Authors,
especially those who are self-publishing, need to be aware of the huge,
untapped market that the tech industry is frothing at the mouth for: the mobile
phone consumer.
The juicy
information below shows that from the commuter in London to the infrastructure-poor
teen in South Africa everyone is using mobile phones more and more for accessing
the internet – sharing, browsing and reading. From buying life insurance to
banking to watching videos, cellphones are becoming relevant in a big way, especially
on a continent where the middle class market is expected to grow and the ratio
of phones to people is so high. (In SA there are 45m active cell phones for
a population of 49m).
This is why
you can find our books on Bookly, a mobile phone reader app on the South
African based Mxit. Now, this is more than just being able to read your books
on your smartphone. Apps like Bookly allow non-smartphones to buy and consume
books on this one platform (Amazon apps, for example, don’t allow buying).
So how do I
get onto a mobile platform?
Step 1:
Start with the smartphone market and make sure that your book is available as
an eBook on platforms like Kobo and Amazon. Android and iOS users can download
reader apps for free and read their books this way on their cellphones when
they’re commuting or waiting in line somewhere.
Step 2:
Build your reputation among the under-served market. Find a platform like we
did with Bookly that speaks to your genre. Worldreader is focused on getting books out to
underprivileged learners, and keen to make contact with book donors.
Get into
contact with the spokesperson for the platform. Often these technologies are
still relatively new and the creators are keen on adding content to showcase
all the features and abilities of their apps.
And you’re
in a better, more flexible position than many of the slow-moving publishing
houses to quickly send over your work. However, let’s not make promises here
that you’ll get in there quickly. Sometimes persistence counts, but chances are
indie publishing houses already on these platforms are looking for tailor-made
content and contacting them would be easier.
Contact: tick.
Now for getting people to read your stuff.
By now you
should’ve read quite a bit about writing great blurbs and good cover design.
However, on
cellphones you have even less space and attention span to work with. So your
blurb needs to be shorter and punchier. We’ve found blurbs in the first person
do better than others. Make sense? No, but we’re working on figuring out why.
As for the
cover design – it needs to be digitally friendly. Look how striking the black
and white of Brett Bruton’s Birth One is on this screen shot, and it pays off
in the number of times read.
Striking the
right balance for blurbs and design takes some experimentation. However, if
you’ve found a good platform and have a good relationship with the content
editors, it’s easy to make changes and see how they impact your figures. We
like that we can see how many people have read our books and how many have
liked or disliked them. This immediate feedback allows us to make more accurate
decisions regarding the length, type of content, the blurbs and the look of the
books we publish. Power to the people, hey?
Then there’s
the content. We find our shorter stories do much better than the longer ones.
We’re talking 3000 words here. So you
don’t want to dump your entire novel onto this platform, rather, perhaps, a
short story using the same characters and world, but a different plot. Use it
as a way to build your reputation so that when your novel is launched, there are
more people who can recognise you and what your work is about. Author
Fiona Snyckers chose Bookly to launch her novel Team Trinity to an
audience of 7.3m monthly active users, three weeks before the real-world launch
in bookstores.
Promoting
yourself:
The problem
with mobile platforms, is that some aren’t linked to your social media accounts
or have different ways of connecting to the Internet – so you can’t link your
book site to your Twitter account or find all your friends from Facebook. Some
platforms are also very age-specific, so you’ll most likely be oldest person on
the platform, and asking 16-year-olds to follow you is kinda creepy. These
platforms are still very isolated from the rest of the online world. It’s still
early days, but for now consider that the platform that you’re using can send
messages to all the readers of your previous books, can tell how far they read
your books and how long they spent on your work. They can also send out
messages directly to a cellphone to alert users of giveaways, new releases and
other newsworthy items. For now, that’s all I’ve got, but it sounds pretty good
to me.
Show me the
money! Please? Oh ok.
However, as
with most of these new endeavours, you’ll probably be paid a pittance, if at
all. So you’re back to being a poor writer. BUT, we live in hope. Which is why
mobile is so interesting – it could mean more eyeballs for your work, which
means more clout in terms of social networking and readers of your other books,
all of which you can take to a publisher and say “Look, Look at these crazy
numbers – there are so many people reading me, you should have signed me years
ago, but I’ll forgive you … for a fee. And a footrub.”
Some tidbits
of info getting the techies excited:
The Internet Access in South Africa 2012 study, conducted
by World Wide Worx and backed by the howzit MSN online portal:
- A
total of 7,9m South Africans access the Internet on their cell phones. Of
these, 2,48m access it only on their cellphones, and do not have access on the
computers. The remaining 6,02m users access the Internet on computers, laptops
and tablet computers. However, 90% of this number – 5,42m – also access it on
their cellphones. This means that almost 8m South Africans sometimes or
regularly access the Internet on their phones
The numbers
according to the The Mobility 2014 research study, conducted by World
Wide Worx with the backing of First National Bank:
- The 19 to 24 age group – representing students and
entrants into the workforce – is abandoning voice faster than any other
segment. Only 56% of this group’s mobile budget is now spent on voice, down
from 66% in mid-2012. Data spend, on the other hand, has increased from 17% to
24%.
- Voice
spend has dropped from 73% of mobile budget to 65%, while data has increased
from 12% to 16%. At the beginning of 2010, voice stood at 77% and data at 8%.
Check out the World Wide Worx
site for more info on cellphone usage and internet penetration in Africa.
How do you envision Johannesburg in 30 years' time?
