Book Business's feature article this month is on “21 Tips for Developing Your Mobile Game Plan.” Book Business asked several industry executives who have navigated the mobile waters to share their insights on how to develop a successful mobile strategy. While geared toward publishers, there are a number of items on the list relevant to booksellers too. Here is the list, with details available in the article.
1. Focus initially on iOS and Android platform and get revenue flowing.
2. Determine the level of interactivity for your app. Avoid “feature creep.”
3. Develop enough apps and to learn what your ROI is for the specific app.
4. Get one product to be successful even on a small scale. Learn from it and then follow up with updates and feature enhancements as appropriate
5. Get a few apps on the market that are well-targeted and bug-free create your core base of loyal buyers. Marketing will be key. Develop relationship with Apple and Google.
6. Make sure to nurture good relationship with the big e-book vendors.
7. Publishing e-books is more work. More formats = more work.
8. You will need to transform your traditional workflow to manage digital content.
9. Digital publishing is still manually intensive.
10. Develop for more than just the desktop.
11. There is no best way, only good ways. Remember there are a lot of ways consumers access content.
12. Rethink what your product is.
13. Be bold with Mobile App as we were with Web 10 years ago.
14. More than one way to go mobile- mobile app or mobile web.
15. Accept Apps will cannibalize your other platform but you will keep customers
16. Learn how to work with Apple
17. Build as installed base of users of free apps and then make use of in-app purchasing to sell paid apps to that installed base.
18. Take the plunge.
19. Mobile Search strategy is different from Web search .
20. Mobile strategy should be focus on “action-oriented activities.”
21. A mobile search has to yield a result with eBooks that are interesting to read, priced competitively, and available to buy [immediately] on mobile or in-store.
