Novelists and app developers have a lot in common. An author puts a lot of work into writing a novel, but when it’s finally published it’s competing with millions of other books out there. Unless you’re a big-name writer, most people will never even get to know that yours exists.
You can try to be creative with your marketing. For example, I did a Kickstarter campaign for my first novel, 11/9, and included the opening scene of The Billion Dollar Heist at the end of it to drive sales through to that. But it’s impossible to compete with the big publishing houses.
The same is true of small-time app developers. Your app may be the greatest in the world, but it steps out into a world that already has around 1.5 million iOS apps and where nobody has ever heard of yours. And with Apple now allowing successful companies to buy even more App Store visibility through search result ads, it can only get tougher for the little guy.
Up until recently, there were only two ways you could get a book published. Pitching publishers directly is now almost pointless, as they rely on agents to filter through the manuscripts worth reading, so approach one is to try to find an agent for it, and then wait for them to find a publishing deal.
Agents get inundated with manuscripts, and accept only a handful of them each year. In my case, I was lucky and found an agent for 11/9 almost straight away, but a year later she still hadn’t found a publisher for it. (I later learned that this was because she’d only shown it to three, but that’s another story …)
A normal publishing contract sees the author get a royalty somewhere in the 10-15% range. To make this more palatable, they offer an advance – a non-returnable upfront payment – which is typically a few thousand dollars. (Yeah, those million-dollar advances you hear about are for best-selling authors; the average first-time novel gets an advance of around $5000.)
Self-publishing gets you no upfront cash, but a royalty rate of 70%.
This is a model I think Apple could usefully adopt for apps. Instead of app developers shoving their app out into the wilderness and, in most cases, getting 70% of not-a-lot, they could submit it to an Apple scouting site. You and I nominate the apps we like, the best ones are published by Apple on a 50/50 profit-share – and if an app we nominate is selected, we get it free.
Each person can only nominate three books a month, so you can’t just nominate everything in sight in the hope of getting the maximum number of free books – or apps, in Apple’s case.
An alternative would be to allow people to download time-limited trials, so they can actually see for themselves how the app performs, but I think that would be too frustrating. If you don’t like an app, you’ve wasted a fair bit of time; if you do like it, you’ll be annoyed when you lose the use of it at the end of the trial.
What do you think? If you’re an app developer, would you give this a go? And for everyone else, would you like to get a vote in determining those apps that get greater visibility on the App Store? As ever, please take our poll and share your thoughts in the comments. (Oh, and did I mention you can nominate my rom-com … ?)
