Initial Thoughts and Ramblings

After our trip to Aus we (my husband Mick and I) have finally found some time to sit down and talk about the next iPhone ebook to produce.

I wanted to do a story that was animal based as a lot of my work has been humans. And I also wanted to make it a simple, worldwide story. While "The Night Before Christmas" is great it is quite traditional and the illustrations were partly dictated by that.


So we have chosen "The Three Little Pigs".

The story is going to remain basically the same but I want to rewrite it to make it more funny and up to date. This is a bit of a new area for me as I usually just illustrate and I am notoriously bad at grammar and spelling. We shall see how it goes. Might be enlisting the help of many SCBWI friends.

Some things I learnt from the last book are:

There needs to be more interactivity: When we showed kids they kept trying to press things and make things move.

Splitting the words and pictures: We found that kids would concentrate on the pictures or words but couldn't do both at once. But splitting the text wouldn't have worked with Night Before Christmas as it is a very long text.

Have Translations: We wanted to do this with the last book but just ran out of time. But we still had a lot of sales in non-english speaking countries. So this time we want to take advantage of that.

Start Marketing Earlier: OK this is pretty obvious to us now, the marketing needs to be all ready to go when the book is released. Duh. App review sites take about 4 weeks and by that time the listing has gone down on iTunes.

Lite Version: We copped a fair bit of slack about our Lite version. People thought it was too much like an ad and wanted more for free. With this book we are going to try and make a Lite version that is a more stand alone product but still encouraging people to buy the full version.


Those are the initial thoughts- More tomorrow on style.