Stitch Craft Create digital magazines

We hit another milestone at F+W Media International this week with the launch of our first digital magazine in the IOS app store. We’d already planned for some time to do a print bookazine and this is about to go on sale in a WHSmith near you. The print magazine builds on continued originally published in the US, we’ve taken that and made a few changes for the UK to publish ourselves.

We don’t have big aspirations to be print magazine publishers, but providing the numbers work it’d be great to keep publishing the occasional bookazine/special edition in this way. What’ll be really interesting to see is how this helps build our brand, profile and audience. Both the print and digital version promote our Stitch Craft Create business, our books and our authors.

The digital magazines (there are two, a preview and a paid £3.99 magazine) is a really interesting test and it’ll be fascinating to see the downloads and in-app purchase stats come together. If we can make this work, I’d love to see us doing a digital magazine with more frequency. Watch this space!

It’s great to have added a new channel, or two, to our business and to be reaching our audience in new ways. Also great to see us building our Stitch Craft Create brand further on the physical and digital newstand. The process of creating this has given the team new skills, and next time we’ll be a little faster and be able to add more features into the content.

Foap is a Swedish start-up that enables you to sell pictures you take on your iphone, with Android coming soon. Your images have to be approved by the Foap team, but once they are you will make 50% of the revenue generated from each sale. Featured in Wired magazine as start-up of the week, Foap is taking on established stock photography sites in Getty, istock and Shutterstock with a unique twist. Pictures are sold at $10 each (£6.40).

For the iphoneographer, this is a great idea to make money out of your pictures. For business and bloggers, Foap provides access to original photography with a huge variety of images, styling and settings. It’s a simple license and commercial model and a great alternative to traditional stock sources.

I loved the idea of this business. It’s a simple model, technology enabled and uses the crowd to the benefit of all. You can only see there being growing demand for cost effective imagery like this, and in future I’m sure there’s scope for video to be added to the offer.

The photography industry as a whole is under transition. The impact of digital, the fast growth of companies such as Instagram and the improvements in camera technology allowing all of us to take great pictures have impacted the traditional photography world. No doubt it has impacted on the professional photographer who can no longer generate the same value out of the licensing of images that they were able to just a few years ago. The Foap founders talk about the smartphone potential as ‘democratising photography’ which is an exciting concept to consider.

Stock photography sites had already changed this industry, Foap takes it a step further and good luck to them.

I attended the Futurebook Innovation Workshop today. The half day conference featured panels, speakers and Q&A focused on inspirational projects being created by the leaders of digital publishing in the UK.

Refreshingly, this wasn’t a series of lectures. It moved beyond the ‘change your business model or perish’ preaching that we’ve heard many times and I think the industry (in the UK at least) now understands. Instead, we were treated to a host of projects, ideas and new thinking from app developers and digital publishers.

If the workshop was lacking in anything, it would have been been good to hear more metrics attached to the ideas that were shared. There were some glossy and, presumably, costly projects on show and I for one was left wondering who was actually making money here. Also, the extent of the programme was such that there was little to no time for questions after each session. Nonetheless, from short format ebooks to multimedia storytelling, augmented reality poetry (yes, really) to the new Unbound crowdfunded imprint, the day was packed with ideas.

It was the kind of conference that inspired you to think as much as giving a set of actions to apply when back in the office. With that in mind, these are my first areas of inspiration from the day:

- Test more in the field of long form journalism/short ebooks at lower price points.
- Think more about enhancement with audio. We talk much more about video than audio, but there were two sessions that covered sound.
- Test the use of QR codes in books as a tool to better engage the reader and take them into a further enhancement of the experience online.
- Form strong partnerships, Innovate and focus on quality for success in enhanced and app projects.
- Resist the pressure for the race to the bottom on price, particularly when it comes to the 59p app.
- There is plenty of great product out there, successful marketing is key.
- Keep pushing for greater & deeper analytics. Invest in the resource to apply knowledge from this data.

That’s only a flavour really, plenty of other food for thought from the projects presented. I hope that those who presented will be brave enough, and allowed, to share more sales data in time.

Three news items this week had me thinking about our language as we see ongoing convergence in media:

Apple announced the newsstand app, which replicates the ibooks model for magazines. This continues steps Apple have taken towards serving the magazine industry with the launch of subscription services earlier in the year.

The FT launched their new web app. I happen to think this is particularly impressive and really demonstrates what can be achieved through the web, without the need to for the app store.

I listened to the Guardian tech podcast which, in a wider discussion on gaming, raised a question over convergence of gaming devices with smartphones and for how long these would remain separate.

Despite the technology shift, we’re still in a world where we’re talking about books, magazines and games separately. This is understandable as the distinctions are well understood by consumers and industries alike. I just wonder how long it will be, if ever, until these definitions completely disappear. Gaming aside, clearly the difference between books and magazines is blurring in the digital environment.

An interesting launch for Apple would have been an app that doesn’t perpetuate this language and addressed the convergence in media head on: Perhaps having just iRead would be more fitting than separating iBooks and Newsstand?

Image courtesy of Apple.

These are the iPad apps I use most frequently & wouldn’t be without:

Evernote: A great tool that I use for managing all my to dos, note reminder & meeting notes, agendas and speaking notes. Syncs with my iPhone & PC desktop.

Dropbox: invaluable to making sure I have all my documents on the go. Second only to Evernote for helping my productivity. Also iPhone & PC desktop sync.

Instapaper: Clip and read later, great using in conjunction with Twitter…

Twitter: Although I use Flipboard, I’m really enjoying the new Twitter interface and the easy access to tweeter links & profiles.

iBooks: For reading books & PDFs. Preferred to reading on the Kindle app.

Popplet: The iPad was made for this kind of app. Great for thinking & brainstorming & soon to be able to share online.

BBC News: I really like the BBC interface and this is my first port of call for news & sport.