 2-3 minutes per month (Note: use this link to register, so that we know you’re taking part in this experimental offer).

Do you take PDF files?Yes, PDF is the format we use within the applications.

How do I get paid? Via electronic transfer or PayPal? When are the monthly payments made?We use PayPal for payments. We process payments during the week after the 10th of each month (when the sales report is generated). If the 10th falls on the weekend, we start sending the publishers their money on the following Monday.

Is there a free trial period available?No trial period is available for this offer. However, as mentioned before, there are also no long-term contracts or cancellation fees. To get your iPad app, register a PressPad account via this link, upload your magazine issues in PDF format, order the application and wait for us to contact you.

29Can I have a look at any sample applications published by PressPad?

Of course. Search for “presspad” in the App Store, and most of our apps will appear. Alternatively, download these few examples directly (we picked the free ones to save you the unnecessary expense):

Jack Kirby Collector

Tickle The Imagination

Kiteboardign Magazine

Upon placing the order, we contact each publisher indi-vidually if anything requires clarification. If you have any questions, please contact us at sales@presspadapp.com. We will answer any question.

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Becomea Partner!

Do You Work in DTP?

31 In PressPad, we follow the principle 1 + 1 = 3. This is the way in which our product is created, the way in which we consult new ideas, and also try to cooperate with clients. We believe that our knowledge of mobile applications marketing and our clients’ ex-cellent content will be able to get through the TOP PAID rankings in stores with mobile applications.

Now, to a group of people with whom we want to cooperate very close-ly, we would like to invite companies and professionals from the field of Desktop Publishing (DTP). Over the last few months we have tested how such cooperation proceeds, and today we are convinced that all parties can benefit from it.

How does the cooperation with PressPad take place?

DTP companies and PressPad have a very similar client: a magazine publisher. We think that PressPad can supplement the offer of DTP com-panies and therefore influence their value proposition.

When a client of DTP company becomes a PressPad subscriber, in ex-change, we give the DTP company 50% of our profit. What is more, PressPad manages the communication with the maga-zine publisher and his future service.

Aren’t mobile applications a threat to DTP field?

We understand why, from the perspective of DTP field,

32mobile applications may be readily perceived as a threat. The result of designers and professionals’ work dealing with the print is the order of a printed maga-zine, while mobile applications need neither a printing house nor paper.

However, from the experience, we can see that over 50% of our clients treat mobile applications as a supple-ment of a paper magazine. Moreover, thanks to mobile applications, more readers can find out about a maga-zine, and some of them also order paper editions.

Furthermore, the files which leave DTP studio are si-multaneously materials for creating mobile applications in PressPad. Thus, the cooperation with DTP companies is extremely important to us.

How to become a PressPad Partner

We made efforts to help DTP companies easily start the cooperation with PressPad.

Today we have released a dedicated website on which the interested will find a description of a program, nec-essary marketing materials, profit calculator, the status of financial statements, and more.

You can find this website at presspadapp.com/partner-

33ship-center.

What are the benefits of joining PressPad program

We make efforts to keep our actions transparent all the time, and information available to everyone. For this reason, on the Partnership Center website, we made all the information on the statement with DTP companies publicly accessible.

The basis for cooperation is trust. DTP company must trust PressPad that it will deliver a high-quality prod-uct to its clients. We are working in digital publish-ing for over two years now, and delivered hundreds of magazine applications to the market. For us, it is ex-tremely important to cooperate with reliable partners as well, therefore we reserve the right to screen Part-ner requests.

Every magazine publisher who will become a PressPad client, acts in favour of the Partner from whom he had come. The benefit from the subscription gained in this way is divided 50/50 between DTP company and Press-Pad. Most importantly, this agreement lasts as long as the magazine remains the client of PressPad.

I encourage every DTP company to have a look at our offer.

Paul NowakCEO PressPad

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02DESIGN

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If you are going to publish your digital magazine on mobile devic-es, then, in this article, you will find out (having in mind a couple of universal design rules) how to prepare a popular, good looking, recommended magazine which is read with pleasure and which works on Apple mobile devices with iOS7.

Golden Rules To Design

Successful Digital Magazine

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Your native PressPad app is a virtual kiosk and, at the same time, a reader visible in News Stand which al-lows readers to look through successive digital issues. A great advantage of such a solution is that you can put every issue in your PressPad publisher panel in a PDF format and subscribers of your magazine will instantly see successive issues on their tablets or smartphones.

The FastCompany magazine accu-rately noted in the article “Your App is Your Brand Now” that “If you don’t have an app you risk being effec-tively invisible to the fastest grow-ing audience of customers: More than a billion app users already exist, and that market is growing at nearly 30% every year.”

The guardian Case Study

Known titles have already gone to mobile platforms. The case of The Guardian is one of the most famous. Its mobile app is a perfect complement to the printed mag-azine. Not only the title itself has gone to mobile plat-forms but also they adapt their publishing platform to new customer expectations.

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Obviously, you don’t have to invest millions of dollars to appear on the mobile platform with your magazine but the case of the Guardian is interesting and instruc-tive for every digital magazine publisher.

The Guardian Digital Magazine on iPad - PressPad blog

Here is an excellent presentation that outlines how The Guardian newspaper created its iPad version. This has a lot of good advice for anyone who wants to go mobile.

If you want the digital edition of your magazine read on mobile devices to make use of the poten-tial of mobile devices fully and to make the User Experience the most valuable, stick to the follow-ing rules while creating a PDF of your magazine.

1. Layout

The magazine has to be legible. Use one or two column layout in order to have a magazine which is legible and good looking. Mobile applications on smartphones and tablets allow you to view magazines in portrait or land-scape modes. In the case of portrait mode only one page can be displayed and in the case of landscape mode two pages can be displayed at the same time. That’s why it is so important that every page keeps the 4:3 ratio

This allows, both in vertical as well as in horizontal mode, to use the whole displace space. What’s more, it

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creates additional opportunities of building great User Experience because in landscape mode you can get an extra (central) column formed by putting together the two smaller columns on adjacent pages. To select the op-timal column width you can use the Golden Ratio prin-ciple used successfully in the art of design.

Another interesting idea is to use a grid (grid), where each element is a preview of the next articles and has interlinks with which you can easily jump to the loca-tion in the magazine. If your magazine or other publica-tion consists of multiple pages this type of grid can be a nice variation for the reader, who also serves as the in-ternal menu. Hint: Recommended page size: 2048 x 1536px

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2. Illustrations and Photos

What would reading on a tablet be without being able to enjoy beautiful illustrations. The first and one of the most important illustration in the magazine is the cov-er of the magazine, which has to draw the reader’s at-tention, and in the case of digital publishing has to trig-ger sales.

Beautiful pictures are generally a big expense, especial-ly for a young magazine/startups. Such projects as Un-

splash come to help with beautifully cropped, high qual-ity pictures, which are free to use.

3. Typography

Proper fonts use is essential and typography itself is viewed as a secret knowledge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Well-chosen fonts, which create words correctly formatted with spaces not only make the reading easier but also affect the positive reception of a magazine as a professional one.

Hint: Reduce size of the pictures bigger than 250ppito 150ppi

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I’ve listed the key features of good typography below, based on Butterick’s Practical Typography.

� Point size should be 15-25 pix els on the web.� line spacing should be 120–145% of the point size.� The average line length should be 45–90 char ac ters (in-clud ing spaces).� Avoid goofy fonts, mono spaced fonts, and sys tem fonts, especially times new roman and Arial.� Put only one space be tween sentences.� Never use underlining, un less it’s a hyperlink.� Use cen tered text sparingly.� Use bold or italic as lit tle as possible.� All caps are fine for less than one line of text.� Use first-line indents that are one to four times the point size of the text, or use 4–10 points of space be-tween para graphs. But don’t use both.� If you use justified text, also turn on hyphenation.� In a doc u ment longer than three pages, one ex cla ma-tion point is plen ty.

4. Quality

The magazine shouldn’t look like a “digital reprint”, nor should the website. People are used to using the inter-net for free. A mobile magazine is an optimal mix of ex-

Hint: Be aware that pixels (px) are not the same aspoints (pt), where sizes of fonts are defined. You’llfind the appropriate converter here.

41clusive content and great user experience served by Ap-ple mobile devices.

What’s more, customer pays for value added content and unique experience, that’s why, while exporting your digital magazine to a PDF file, do not flatten text and embed all fonts. This will ensure a consistent layout even on devices which don’t have the fonts used in the magazines.

5. Performance

Any new issue of the magazine must be downloaded by your reader on his/her tablet or smartphone. Therefore, it is good to optimize the PDF file in terms of size (not to exceed 50MB). You just have to remember to:

� Downsample images above 225ppi to 150ppi� Do not embed thumbs

6. Sale in App Store

A user who visits the website of your magazine in App Store is only one step away from making a purchase de-cision. In PressPad we ensure that every publisher will

Hint: These treatments will ensure that your agazine will provide the same experience on everydevice.

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appear on the product page in App Store without the need to own a developer account and without the need to pay any-thing to Apple Inc. We take care of everything so that publish-ers can focus only on their publishing process.

Factors stimulating sales of digital magazines:

� Ability to subscribe to a magazine� Competitive pricing model for a subscription (read about Apple pricing models)� Magazine preview, which is generated by us but we are open to suggestions of our publishers.� Free sample of a magazine in a truncated version “preview”..

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Recommended page size – 2048 x 1536px (4:3 ratio)• Reduce size of the pictures bigger than 250ppi to 150ppi• Use interlinks to navigate among inner content• Use free samples with promotional codes• Attract customers with competitive subscription price• Attract customers with preview screenshots

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Some of our customers want to find the way to publish while limiting the costs. Most of the magazine designers use InDesign and there is no doubts that it is great, but still pretty expensive software. We’ve made a small review of low budget and professional designing tools and we hope this will help you to choose the right one.

There are different types of DTP (Desktop Publishing) software available nowadays, either as online or downloadable versions. The purpose of these applications is to enable users to create magazines,

4 of the Best and Low-cost Tools for Designing and Creating PDF Files.

iStudioPublisherInkscapeScribus

Serif PagePlus x-7

44brochures, posters, books, newspapers or flyers. Export-ing/importing the Portable Document Format (PDF) files is possible as well. While most DTP programs are quite expensive, the cheapest – and some even free – among them are listed below, along with their corre-sponding tools and plug-ins.

Free/Open source

1. Scribus:

Scribus has been released under

the GNU General Public License.

It is 100% free and can be easily downloaded

from its website www.scribus.net. You can

create all manner of great looking documents

with this easy to use and powerful DTP ap-

plication, which can easily compete with the

leading commercial and expensive DTP pro-

gram, which is Adobe InDesign. Scribus has

plenty of options to choose from to achieve

best results.

Interface and usability:

- One-click color management.

- Document preview without frame borders

and guides, and many more viewing options.

- A search feature for the document outline.

- Many options to speed up and automate the

insertion of frames (such as the Sticky Tools

option, or the Insert Frame dialogue).

- Enhanced Scrapbook.

- Context menu for the canvas, with options

toactivate viewing or to insert vector graph-

ics directly.

- Can open and fully edit PDFs.

Template availability:

- Added many more templates donated by

artists.

- Template descriptions and categories are

translated to different languages.

Images:

- Connection with stock image database.

- Non-destructive image effects.

- Good handling of clipping paths and layers.

- The following image formats can be im-

ported: PNG, JPEG, EPS, GIF, TIFF, EPS and

XPM.

- Image management.

- Import SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) im-

ages.

45

2. Inkscape:

Inkscape has been released

under the GNU General Pub-

lic License. It is 100% free

and can be easily downloaded from its web-

site www.Inkscape.org. Inkscape is an easy

to use open source vector graphics editor,

which uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector

Graphics (SVG) file format. It can easily com-

pete with Adobe Illustrator, Xara X or Corel-

Draw.

Interface and usability:

- Universal keyboard accessibility.

- Convenient editing on the canvas.

- Has come a long way in terms of usability

since the start of the project.

- Keyboard shortcuts and toolbars docked

within the editing window can reduce the

number of floating dialog boxes.

- The toolbar at the top of the window always

displays the controls relevant to the current

tool.

- Provides floating tooltips and status bar

hints for all buttons, controls, commands,

keys, and on-canvas handles.

- A given object can display up to 4 hints

while editing with a single tool.

- Comes with a complete mouse and key-

board reference in SVG and HTML.

- Can open and fully edit PDFs.

Template availability:

- Creation of web templates.

- Extraction of vector images from a PDF

file.

- Can create SVG documents.

Images:

- All vector transformations, scale, rota-

tion and positioning (minus skewing) have

keyboard shortcuts with consistent modi-

fiers.

- The most common operations (such as z-

order, transforming, zooming) have con-

venient one-key shortcuts.

- The Alt key transforms by 1 screen pixel

at the current zoom, and Shift multiplies

the transformation by 10.

46

3. Serif PagePlus X-7:

PagePlus X-7 developed by Serif Europe is a

proprietary, commercial software application

available for purchase from the website www.

serif.com/pageplus for $105.24. You can create

all manner of great looking documents with

this easy to use and powerful DTP applica-

tion, which can easily compete with the lead-

ing commercial and expensive DTP programs,

which are Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Pub-

lisher. PagePlus X-7 has plenty of options to

choose from to achieve best results.

Interface and usability:

- Supports page layers and master pages.

- Supports page layout with full freedom.

- Supports professional PDF/X-3 output for

print shops.

- Can open and fully edit PDFs.

- Able to import Microsoft Word 2013 files

with maintained layouts.

- eBooks are compatible with Kindle and all

other stores.

Template availability:

- Professional templates, unbeatable value.

- Everything you need for the web and print.

Stunning templates perfect for your busi-

ness, club or charity, available online as well

as in print.

Images:

- Advanced photo editing lab and image cut-

out studio.

- Logo studio with graphic design tools.

Proprietary/Commercial

47

4. iStudio Publisher

iStudio Publisher has been de-

veloped by iStudio Software,

a UK based company. It is a proprietary, com-

mercial software application available for

purchase from the website www.istudiopub-

lisher.com for $45. It is a truly great publish-

ing app, meant to be a cheap and user-friendly

alternative to the expensive and complicated

DTP applications available on the market.

Interface and usability:

- Frequent software updates.

- Auto Save feature.

- Stack dumps resymbolized to enable Crash

Reporter.

- If no documents are open, clicking Dock icon

now shows Task Chooser.

- Drag in PDF content.

Template availability:

- Preconfigured templates can be downloaded

for publication from a dedicated template site.

Images:

- Images can be manipulated: stretched,

scaled, tiled and cropped. You can also ro-

tate, resize and alter position of any image

within its containing shape.

- Any part of an image lying outside its

shape remains hidden, so you can just fo-

cus on the parts that matter.

- You can resize or move the image by hand

with the new image tool.

- The program can do all the hard work for

you with the alignment and fitting options.

What is your favourite tool for creating

and designing magazine content? Let us

know about your private reviews.

To check how to create pdf for newsstand

app see: The easiest way to create your own

magazine app – infographic.

To check how to create pdf for newsstand app see: The easiest way to create your own magazine app – infographic.Publisher has been developed by iStudio Software, a UK based

48

Your iPad Magazine Can Look Like That on Apple iOS7

49

Your iPad Magazine Can Look Like That on Apple iOS7

50

Apple has released its new, inno-vative operating system iOS7, in-troducing many interesting fea-tures such as the Control Center, AirDrop for iOS and smarter multitasking. But what catches the eye the most is a brand new, beautiful user interface with icons designed in the style of flat design, and referring to the cur-rent color trends. Apple’s new mobile system provides a com-pletely new user’s experience, better than ever.

In accordance with the direction set by Apple, we are testing a new version of our mobile application

in the PressPad, which is compat-ible with the iOS7 interface. We can boast about its appearance just now, which fits well with the new system from Apple. This makes reading the publication on iPad even more pleasant.

The new PressPad application is also a brand new promotional opportunity for our customers. Now, with the ability to share magazine covers in Social Me-dia, the subscribers themselves promote available titles from the Publisher by sharing the beauti-ful graphics within the circle of friends

When Apple introduced a new mobile operating system iOS7, our team had just finished working on a new version of the mobile magazine application. This PressPad application allows subscribers to download and read digital magazines published by our editors. In this article we disclose the appearance of our new mobile application optimized for iOS7.

51

Verizon 100%9:43 PM

TO BUYALL PURCHASED

SUBSCRIBE

BUY $0.99 READ SAMPLE

BUY $0.99

READ SAMPLE

READ SAMPLE

Tickle the imagination subscriptionstyle magazine newsstand App

ISSUE #5Once upon a time / January 2013

ISSUE #6Old Hollywoon / June 2013

ISSUE #7Anniversary edition / July 2013

ISSUE #8Fall is comming / October 2013

85

NEW

HOT

Q: Is the current version of the PressPad App supported on iOS7?

A: Yes, the current version of the PressPad App is supported on the

new iOS7. The new version will be available soon. All our publishers will be informed.

Q: Do the subscribers of my magazine must install

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

52PressPad one more time af-ter the installation of iOS7?

A: No, this is not necessary. Sub-scribers can use the current (old) version of the application Press-Pad. However, after the release of the new version, we suggest sending Push Notification to the subscribers with information that the new version of the appli-cation is ready for download.

Q: Why then do you pay so much attention to the de-tails in the new look of iOS7?

A: In the PressPad we are aware that the user experience is just as important as the functional-ity of the application. User expe-rience of the application should be compatible and should fulfill the experience offered by the de-vice’s operating system in such a way that reading magazines was a unique experience.

Q: Why should I install a new version of PressPad on iOS7 if the current version works well?

A: The new interface of the Press-Pad App interacts with the inter-face of the new mobile system for Apple mobile devices. Our new ap-plication code has also been opti-mized for iOS7 to ensure stability and optimal user experience.

App Store Newsstand

Q: What is PressPad?

A: PressPad is a self-service iPad publishing platform. Reg-ister to start your iPad magazine with branded newsstand app, sub-scriptions and Push Notifications. With our new business model you can exist in the App Store with your commercial digital maga-zine at no additional cost. Open a free account and send us your magazine in a PDF format.

Q: If my digital magazine pur-chases 5000 subscribers, will you charge additional fee for the transfer?

A: No. We do not charge any ad-ditional fees for the transfer, or

53hosting.

Q: Can I place the discount coupons inside my digital magazine to encourage users to buy the subscription?

A: At the moment it is only pos-sible by putting an active link to the external promotional content, for example, to the previously generated a Facebook entry that contains the password, or promo-tion code in your magazine’s PDF.

Q: Do you offer a White-Label solution?

A: Yes. You can publish your mo-bile magazine in the application under your own brand. PressPad is then the supplier of technology and our brand is nowhere visible.

We are fully transparent to your subscribers. To learn more about White-Label solutions email us or visit our home page and start a chat with a consultant.

On PressPad, the publishers have access to detailed sales data and their magazine down-loads. Possession of such data allows for building funnels and optimising sales processes. Get your magazine to the App Store for free with PressPad.

Tip: Using the tool that shortenslinks (e.g. bit.ly or goo.gl), youcangenerate a shortened link andoptionally download and placethe QR code that leads to thementioned entry or promotionalwebsite.

54

There Are Lots of Great Selling Covers… Make Sure Yours is One of Them!

55In order to help our publishers sell more, today we in-troduce into our offer quite a surprising item: to cur-rent clients we offer a “tuning” of their magazine cov-ers. Sounds atypical? Read on for details.

We did not expect ourselves, that such a service could attract customers. Until, during a conversation with one of the clients, we suggested her several changes to the cover, which could increase sales. It did and she loved the work we did.

56What does the cover sale?

The fact that the cover sales the magazine does not re-quire an explanation. In the “old days” a client saw only covers at a kiosk before he decided to pick up a particu-lar title.

Today the role of a cover at digital kiosks and mobile app stores has hardly changed.

Where does a user see a cover?

On Apple devices and in the Android system a cover and description are the first things that a reader comes in contact with. On the basis of these two elements they make a decision whether to download your or your competition’s magazine.

After downloading a magazine app to his device, a reader browses available issues and decides which ones to buy. Here also nearly the entire decision is made on the basis of a cover.

In the newer iOS systems, for instance iOS 7 in the App Store a reader can simply see only a

cover. This rectangular piece of graphics has to be very solid in order to sell your magazine.

57Is changing a cover the solution to poor sales?

Of course not! There is no single thing which solves all problems. As with free magazine excerpts, a solid de-scription, a good title of a magazine and many other ele-ments, a cover influences client’s decision.

What do you know about covers?

All of our clients are magazine publishers. We have added over a hundred magazine apps to the App Store, which have published over one thousand editions in to-tal.

We know which covers sell better, what should appear on them and in what order. We also have an excellent inhouse designer who understands mobile publishing like no other.

I want a new cover, what should I do?

To order a redesign of your cover, visit presspadapp.com/magazine-cover-redesign and attach your current cover or simply a description of what should appear on the new one.

For current PressPad clients the service costs $29. If you would like to order a redesign of your cover but you are not our client, the service will cost you $99. This is per cover price.

58

How to Use Our Professional, Free Magazine Templates

Get Free Magazine Templates for InDesign

59If you’re thinking about changing the looks of your digital magazine or you’re simply looking for a professional layout as an inspiration – we have some good news for you. Now you can download beautiful magazine tem-plates.

The whole thing have been pre-pared by PressPad designers, we offer you all the templates with

Get Free Magazine Templates for InDesign

the covers for free, and what more – you can use them for commercial purposes.

What’s inside

After downloading the free pack-age to your device, you will get a .zip archive. After unpacking the archive, a new folder called “PressPad_all_templates” will be created. It will contain four cata-logues with magazine templates.

60Attention: You don’t have InDesign? Scroll down, I have something also for you!

Every catalogue contains the fol-lowing:

• Magazine’s Cover• 14+ page layouts• Fonts• Sample images• * .indd files for InDesign• *.idml files for older versions of InDesign• Templates in PDF format• We have also included our 1-page ad. If you like our work, you can run this ad in your maga-zine linking back to http://presspadapp.com

With the help of our tem-plates you will start your magazines in no time.

Types of available templates

PressPad_template_1

This is a template of a bloody red color balanced with white in which the shades of red under-lined with black greatly combine with sans serif headlines font. This template will fit perfectly “manly”-themed, masculine mag-azines.

PressPad_template_1A

Enthusiasts of food will love this template. Created in pastels, bright blues and palette of pinks, bring a feeling of freshness and lightness which perfectly fit pic-tures of meals. All you culinary bloggers – the field is left clear for you! You already have the con-tent, now it’s time for the next step, or rather a jump with our free magazine apps for bloggers offer.

61PressPad_template_2A

This underground template is unusual itself. Shades of yellow lighting up the darkness greatly resonate with serif fonts, build-ing exceptional mood. Lifestyle magazines with this template will certainly arouse interest among the readers, as well as en-courage readership among those undecided.

PressPad_template_2A

This template, thanks to its warm colors, is dedicated mostly to female magazines. The femi-nine touch comes with warm or-anges, yellows and pinks, and guarantees positive reception of the magazine with perfect pres-entation of its content.

To use templates described above just open them in Adobe Inde-sign (if you have older version use .idml file also available in the

package). If you want to down-load your own Indesign template package, like our Facebook fan-page.

Tip #1

You can use any font you have. You can find free fonts in differ-ent formats online. One of the great sources is FontSquirrel which offers fonts available to use in your magazine.

What if I do not have Adobe Indesign

Google Docs Magazine Cover Te-moplate - how to use1. This is your magazine’s inter-active cover template 2. Make a copy onto your Google drive in order to be able to customize it 3. Change the name if you want, and press “OK”.

If you don’t have Adobe Indesign you can also use our free tem-plate package. Every template is available in PDF, so you can see what and how was done by our

62designers. Just for you we have prepared an interactive template for creating covers which you can use with the free Google Docs suite.

Just click the following links Cover Template 1, Cover Tem-plate 2 which will take you to the Google Drawing Document con-taining interactive cover tem-plate. This template will allow you to prepare a professional-looking cover for your magazine.

To be able to use Google Docs Cover Templates, click Menu > File > Make a copy… (Ref. image #2) and press ok (Ref. image #3) Now our template is all yours, and should be visible in your docs folder.

Tip #2

Do you know that you can modi-fy the colors of your chosen digi-tal magazine template? For you new color to be coherent, use free Adobe Kuler. Set big solid color squares for basic colors used in template (i.e. black, red, white)

and rotate the color picker to-wards your favorite colors to get a new, coherent color palette.

If you like our initiative – don’t hesitate to write us a comment on Facebook or Tweet your friends about us so they can also check it out.

63

03MARKETING AND SALES

64

many companies suddenly realized

their position in Google was on the constant decrease and the SEO (Search Engine Optimiza-tion) techniques they used to implement were gradually be-coming less and less effective. On the other hand, those web sites and enterprises whose main focus was on the content were growing and doing better and better.

Is Digital Publishing a Great Content Marketing Technique?

In 2013

65

Is Digital Publishing a Great Content Marketing Technique?

Frankly speaking, I don’t know whether the change was imposed by Google itself (due to the search algorithm alterations), or whether it simply is an outcome of some more general changes in the Internet and the way modern societies view the web. One thing that is certain: the final user benefits from those changes.

Content Rocks Long After it is Released

66Before I took up my PressPad adventure in 2011, I had to do with publishing and content. I used to be the author of a very popular blog in Poland for many years.

During 6 years of running Apple Blog I produced nearly 2 million words which made up a unique con-tent. Today, after almost 2,5 years of closing it down, the blog’s web site is still visited by several thousand readers a month, directly from the search engine list-ing. The unique content actually becomes more and more powerful over time!

I discovered it by chance browsing through the blog’s statistics, and I was shocked by the fact it still was so frequently vis-ited. From that moment on, I use this story to prove how important a unique content is for establishing a long-lasting relation with the read-ers (or customers in case of companies).

Introducing Content Marketing

Digital Publishing as Content Marketing TechniqueCon-tent marketing has always been of interest to market-ers. However, it has never been as powerful as it is today. Only a couple of years ago content strategy was treated as a too long-term operation which couldn’t guarantee quick investment return or measurable results.

67Thanks to the changes mentioned above, content has been on the re-vival for several years now. Companies more and more often decide to invest in unique content and more attention is put to it (certainly, what also proved helpful was the appearance of many analytic tools allowing for an easy measurement of the influence content has got on sales).

Digital Publishing as Part of Content Strategy

The fundamental role of content marketing is for the content to reach the readers interested in it. They can be found in a traditional offline way, via tens of on-line channels, as well as mobile devices.

The growth of the mobile market is great news for content marketers too. Only today almost a half of Facebook interactions come about via mobile devic-

es. Moreover, those who ‘like’ their friends’ holiday photos, at the same time browse through the news and read other information using the same device.

If the companies want to be serious about their content consciousness, their presence on mobile devices should be seen as obligatory.

PressPad collaborates with many companies publishing their own magazines or catalogs on iPads and iPhones as part of their content affords. Thanks to being part of iOS Newsstand they literally get to their readers’ pockets (pun intended).

68

5 Things on How to Improve Your Digital Magazine Sales

69

1. Determine who your model reader is

While you are completing your brand new issue of

your Magazine, you are sure to know who you’re

speaking to, who is the recipient of the content

included in it. It is worth to note this knowl-

edge down and verify it periodically. It

will help you with taking actions the

effect of which will be the op-

timization of the sales fun-

nel, which in turn will feed

through to the number

Are you wondering now how to increase your magazine’s in-come? This article is just for you. We will talk about the best kind of sales out there, which is subscription. What to do in order to make customers more willingly choose subscriptions over single issues? How to reach them? What determines their decision? Read further to find the answers.

70of your magazine’s subscriptions, thus the increase in

income.

In order to determine your model reader, you should answer the following questions:

• Which gender dominates among the subscribers of

your magazine? (Some subject areas are typically male

or female)

• Readers of what age will be the most interested in

your magazine? (You will choose the adequate lan-

guage and promotion methods depending on the age

group)

• Where do your best subscribers live? (It is important

whether your periodical interests global readers or not)

E.g. subject areas related to ways of fighting alligators

will probably engage only residents of Florida.

• What can be the other related interests of your model

reader? (You will determine an accurate and popular

promotional hashtag)

What you’ll write down might turn out to be solely an

assumption but that doesn’t matter, create at least one

model character and give it an identity, e.g. Jonathan

Doe. An example character might look like the follow-

ing:

71

Having created a few of such model “customer characters”,

you will be able to conduct consistent activities aiming to in-

crease the “sales” of the magazine on numerous fields. After

some time, you will see for yourself which character is the

closest to your “most precious” reader.

Name: Jonathan Doe

Gender: male

Age: 35

Location: USA, Florida

Interests: Web design,

hunting alligators

72

Now you know the model subscriber of your magazine, so

check if the Magazine’s front elements, such as the cov-

er and application’s name are appealing enough. In this

case, the design sells by itself , as the cover is an element

which is the visual factor that engages users the most,

and influences their purchase decision. Paradoxically, a

magazine with a high-quality cover can still successfully

distinguish itself in the tangle of poor creations.

3. Verify the price

The knowledge of your model subscriber’s location allows

for a strategic approach to the issue of valuating your

magazine’s application which is to appear in App Store.

iPad and other Apple devices users are loyal customers

accustomed to micropayments. An interesting approach

is setting a fractional price such as $0.99, $1.99 etc. Check

whether this kind of solution works for your magazine.

If, however, you’re already done publishing your first

magazine, move on to your PressPad publisher’s panel

and generate a sales report. Keep the Pareto principle in

mind, which in this case can be interpreted as the follow-

ing:

2. Check the design elements that influence sales

7380% of your income is generated by 20% of customers.

Basing on the report’s content, you will discover the

countries from which you have received the highest

number of subscriptions. Thanks to that, you can draw

the right conclusions, whether or not and in which direc-

tion to modify the price.

4. Promote your magazine for free

Having clearly specified the model readers of your mag-

azine, you can pretty accurately assume which social

network to start your promotional activities in.

Who Uses Facebook - Pew Research Center Study

“A demographic portrait of creators and curators and us-

ers of various social media services” – study by Pew Re-

search Center

Inform your potential subscribers of upcoming issues where communities have already been formed. In or-der to do that, publish entries and answer questions in places like:

• Interest groups in the LinkedIn network.

• Open interest groups on Facebook.

74• Slideshare. Publish samples of your magazine along

with the links to App Store here.

• Quora. Write reviews, and while answering questions,

try to weave such expressions as: “we have brought up/

elaborated on this topic in our magazine…, here is a

link for the interested” in.

• Twitter, Google plus, Facebook pages. Build the sub-

scribers community here. Work out your own efficient

method of communication, however, remember to use 1

constant hashtag, so that the reader can find you eas-

ily using it.

Remember to send a Push Notification to your cur-

rent subscribers after publishing a new issue. Here at

PressPad, we allow you to send up to 5 Push Notifica-

tions for free.

5. Check the sales effects periodically

The subject of increasing the number of subscribers

is closely connected to promotion and marketing, as

well as building a community of subscribers in Social

Media, and also the tuning of each upcoming issue of

your magazine. Because this is a complex activity , it

is worth to approach as a process, and clearly describe

each consecutive action to be taken after a new issue is

75published. Thanks to the formation of such promotional

process, with each publishing cycle, you will be able to

check the impact of introduced innovations and modi-

fications on the number of subscriptions/sales.

Remember to make changes gradually, step by step.

You will notice what works and what doesn’t. Check

the sales results in set intervals of time and introduce

changes periodically.

New issue Social Media Updates

Slide Share Update

Groups on Linkedin/Facebook

Quora harvesting/answering

Your Social Media Pages

New Sample

Push Notification

On PressPad, the publishers have ac-cess to detailed sales data and their maga-zine downloads. Pos-session of such data allows for building funnels and optimis-ing sales processes. Get your magazine to the App Store for free with PressPad.

76

Digital Magazine

FastestWay

Sales ofto in-crease

77

he traditional publish-ing cycle doesn’t really account for the moneti-

zation of back issues. The older issues would be available in the archive on special order, but for most of the time, they will either be ground and turned into new paper or go up in smoke.

How Digital Archive Works

Digital editions are not burdened with storage costs, nor are they an added cost of the mobile ap-plication itself. Bits and bytes will fit anywhere and require no

warehouses, pallets, low humid-ity conditions, or limited sun exposure.

However, publishing back issues is not a natural course of action for the publishers. We see this on a daily basis – when we start working with a new magazine, the publisher uploads only one or two issues to the application. Despite many years worth of his-tory and thousands of valuable articles from the archive, pub-lishing them is not a natural re-sponse and is often omitted.

There are many advantages of digital editions over traditional ones: direct-to-reader sales, access to the global market, or the incom-parably lower costs of publishing. Today we will focus on a feature of digital editions that is less obvious, but impossible to ignore: the ability to monetize back issue archives.

T

78That is one of the reasons why one of our goals in PressPad is to share our knowledge and ex-perience with digital publishing. Therefore, we can wholehearted-ly recommend uploading some, or even all back issues to your iPad magazines.

The Advantages of Selling Back Issues

Having a choice between two competing magazines, the readers’ decision will be some-what facilitated when they see a well-stocked archive in one of them. Knowing that the magazine has been com-ing out for some time creates a sense of security, make a choice easier, and can make for a good sales pitch (“maga-zine published since the year 1995).

Back issues can be an excel-lent basis for upselling – a

1.

2.

3.

•

process known in online and traditional sales can now also be utilized by mobile maga-zine publishers. An ideal read-er buys the latest issue each month, but that is basically where the sales possibilities end. When presented with the possibility, that same reader could possibly purchase one or two older issues in addition to the current one. As a result, the average earnings from a paying reader will be higher, with virtually no additional costs to the publisher.

In order to entice a reader to browse and possibly purchase back issues, their price can be slightly lowered. However, such action entails potential risks, which ought to be con-sidered:

News content doesn’t have much lasting value and will not be interesting to a reader

79

Summing up

Naturally, the archive is built over time by itself. 12 issues will be awaiting new readers after a year of publishing in a news-stand. If, however, a title has been issued for longer and it just got its mobile application, then there’s no reason for the reader to not have access to the back copies.

Publishers using PressPad are not limited in terms of amounts of is-sues published monthly. We encour-age and recommend for all the past and current content to be uploaded to the iPad edition and made avail-able to the users.

•

•

at only a slight discount. The value of such content to the reader can go slightly beyond research and archive, so the archive should be heavily dis-counted in order for it to have sales potential.By contrast, the discount level of time independent content should be considered. En-gaged young women will be very interested in purchasing an older issue of a bridal mag-azine that describes specific issues important to them at that moment. Weddings don’t change over time that dynam-ically in terms of organiza-tion, so content that is created today will most likely also be valid in half a year’s time.A trap: discounting too quick-ly will decrease sales of cur-rent issues. We have seen cases where a publisher of a monthly magazine had de-cided to reduce the price of an older issue by half when the

new one got published. As a re-sult, the profits dropped, since the readers had been waiting un-til the next month to buy an issue at half the price.

80

In 2013, our focus is on helping you sell more via your iPad app. We have plenty of tips lined up for you, but today is different—to-day we are sharing a new fea-ture in PressPad that can help you sell more in no time.

Why are magazine samples important for my sales?

This feature is very powerful: it requires only couple of minutes from you to prepare a sample is-sue in PDF format, but it can be instrumental in helping your readers make decisions.

Use Magazine Sample to Help You Sell More

People like to take a look before they make buying decision and free, quick to download sample is a great way to achieve that.

How do I upload a sample of my issue?

When you sign in to your account and EDIT any issue you have al-ready uploaded, you will see two tabs:

1.Issue details 2.Free sample

When you select Free sample,

When you buy a car, you can do a quick test drive around the block to check whether everything is working right and the ride is smooth. PressPad now gives your readers the same option. You can upload a full (paid) issue, free pre-view/sample, or both!

81you will see an option to upload a sample issue. Once uploaded, your sample will go live immedi-ately OR when you choose to pub-lish main issue.

Good practices for magazine samples

Samples are small magazines that are representations of full issues. You have complete free-dom when it comes to choosing the content of your sample is-sue—select the pages that will sell your full issue best.When you export your PDF file, don’t forget to include a cover and table of contents.Readers will have to download samples to their devices. Make sure PDF file is optimized for fast download.

How does my magazine sam-ple look on a reader’s device?

If you choose to upload a sample

for a particular issue, PressPad will recognize it automatically and will immediately add a new button with the price. An exam-ple is shown below.

If you haven’t already signed up for PressPad, do so today and enjoy your iPad application while growing your sales!1.

2.

3.

82

04HOW-TOS

83

How To Publish a Brilliant Children’s Book on iPadFor several weeks you have been writing to us ever more often, asking about possibilities for publishing a children’s books on iPad. If you are an author of a children’s book or a publisher, from this article you will learn how to publish a book on Apple mobile devices with no knowledge of programming required.

84

Tablets have entered our lives for good. Research conducted by “YouGov” shows, that in Great Britain more and more women become owners of tablets and it is women, who are the main us-ers of tablets, and the number of these devices itself is growing on a global scale (e.g. in the second quarter of 2013 Apple sold nearly 20 million iPads). This is prob-ably one of the fac-tors contributing to the fact, that tablets reach the hands of the youngest users ever more often.

Also, a tablet in-creasingly becomes a toy in the hands of younger and younger kids. We believe, that this excellent tool, which in the hands

of a conscious parent can intro-duce a child to the magical world of fables, at the same time stim-ulates the child’s development and integrates the parent and the child in play. We see in this a huge potential of publications for

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HOW TO ON iPADPUBLISHHOW TO ON iPADPUBLISH

children on iPad. Why? Because using an iPad is as intuitive as using a book. Moreover, a child

can explore stories pre-sented in lovely

pictures by enlarging selected el-ements and moving them in dif-ferent directions with their little fingers.

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Self Publishing on iPad Step by Step

Lovely pictures and beautiful covers make a book more at-tractive. Kids love stories told by colorful pictures and they can jump into them right away dur-ing manual interaction with graphics with parent assist.

According to Carole Leach, who is a writer of children’s books at Di-amond Books “A book is dressed by the cover”. I liked this meta-phor so much, that I have decided to talk to illustrators about chil-dren’s book covers. My conversa-tion partner was Jason Buhagiar who is an illustrator of chil-dren’s books and various publi-cations.

Jason Buhagiar is a Maltese digi-tal illustrator. He has studied and graduated in graphic design, but has chosen the career of an illus-trator instead.

Hi Jason, I am go-ing to ask you a few questions about chil-dren’s publishing and your work. Can you elaborate on what is the main goal of de-

In order to publish a children’s book on iPad divide it into chapters.Add a beautiful cover for each chapter, that will interest a parent, as well as a child.Each chapter is a separate PDF file, which will be offered to the book’s sub-scribers.Send all PDF files containing chapters (or start with the first) to your PressPad account.Set the subscription price for all the chapters (if you wish you may also set a separate price for each chapter).We will publish your book chapter af-ter chapter in the App Store as a native application, which every iPad or iPhone user will be able to buy directly from his/her device.Here is the best part: you will not invest a single cent in your app, we will make it ready for free.

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signing a cover pic-ture for children’s book?

Jason: The book cover needs unique creativity in ways to sur-prise the audience and also need to be attractive and excite the reader about the book. The book cover should depict the spirit of the book. This is done with im-ages, color, and text. The images may be an illustration or photo-graph that shows a main compo-nent of the story. The graphics might show the main characters, an important object, or an event

from the story. When looking for a book cover idea, the designer may want to look at successful book covers of books in the same genre. However, designers should avoid copying other book covers. Instead, they should consider how they can improve upon existing covers and make them unique to the book.

Are there any special tech-niques illustrators use while working on children’s book?

Jason: The illustration and text should reflect the mood of the book. For example, the font for the text of a children’s book is of-ten rounded and playful. Classic literature often uses traditional serif fonts on the book covers. Color is an important decision when creating ideas for book cov-ers. Even if the prospective read-ers are not aware of its influ-

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ence, color affects our attitudes towards objects. The covers for children’s books are typically of bright, cheery colors that would be attractive to children.Does a cover should catch kids’ or parents’ attention?

Jason: We are told, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Well, children do it all the time. A child’s first impression of a book is usually shaped by the pictures. So involve children in choosing books with wonderful, eye-catching illus-trations that beg to be explored. Conduct “picture walks” through books by leafing through the pages to look at the images and discussing what you see before you read. That way, the illustra-tions will draw in even the most reluctant reader.

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With efficient ASO (App Store Optimization) of your app, you can increase the sell of magazine app in App Store. It is important to give proper and deep concern to the de-scription, which is supposed to be appealing, clear and easy to find by visitors.There are some important tips how to write an appropri-ate and vivid app description for the App Store:

Pay attention to the first few lines

The first lines are the most important for your app to feed.

Those first lines are a great advantage to make informative

and concise description. This also consequence in good first

impression which make your audience press ‘more’ button.

We mare it so crucial since first lines are visible on iPad or

iPhone screen along with app icon. Include the most impor-

tant features of you app in these lines, like it’s key gimmick

that make it so appealing and useful to the readers. Any

How to Write an Effective Magazine App Descrip-tion?

90award winning fact or good review is also worth to mention-

ing. Make sure that the top message is catchy enough to

persuade the users to click the “more” button to read full de-

scription.

Make the app social by including links of your profile

It is reasonable to give the link of your website, blog, Fa-

cebook Page, YouTube Channel or Twitter. Just choose the

most valuable place on the web, where user can get more

information about your activity. Never include extended

URL’s.

Make your international markets local

By this technique you can reach globally with your app.

Translate your description to different languages and pro-

mote download by various users. Translation must be stand-

ard and clear for better feeding.

Mention the reviews from famous persons or web-sites

In present days it means a lot. Visitors always search for

review before take any action. They always pay much at-

tention to family and friends referral. Put some important

91review about your magazines in description. People always

search for reviews and trust in blogs. Positive review from

trusted link will give your app more downloads so add the

user positive review, testimonials or accolades in the end.

Include every feature of app next to its benefit but omit unnecessary content

Don’t make your description with lots of unusual content

and overflooded keywords, always look for the quality not

quantity. To keep the audience read your apps screenshots,

you need to explain the actual content, most relevant fea-

ture and essential information of your apps. Include star rat-

ings, special app features and press mention.

Underpromise – Overdeliver

Explain the actual benefits of the feature and don’t over-

promise. Best policy is to keep the benefit to the point and

make it easy for understand. Always give priority to the

visitor’s perspective because they need to experience the

smoothest user’s yourney and solid structure of benefits.

Attractive bonuses

You can offer cool bonuses to the users of your apps, prior

92to download that. Sometimes it is worth to publish one teas-

er issue for free to let the ipad users check how your maga-

zine looks like on their device.

Correct form

Never use extra white space between texts and pay atten-

tion to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. Don’t use spe-

cial signs as ★ or ♣ as now it is not allowed in AppStore. Be

careful with the technical language and don’t use it if unnec-

essary.

Define the audience

Choose the category of your app wisely and stick to it. It

could be annoying for users to receive too much updates. In

each category there is a top list which is the first thing us-

ers will see while browsing. It is also connected with the age

of users who can download your magazine app. They will re-

ceive the notification to confirm the age before download-

ing.

Hope that all those tips help you to make really efficient

magazine app description. If you still don’t have one or need

a piece of advice, feel free to ask PressPad for support.

Good luck with getting top ten.

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How to

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If you are a comic strip author and your creations don’t end up in the drawer, consider reaching millions of Apple mobile device users. You can’t lose on publishing your works on the iPad, especially when we do it for you for free now here at PressPad.

If you create your own online comic and you’re won-dering how to reach Apple device users with it or you just want to get your comic known at App Store, this article will give you some tips on what to focus your at-tention on while creating a PDF file which we will then process at PressPad into a native iPad application, free of charge.

Reading digital magazines and comic strips on the iPad is a very pleasant experience. You can zoom in on each page as much as you like, relishing the graphic details. It is an experience impossible to recreate with tradi-tional printed issues. In order for your digital comic strip to get positive reception from App Store users, re-member to pay attention to:

95• Graphics quality• Text legibility• Possibly small size of the PDF file

In order to achieve that, follow the steps below.

1. Do not flatten text

If you create your comic by hand, you can skip to section 3 right away. If you create your comic with graph-ics software, do not flatten text when exporting your strips to PDF format. Flattened text becomes an ordinary bitmap, creating a bigger re-sulting file. With bigger zooms, individual pixels are noticeable, which is also called the stairs effect.

2. Embed all fonts

Go to “Advanced” tab and set 0% at Fonts > Subset fonts when percent of characters used is less than:”

96Remember to embed font files to the PDF being created. It is especially important if you use non-standard fonts in your digital comic. It is just as you’re suspecting, if the PDF reader software (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Read-er) cannot find the fonts used in the comic, it will use the most matching ones available on the given device, which is not always a good idea.

You can also convert fonts to be included in the pre-pared PDF file to curves but it is not advised to do so because of the lower quality of typography, noticeable especially on devices with lower resolution displays. If you don’t have the font file or you don’t know where to find it, try to look for a matching one on the Font Squirre website. There you will find free fonts for com-mercial use.

3. Downsample images

Your comic strips consist mainly of graphics and pho-tos being a background for illustrating stories told, or scanned drawings. Keep in mind that the more high-resolution graphics, the bigger the size of your strip’s PDF file, and the more megabytes to download, the longer the time required to download the file.

Even fractions of a second matter here. Try to recall yourself browsing the last 10 web pages, probably a

97part of them didn’t even load completely. Now you see that download time plays a major role, so try to keep your output PDF files below 50 MB. In order for that, make sure to reduce the resolution of image files used to at least 150 ppi.

The PPI unit defines the image resolution in pixels per square inch. The higher the PPI val-ue, the bigger the resolution, thus bigger the image file size.

In order to scale down all images in the PDF file being created, follow the steps below:

From the top bar menu, in Photoshop navigate to the menu Image > Image Size…. In the new window, change the unit to “ppi” and input the correct value (e.g. 150),

98and then confirm by clicking the “ok” button.

Regarding inDesign select “File > Export” from the top bar menu, then set “Adobe PDF Preset [High Quality Print]“.

Now, go to “Compression” tab and set the “Colour Images” and “Grayscale Images” for “Bicubic Downsampling to” 150 pixels per inch for images above 225ppi.

99Select Colour Conversion

In the “Output” Tab, set “Colour Conversion” to “Convert to Destina-

tion (Preserve Numbers)” and set “Destinatinon” as sRGB.

Done. Now you can export your digital comic strip to a PDF file and then send it to us via your free PressPad account. After a few days, your comic strip will find its way to App Store.

We’ll also offer an InDesign plug-in for interested pub-lishers, which enables them to publish new issues di-rectly from Adobe software to their iPad and iPhone application.

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4. Do not embed thumbs

inDdesign: From the top bar menu, navigate to the “export” then

select PDF print. Uncheck the “Embed Page Thumbnails” option in

the Options field of the “General” tab.

The limitation to the size of your comic’s output PDF file comes solely from the time which the user is willing to invest into downloading the application. Your ap-plication could be as big as even 1GB but would you like to download a comic strip of such size?

In order to save as much space as possible, get rid of all unnecessary additional options which the majority of

101PDF file generators have turned on by default. One of such options is the file content preview image. It can comprise quite a big part of the output file so if you’re using Adobe inDesign, you can safely turn this option off.

Don’t worry if you’re not good with technical stuff. Should the need arise, we will optimize your PDF for you and we’ll even correct your comic’s cover . However, you will then have to wait a little bit long-er for your native comic application in App Store, so it’s worth working on the details yourself.

A comic is an incredible form of message, often cre-ated by enthusiasts from all corners of the world. If you want to create your own comic, you don’t have to pos-sess amazing drawing skills. What counts is:

• Engaging story

• Expressive character

• Interesting background

• Enjoyable digital issue, ensuring high quality experience

You can also use tools for designing comic strips avail-able online.

102Create your own comic with Marvel Heroes

Marvel shares a simple tool on its website, with which one can create own short stories (comic strips) or whole notebooks (comic

books) featuring the heroes of the cult Marvel comic books.

Pixton

It is an extensive editor for designing comic strips. You can use a large set of premade characters. What’s more, you even have

control over the characters’ facial expressions.

If you are a com-ic strip creator, you definitely need to contact us. We will pub-lish your comic (for free) as a na-tive iPad ap-plication which your readers will be able to download and buy all over the world.

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How Does the System of Tiers Work in Apple?

The reason for that is very sim-ple. Apple charges from 30 to 40 per cent of a commission from each purchase of an app.It is understandable since the AppStore is a professional selling platform. In order to avoid very small sums of money in finan-cial settlement a system of tiers has been introduced. A developer (app author) has the right to set-tle the price for their product by choosing the right tier. There are almost 100 tiers. For instance, Tier 1 is equal to $0.99 but also €0.89. The price of a tier for each

Have you ever wondered why you nev-er come across app costing 10 cents in the AppStore?

country is settled according to the table.

How does it work in PressPad?

After registering in the PressPad and uploading the magazine’s PDF file a proper tier should be chosen. The selected sum of money is the price for the final user. We advise to study the table with tier prices in advance.To make it more simple we pro-vided in our panel tier rate in dollars. However, one should re-member that the AppStore cal-

104

culates the sums according to the mandatory currency. For instance, if the price of an app magazine is 0.99 US for AppStore users regis-tered in USA, the same magazine will cost 0.89 EUR for the ones in Europe.

Can I change the price of a maga-zine?

You can settle the price for each magazine separately. It is especially

useful while pub-lishing special edi-tions or archive issues. In such a case you can set a specific price of is-sue you choose or even make it avail-able for free.

Alternative Tiers

At the end of June Apple introduced alternative tiers.

Check the table below. They are in-troduced to inify prices for App-Store users from USA, Canada, Aus-tralia and Europe. The only change is in Euro zone. Alternative Tier 1 = €0,99 = $0.99.We realise that could be a bit com-plicated. Thats why we are here to help. If you have any questions leave the comment or write us here.

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Couponpassword:PressPad30

Use this code to register for 30 minutes free consultation

from PressPad experts

We'll call you back

Call at our US toll free number +1 (888) 712-0331

say the code and left your contact number.

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What Happens when You Order a Free iPad App with PressPadSince we have changed our model of cooperation with magazines, we receive more orders for iPad applications than ever before. That is why we are going to devote one blog article to explain the whole process of ordering of iPad magazine: what happens at the backstage, what we are doing for the publishers, why and where is Apple en-gaged and what happens when an application with your magazine is ready in the App Store.

107In PressPad, every publisher who decides to cooperate with us, receives an Apple iOS News-stand application. Every maga-zine receives one application, so if you have three different mag-

azines, you will

receive three different applica-tions. Win-win.

Thanks to the latest changes in the model of settling accounts with clients, these applications are free of charge for the pub-lisher. There are also no pay-ments for keeping the appli-cation in the App Store, for its development or sales interests.

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1. Ordering an iPad maga-zine with PressPad

To order an application, the pub-lisher has to:

Create a free account in Press-Pad system. The account is created via a web browser and it could be done by any person in the publishing house, since there is no special knowledge required and the only thing needed is an internet browser.Upload at least one magazine in PDF format and determine its price.Send the order – In the last stage, the publisher fills in the name of their magazine, its description, chooses the sub-scription price for the readers and sends the order to Press-Pad.

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2.

3.

2. Preparation stage in PressPad

When all information from the publisher is sent to us, we pro-ceed to building their applica-tion for iPad and iPhone. We use a well-known and reliable template that we have developed over last 2 years, and that ena-bles us to proceed to the next stage of the process after a cou-ple of minutes.

In this stage, we can still contact the publisher in order to discuss some doubts, complete the de-scription, etc..

The publisher can also upload more editions of their magazine into the panel. Uploading archive editions is a very good sales tech-nique. There is no limit for the publishers as to the number of editions, so there is nothing that could prevent them from upload-

109

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ing all editions ever published into the panel.

3. Submitting the magazine into review in the App Store

When the application is ready, we submit it to Apple App Store. If the publisher did it on their own, they would need an Apple devel-oper account ($99/year), some knowledge on the submission process, IT and much time.

Thanks to the cooperation with PressPad, the publisher does not have to worry about anything connected with Apple. We submit several dozens of magazines into App Store every week. It affects two things:

An important remark: Apple does a technical review of the software, it does not revise the content of the magazine. The pro-cess is uniform for magazines, games, utilities, books, and any other software that is submitted to App Store.

4. The application is ready for sale

When Apple finishes the review, the magazine’s application be-comes available in the App Store. Since it is us that are in-formed by Apple about that fact, we pass the information to the publisher.

We know exactly which of the dead-ends are to be avoided and what to do in order to go through App Store review without hiccupsSince we submit so many ap-plications to the store, Ap-

ple pays more attention to us and approves our applications more quickly. We still remem-ber that the first application that we submitted was wait-ing for review for more than a month. Today, it takes a couple of days maximum!

110The publisher gets a link to their application and a set of several pieces of advice that will help them to inform their readers about the new form of the maga-zine and to start with the sales.

From this moment, the appli-cation is available in App Store and the readers all over the world can download and buy single editions as well as sub-scriptions.

5. Monthly settling of accounts

After the 10th day of each month, sales reports are auto-matically generated in publish-er’s panel. On that basis, we pay the publishers the money earned by their magazines.

In the new model of cooperation between publishers and Press-Pad, we keep the first 199 dollars earned by the application each month. Thanks to that fact, the publishers avoid payments for using PressPad and the payment process becomes much simpler.

6. Why we pay as much at-tention to the sales of the magazines as the publishers do? Most importantly, if the mag-azine does not earn the 199 dollars in a particular month,

111PressPad does not require that the publisher to supplement the due amount. We do it for three reasons:

Thanks to this simple operation, we care for good sales of each magazines as much as if it was our own application.. That is why we write this blog, share our knowledge about digital publishing and answer all questions of the publishers.

Start your iPad magazine app with PressPad for free »

8%

6%

4%

2%

To simplify the payment process and be more transparentWe calculated that such model is rentable for usAnd, this is a reason for us to have an addition-al motivating factor to increase the sales of our magazines.

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05THE ERA OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING

113

The Washington Post Bought by Jeff “in 20 Years, Print Newspapers Will Be All but Extinct” Bezos

Facts first: Jeff Bezos, charis-matic CEO of the internet giant Amazon, buys The Washington Post. Interesting side of that transaction is how media pun-dits covers that story for past two days. They focus mainly on Bezos buying The Post with his own money, and tried to guess what a man like him can do with a paper like The Post.

We were very happy to see a piece by Cade Metz on Wired to-day about Bezos/The Washing-ton Post though. Wired is not

Jeff Bezos Bought The Washington Post. But So Did Amazon

involved in newspaper business and they tend to see things from a different angle. And Metz clearly saw that although Bezos bought The Post with his own money, the only reason for that is to merge it with Amazon from the outside.

Read the whole story on wired.com

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Reasons Why Self Mobile

Publishing Tool is the Best Way to Get Your Magazine Published on iPad

There are small and medium publishing houses which still are in two minds whether to join digital revolution or not. Some are sceptical about publishing magazines and newspapers on tablets and claim that it still is an expensive and painstaking job. However, the fact is that using such tools as PressPad it is really easy to have your magazine app available on mobile devices.

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1151. Time saver

By using PressPad or other self mobile publishing tool, setting up the magazine app available in App Store takes less than a week. The only thing a publisher needs is the content in a PDF file. Simply upload it to PressPad panel and we take care of the rest. You don t have to worry about encoding, design, or further edition of the app (bug-fixing or updating).

2. Money saver

The fact that the app is programmed by an exter-nal company, allows to cut the app production costs, such as employing addi-tional workforce. Moreo-

ver, we all know that printing costs constitute the big-gest part of a publishing budget. Hence, some publishing houses resign from printed versions of their magazines after starting on the mobile market.

3. Less work, more independence

After setting up an account on PressPad you will quick-ly realize that it is very easy to manage. Once your app is set up, uploading the following issues of your maga-zine will take, depending on your Internet connection, from a few seconds until one minute. You are the one

116to decide when to publish a new issue of your maga-zine. You have got the possibility of sending informa-tion about a new issue to your subscribers anytime you want. We recommend sending all the notifications in the evenings when most users switch their tablets on.

4. Global reach of your content

presspad reaches globeThe magazines avail-able in App Store immediately gain glob-al ground. Every day we observe that our customer s publications are downloaded worldwide. No matter where your office is located you have got the chance to find readers all around the world.

5. Additional sales channel

App Store is an effective and successful sales and dis-tribution platform. On May 16, 2013 we could observe a record-breaking number of 50 billion apps downloaded from App Store. Great marketing strategies Apple ap-plies to its products, works for promotion your own ap-plications too.

6. Closer bond between a publisher and a reader

Digital sale has got a great advantage facilitating com-munication between a customer and a seller. Using so-

117cial media such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or In-stagram to build up a dialogue with your readers is essential. Moreover, PressPad allows for direct commu-nication with your old subscribers via Notifications. You will find more on this tool here.

7. Easy sales monitoring

The tool allowing you to publish your content on mobile devices by yourself also serves for constant observation of the readers behaviour, the num-ber of the downloaded apps, particular issues sale, as well as the days when your readers are most active. This knowledge may be helpful in your prod-uct development. You will find more on reports delivered to you by PressPad here.

8. Digital publishing is environmentally friendly

Printing is the most expensive part of magazine and newspaper publishing. Thanks to mobile publishing you can cut printing costs and avoid surplus. Additionally, it is now common knowledge that natural sources for pa-per production are scarce and that the threads connect-ed with logging are serious. Opting for digital publish-ing you become eco-friendly.

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9. Be the forerunner

Don t wait until your competition starts gaining prof-its from having their magazine app first. And even if it already is so, remember you can have your magazine available in Apple Store within several days.

10. Small and medium publisher-friendly

If you look carefully at the above, you will surely notice that self mo-bile publishing tool is a perfect solu-tion for small and medium publishing houses. It is essential for them to act effectively and economically at the same time. It is them who need a user-friendly tool which will make their work easier and allow to develop their product. If you know what we are talking about, we are looking forward to collaborating with your magazine.

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If in 2011 I had known what I know today, I probably wouldn’t have decided to start PressPad. This is a brief answer to the question raised in the title. Today we love what we do with mobile publishing but the begin-nings have not been easy. And this is the stage with which a publisher who wants to build their own tool for publishing magazines on mobile devices has to deal.

What It Would Be Like to Build a System for Publishing Magazines on Mobile Devices

120I get this question a lot. How much will it cost? Is it worth doing? I’ve identified four areas that in all probability may create great difficulty for everyone who is trying to build and launch one’s own magazine app.

Assumption

I assume that a publisher who makes an attempt to build their own tool has or is able to buy certain IT competences. Such a small assumption virtually ex-cludes from the very start writing the sys-tem on one’s own but let’s forget about it for a second and let’s see what would happen if the hypothetical publisher was an IT company at the same time.

A painful process of knowledge gaining

As I’ve written at the beginning, if I went back in time 2 years, I would say a lot of in-teresting things to myself. One of them is that It’s impossible to plan, implement and maintain an IT system according to one’s plan. Me and my co-founders had previously had out-sourcing companies and we knew that planning in the case of IT is very tough. However, building something in the situation when we were clients turned out to be even more difficult. Two biggest traps that we en-countered were re-evaluating specifications and get-

Aggregation

Engagement

121ting ourselves into a dead ends once every coupe of days.

As for the former trap, its symptom is that we’re planning a perfect product in the situation in

which we should plan the one possible to be implemented with the current budg-

et/team. The latter trap depends on the team’s abilities – even we, despite having

years of experience in IT, wasted weeks on features that clients didn’t even

use.

Unpredictable costs and time

Estimating time of the project and indispensable

budget stems directly from the previously mentioned para-graph. We’ve spent half a million

dollars to build PressPad. Luck-ily, our R&D is situated in

Cracow, Poland, in the country in which em-ployment costs are in-comparably lower than

in the West or in America (it’s owing to the costs of living, not because we pay unrea-

sonably low fees).

PDF

Multimedia

More...

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We estimate that building PressPad in America would cost around 3 million dollars so far.The second trap is time. In this case location isn’t im-portant any more. We’ve been on the market for a bit more than two years but we can see that 10 months of this period were wasted. Of course, we haven’t been able to make such an observation until now and there’s nothing left for us but to cope with it and op-timise processes in the future.

Learning through iteration

One of the most interesting things that have hap-pened to us during the last two years is connected with iterations. We’ve learned that it is indispensa-ble to present the product in the A version in order to

We are extremely lucky to live in Cracow, Poland.

Your R&D

123get some feedback and start working on the B version. And so it goes on and on.

When we started building a publishing platform we spent months before we presented the 1.0 version to the world. We found out almost right away that more than half of all those months were spent on features nobody needed. The process has been repeated up to now and the only difference is that the periods are getting shorter and we’re wasting less and less time.

Bonus: technology doesn’t matter

As a bonus to all the thoughts I’ll add one very important thing: after 2 years with PressPad we’ve learned that success is often determined by content, the way of reaching the client, or communication. It is very rarely due to technol-ogy.

Conclusions

I do realise that I’m in no position to give such a state-ment but I’m still going to say it: don’t waste your time on building systems that can be bought for $199 per month. Publish your magazine as soon as possible and devote the time and money you’re going to get back to reaching clients and marketing your mobile app.

contentthe way

of reachingclients

& communication

Paul NowakCEO PressPad

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When they are reading?

Tablet usages by time in a day with % of users are as follows:5% – from 2 to 5 am18% – from 5 to 8 am33% – from 8 to 11 am34% – from 11 to 2 pm59% – from 5 to 8 pm53% – from 8 to 11 pm22% – from 11pm to 2 am

Tablet User’s Hab-its. Discover More About E-readers.

What they are reading?

Users read and access various contents through their tablet. 71% users like to read from own tablet rather than other devices. 41% use internet in tablet for reading. Users use it for reading e-books magazine newspaper, buying apps, shopping, watching movies and many more.

People always give priority to the device that is easy to han-dle and convenient for use. Tablet is a one piece mobile com-puter with touch screen aid to use by their users easily and can watch and read any information conveniently. Tablet ship-ment grows 142.4% in first quarter of 2013 worldwide. About 90 million people will use tablet within 2014 and 58% is hap-py and very satisfied during reading from own tablet.Here are some numbers that will help you better understand e-readers behaviour.

12541% – weather forecast51% – magazines41% – newspapers51% – e-books54% – watch video58% – watch video and music.54% – use different apps50% – access social network or communication

What is the percent of men and women among tablet us-ers?

51% female49% male23% kids prefere reading on mobile device to traditional print.

What age they are?

In second Quarter of 2011 a de-mographic evaluation among e-reader in tablets are as follows:7% – between ages 13-1710% – between ages 18-2418% – between ages 25-3414% – between ages 35 – 4421% – between ages 45 – 5430% – 55 years and older

Which magazines are the most popular on tablets?

Esquire, Men’s Journal, Sports illustrated, Time, Bloomberg

Business Week, Fortune.

How much time they spend on reading?

85% spent average 1.6 hours daily during watching TV and tablet, and 66% spent 1.2 hours during watching TV simultane-ously with PC and Tablet.

30% users spent most of the time with tablet and 74% use to read daily with their tablet, av-eraging 14 hours per week.

Weekly usage percentage in hours is as follows15% – 1 to 3 hours weekly17% – 4 to 6 hours weekly20% – 7 to 10 hours weekly30% – 11 to 20 hours weekly11% – 21 to 30 hours weekly7% – 30+ hours weeklyAverage 13.9 hours weekly

Conclusion:Tablet is the leisure time de-vice. It is worth noting that kids and people in middle age are the most promised e-magazines targets. Also as we see a lot of tablet owners use many device simultaneously. This is very im-portant to make the magazine app well designed which helps to gain user’s full attention.

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