Snappyant is a new company creating children’s interactive books for touchscreen tablet technologies. It was founded by Ana Vivas and Niki Bern. We’ve just released our first iPad app for Mother’s Day, My Mum’s the Best, (My Mom’s the Best in the USA) an interactive animated adaptation of a best-selling Australian picture book by Bruce Whatley (Diary of a Wombat) and Rosie Smith.
Ana and Niki started Snappyant two years ago. Ana has worked in children’s book publishing for ten years. Excited by the potential for picture books to be part of the burgeoning digital media, she decided to start her own company. However, Ana needed help on the digital side.
Niki is a visual effects artist who has worked mainly in film. She has been a compositor for more than 15 years, working in LA, London, Wellington, Vancouver and Sydney, on major blockbusters including Matrix Reloaded, King Kong, Tron, 2012, Captain America, The Avengers and many more. But the visual effects industry is transient with very long hours, and Niki was ready to move home to Sydney to settle down and change careers.
Ana and Niki have been friends since primary school, so Ana approached Niki about starting up Snappyant in 2010, just before the release of the first iPad. Niki investigated the field and realised that tablet technologies were a great way to use her and Ana’s skills together.
We realised we needed a specialist in sound, so Niki approached an old friend from film school who works as a sound designer in LA. Katy Wood has worked with top directors such as Peter Jackson and Clint Eastwood. She and her musician friends in LA created the soundtrack for My Mum’s the Best.
Demibooks came into our lives early in 2011 when we were looking for developing help to put our apps together. We were very excited about the idea of using developed software to put our apps together ourselves. We joined the beta testing group and used the first Composer release to prototype our apps.
Having the ability to explore and test out ideas ourselves through composer allowed us to fine-tune navigation and design ideas for various app ideas. For us it was revolutionary and exactly what we needed to pursue our business.
We approached Scholastic Australia, illustrator Bruce and author Rosie about creating My Mum’s the Best as an iPad app. Using Composer we whipped up a prototype of the app to demonstrate our ideas and concept of the app to present to them. They were really excited about our ideas and very keen to for us to create the app. Without composer to demonstrate this to the publisher, author and illustrator I don’t think we would have succeeded in convincing them particularly as we didn’t have a previous app in the stores.
Getting the animations and the sound done took us about four months. Putting it together in Composer was much faster. It’s incredibly easy to use and easy to change things once everything is set up. We were however pushing the boundaries of the iPad with our large png animations. Daniel Hotop from Demibooks, with extreme patience and skill, worked with us to fine tune our app to make it work better with the iPad’s limitations. We are much indebted to the Demibooks team for the end result of our first app My Mum’s the Best and My Mom’s the Best.
Here are a couple of videos from the book app: frog and elephant, enjoy!
My Mum’s the Best App can be found here:
My Mom’s the Best (US version) App can be found here:
Lessons we learnt – 3 tips to help create your app!
1. When designing your app make sure you design it to the iPad’s memory capacities.
Large png animation files will slow your app down massively and synching sounds will become very difficult. Keep within 512×512 (preferably smaller) when creating png animations. Where possible use Composer to move animations to the x and y of screen. Read Dan’s memory management guide before doing anything!
2. Test Test Test
Composer is fantastic because it allows you to do mock ups and preview your app to anyone without having to create a build. Do lots of mock ups of your app and show your friends but particularly get as many of your target audience to play with the app. Adults used our app very differently to our target audience (kids 2+). We noticed that kids were not frightened to touch the screen and they loved repetition. From our observations, we made it hard to turn the page if you hadn’t played the animations. This enabled the kids to concentrate on the animations and text and not the page turn icons. We also made it easy for kids to retouch the animations to play them again and again. One 3 year old loved the frog page so much he would get up and dance. When the animation finished he’d run back to the app and touch it again and again and again.
3. Marketing
Think about this before you do anything!
We chose to adapt a best-selling Australian picture book as our first book to release because we could use its popularity to sell our app. We also chose one that was attached to a holiday of sorts – Mother’s Day. Both Ana and I are mums-to-be so we were able to use that to get a couple of articles written in our local paper . We also got mentioned in Publishers Weekly!
We were very lucky but I think a lot of our sales so far have come through our connections on Facebook and Demibooks. Using Facebook we launched our app to all our friends. Our friends then reposted our app store links to all their friends and so on. Being attached to Demibooks has also really helped as they have been able to do the same. However, Demibook’s audience is much more targeted than our friends’. Their posts on their web site and tweets reach an audience we don’t have yet.
Social Media has probably been the best way we have been able to market My Mum’s the Best. As a result of our Facebook and Demibook’s efforts we got into the top 10 paid apps in the book section in the Australian App store.
Here is a really good article about marketing apps:
Stay tuned for our next Demibooks app coming out for Australian Father’s Day I Love My Dad by Anna Walker!
November 1, 2011
I discovered Demibooks® Composer while attending StoryWorld Conference in San Francisco with my husband Kevin. We had written the story for our first book app, and were working with an amazing NYC based illustrator, Kristine Marsh, who was turning my original Jumble Bugs plush toy designs into cartoon characters. The Jumble Bugs are ladybugs that are jumbled up with all sorts of adorable things. The first book app tells the story of Bloomie the Flower Bug and her trip to the beach to give her best friend Leilani the Hula Bug a birthday surprise. At Jumble Beach, Bloomie stumbles upon a surprise of her own…..(cue exciting music here!)
I thought that the next step would be to hire an iOS developer, who would then build the app from our storyboards and specifications….we thought we’d meet a keen developer at StoryWorld……
Instead we met Rafiq Ahmed and Saadat Qadri, who were demonstrating their new ipad app, that allows non-programmers to create an app themselves. I was amazed and excited! I have been working in multimedia and web design for over 10 years, and was happy that I could now use these skills and build the whole thing myself. Sweet!!
The benefits I saw from the start were how much money this was going to save me, and that I could change my mind on screens whenever I’d want, test out different ways of doing things, and not have to endure the hassle of sending changes to a programmer. But most importantly, this was going to be a fun project and something I’d be proud to say that I put together myself. 
November 3, 2011
I returned home from StoryWorld, downloaded the free Composer app, and quickly began playing around with it. I joined the Demibooks forum and poked around the demo apps that were included – Not Without Bear, A is for Aardvark and Steampunk Chess Puzzles. These were a great help to me, as I could take a look at how things were set up and coded, and get ideas for how to bring my book app to life!
Animation plays a large part of my app, and I used the tool most familiar to me, Flash, to build the walk cycles and character animations. Once complete, I exported these as individual .png frames to bring in to Composer. Since Flash is not supported on the ipad or iphone, I was real happy that I could still use that program to create animations for my project.
Authoring the app directly on the ipad is cool. I like that it is super easy to preview your work by pressing a button, this is more natural than running a simulator on a desktop application, as you get a real feel of how the user will interact with the behaviors you set up in the program e.g. you can instantly see what happens when areas of the screen are touched or swiped. And then you can show it to people directly on the ipad and get their feedback and suggestions.
I spent the next two weeks creating animations and test pages.
November 23, 2011
On a short trip to Sydney, Australia to visit family and friends I stopped by the Demibooks office and met programmers Christopher Roosen and Andy Skinner – awesome guys! It was pouring with rain so I left my waterlogged sneakers at the front door for my first ever barefoot meeting. I got a first hand look at Composer Version Two. I showed them the Jumble Bugs test screens I had made, and they were keen for me to get 5 or 6 pages ready to include as demo when the newer version of Composer is launched in 2012. We talked for an hour or so and I gave them a list of ideas and features to add in that will improve work flow and make it faster to set up animations – I left the meeting with a huge grin and warm and fuzzy feeling inside! These were cool people making a cool product and it was fantastic to meet them in person. And being Australian, I liked that there were fellow Aussies involved!
December 1, 2011
Back home in San Diego, I received an email from Andy saying that the book app pages for the demo were due before Dec 15th. My initial reaction was to re-enact the Home Alone scene where Macauly Culkin slaps his after-shaved face and yells “aaaaaaaaaah”. After calming myself down, I realized this is an achievable deadline if I made the most of my free time after work: “Late nights and a lot of coffee on the weekends!”
I downloaded the beta for Composer Version Two and started building my app “for real”. No time to second guess myself, I worked full steam ahead. A notable improvement was the ability to import the frames of an animation as one zip file, instead of selecting each frame one by one – a huge time saver. Also noteable is the addition of easing effects to motion animations created in Composer. I applied these to the sunbeams on the page that shows the exterior of Bloomie’s house, and also on the wooden “Bloomie’s House” sign to create a fun bounce effect when clicked. Lots of possibilities!
Without time to audition “professional” narrators, I turned to those you can rely on in a pickle, my family! My brother Alex had read a few lines of the story to me when I saw him a week before in Sydney, and these sounded excellent. So I called him and asked if he’d record the lines. He downloaded a free app called Italk to his ipad, which made it easy for him to record the narration and email them straight to me. And after 2 weeks of hearing him narrate over and over, I still loved his voice, so this is a good sign! He really “hams it up” and I hope this opens up a new career for him!
I used Adobe Soundbooth to slice up the audio for each page. Kevin and I created most of the sound effects ourselves – the snore is me snoring, the swoosh sound on the mail box is me saying “swoosh” and the sound of the drawers opening and closing in Bloomie’s bedroom is Kevin opening and shutting our drawers, you get the idea – fun!
December 12, 2011
I had my 5 demo pages ready, before my deadline, wohoo! I am very happy with how they turned out. For the final version of the app we will have Alex re-record the audio with a proper microphone to improve the overall sound quality, and also add or adjust effects on the first 5 pages. Next I updated my website to showcase the new app in development: http://www.jumblebugs.com
December 30, 2011
Ready to start the New Year with a bang! We will work hard to complete the first app as soon as possible, and would love to have it in the app store by March 2012. This is just the beginning — we’re looking forward to creating many more book apps in the Jumble Bugs series, there are over 40 unique characters and they all have a story to tell, so this could keep me busy for the next few years. We’d love to re-release the Jumble Bugs plush toys soon too. Thanks to the Demibooks team for their inspiration, encouragement and support, but most of all for creating the tools that are making my dreams come true. Cheers!
App Building 101, PubAppExpo | Photo: Gary Wexler
We previewed the new release at Mediabistro’s Publishing App Expo conference in New York City earlier this month. It was great to be on the App Building 101 panel with Jordan Stolper from Storydesk and Kwiksher CEO Alex Souza, whom I finally met in person (we’ve been on several #storyappchat tweetups on Sunday nights). The desire for affordable, easy to use tools for publishing interactive content has only grown over the course of this year. A critical question everyone is trying to grapple with is “how do we make money with book apps”, something we all need to dialog on more openly going forward.
The Survivors: Immersedition Back Row: NY Times assistant to the editor Kevin Roche, The Survivors Series author Amanda Havard, Chafie Creative Group, LLC chairman and chief executive L.C. Havard, mediabistro director of content, events/conferences Stewart Quealy Front Row: NPG president owner Nicole Pope Gaia, Demibooks founder / president Rafiq Ahmed, Vanderbilt University producer / songwriter Deanna Walker, Quantum Media principal Erica Gruen Photo: Gary Wexler
There was another reason to be at Pub App Expo – the launch of The Survivors: Immersedition, the highly interactive YA novel by Amanda Havard that sets a new marker for transmedia storytelling. We developed the book app on our new HTML5 platform. More on the platform later, but Amanda and publisher Chafie Creative’s LC Havard showed off the app for the first time to lots of oohs and aahs! I captured some video on my iPad2 and you can, of course, see the trailers on our home page.
The holiday season is upon us and it’s time to reflect back on an amazing year. We started with the rough beginnings of what would become Demibooks® Composer, when all we could do was apply a few transforms to an object on a page. Hundreds of design iterations, code check-ins, test builds, beta testing feedback comments, bug fixes followed. Not to mention the challenges of bootstrapping our company for much of the year, managing our team across the globe and entering a new industry that could certainly use a bigger dose of innovation. We end the year with a couple of products in the market, some very cool book apps you are creating with Composer, and more to come. We’re continuing to learn what works and what needs to change.
Throughout, we have had some great supporters and customers to whom we owe a lot of gratitude. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and all the best for the New Year!
It’s my pleasure today to present a new iOS app we’ve been working on for some time with the visionary team at Chafie Creative. Available now in the App Store, it’s an interactive version of The Survivors novel by Amanda Havard, previously available in print and ebook editions. We are calling this app the Immersedition.
From my very first meeting with Amanda and the Chafie team, I could tell that this would be no ordinary project. There would be music from world-class performers, there would be original video, historical documents, photos of places, hot cars, and hotter fashion. We would need to produce illustrations in a variety of period styles, of subjects ranging from gorgeous to grotesque. We would need Google maps, Twitter feeds and Facebook walls, and all of this wrapped in a few hundred pages of supernatural mystery.
Yet above all we wanted to make sure that the interactive widgets shouldn’t steal the show, indeed the whole experience was geared to be as book-like as possible, with the media items concealed unless the reader tapped on subtle watermarks behind the text.
The app also needed to work across iPad and iPhone screens in both portrait and landscape orientations. So fixed layouts were out, the pages needed to flow fluidly to fit the space they were presented in.
Of course none of these desired features would be possible without the right technology, something conductive to long form text-based content that was nonetheless flexible enough to support interactive elements. We considered some standard ebook formats but these didn’t seem like they could support the full range of features this project demanded – elements like Twitter integration, or a persistent music player.
Conversely our own authoring tool, Demibooks Composer – which we normally use for in-house book projects – wasn’t up to this particular task either. Composer was designed more for fixed-layout experiences, it isn’t so suitable (yet) for the longer tracts of continuous text that make up a typical novel.
So we went back to the drawing board with the Chafie team, and together really dug deep to bring you a reading experience unlike any other. We hope you like it!
Publishers Weekly Back Cover Ad Nov 14 2011
The imprint encompasses all aspects of traditional publishing while offering authors and illustrators an innovative way to reach the next generation of readers. Author/illustrator contracts will be royalty-based agreements. Authors and illustrators use the Composer platform when submitting to InkPad Press. [Note: If an author or illustrator is not comfortable working in Composer, we will – initially – accept submissions via email, but our strong preference is for Composer-produced submissions.]
Kane Miller Books’ and Demibooks’ combined experience and expertise in editorial, art direction and production, design, publicity, marketing and sales will ensure that InkPad Press titles will have a place on every child’s bookshelf, now and in the future. For example, we will leverage Demibooks Studio to assist authors in finishing their interactive digital books. Demibooks Studio is our internal creative team trained on the Composer platform. Sales and marketing will benefit from our partner EDC’s Usborne Books and More direct sales division as well as representatives to traditional sales channels, including gift stores, bookstores and chain stores. We are looking at ways to improve our distribution of digital products on the App Store, and at other platforms beyond the iPad.
Not all submissions may be suitable for both print and digital, although our preference is to publish content that fits both formats. It’s interesting to note how print and interactive digital versions of the same story can be complimentary, yet very different reading experiences. Our own Astrojammies launched as a book app built on the Demibooks platform. Recently, author/illustrator Stacey Williams-Ng released a wonderful print version that has several completely different story elements from the original book app. We see the possibility for many great titles conceived for both formats.
Demibooks will, of course, continue to provide pathways to our customers who choose to publish directly to the App Store under their own brand.
InkPad Press becomes fully operational in early 2012 and we will share more details at as they become available. InkPad Press can be reached at info@inkpadpress.
