Questions about publishing GS interactive books...

sinbot

Does anyone have any experience with using GS to make interactive books? Can you publish GS apps to iBooks?? Or would you just publish it to the App Store under the best category you can match it to?

adent42

So it depends on how much work you want to do and how much you think things will sell on a given store.

AFAIK, iBooks uses the ePub3 format which is a sub/super(?) set of HTML. So there's a chance the HTML5 engine will work, but I'm not sure, because we render everything inside of an WebGL context, which makes book like features like indexing, ToC, selectable text not work.

Knowing that I'd propose two possibilities:

• Give your content a full interactive treatment and release it as an app.
• Author your book in iBook and see if you can embed interactive elements from GameSalad's HTML5 engine into it.

Good Luck!

RedRobo

We published a couple of interactive children's books on iOS and G Play, we published them as apps in the children's category:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.britanimation.aspaceadventure&hl=en-GB

Not sure if your books are for adults or children. If they're for children please be aware that it's an INCREDIBLY competitive market. We unfortunately had hardly any downloads on both iOS and Android. Now it could be that our product was not good enough but everyone that did try it liked it. It's just that unless you can climb the charts no-one discovers your app and you don't climb the chart unless people discover your app! You would need to have a huge marketing budget to just become visible.

The main thing that I learned from this experience is to find a category where there is not a huge amount of competition and push to be the absolute best in that particular genre. I've done that with subsequent apps and had more success.

Sorry if this was all a bit negative and I hope you have a better experience than us but just wanted to pass on what we learnt.

Good luck.

sinbot

No this is the type of input I was hoping for and very insightful. I'm curious, what research did you do to determine which category had less competition? And, what were your findings?> @strag said:

We published a couple of interactive children's books on iOS and G Play, we published them as apps in the children's category:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.britanimation.aspaceadventure&hl=en-GB

Not sure if your books are for adults or children. If they're for children please be aware that it's an INCREDIBLY competitive market. We unfortunately had hardly any downloads on both iOS and Android. Now it could be that our product was not good enough but everyone that did try it liked it. It's just that unless you can climb the charts no-one discovers your app and you don't climb the chart unless people discover your app! You would need to have a huge marketing budget to just become visible.

The main thing that I learned from this experience is to find a category where there is not a huge amount of competition and push to be the absolute best in that particular genre. I've done that with subsequent apps and had more success.

Sorry if this was all a bit negative and I hope you have a better experience than us but just wanted to pass on what we learnt.

Good luck.

RedRobo

I actually did no research to begin with but just kept throwing apps out there.
But since then I will basically just do a search on the app store for the genre I'm making and see how many rivals there are and how good they are. If you think you can be the best in that genre it's probably worth doing.

This document has some good advice (sorry GameSalad people, it's from a rival game engine) but it has some great tips before you begin building.