A New Book, A Good Start

“A Book About Hype” launched yesterday. While that is an exciting occasion, the moment of truth happens on the following day. When I woke up this morning, all blurry eyed, I reached over to my nightstand and grabbed my iPad. After months of hard work, I was curious to see the sales. On iTunes, a strong launch is critical. Otherwise, thousands of other content creators will crush the project. I was delighted to see that the new book wasn’t crushed. Instead, it was off to a good start.

The iTunes Book Store and iTunes App Store can be unforgiving. There are so many things that can go wrong. While there were some minor issues with this book launch, it was as close to perfect as it could be. That effort was rewarded.

Seeing this screen was a nice way to start the day. “A Book About Hype” was ranked #2 in the “Recent Bestsellers” in the “Computers & Internet” section of the iTunes Book Store. The book was also ranked #1 as a “Top Paid Book” in the “Internet” section of “Computers & Internet”.

My name started to appear in the “Top Authors” section for “Computers & Internet”. The sales of “A Book About Hype” started to have a halo effect on “The Interactive Stencyl Textbook”. The plan was working.

The big part happens next. Hype 3.5 hasn’t officially launched yet. When it does, that should create a lot of interest in this book. Also, I’m still waiting to see if Apple is going to feature this book. Considering the strong launch, they might be more inclined to do so.

Based on early feedback, people are really happy with the new book. Hype is awesome software, but there is a lot to learn to truly master it. That means this book can make lots of people happy. The people that use Hype can learn lots of new things and be successful in their careers. While Hype creates HTML5 projects, those exported files can be used to make websites, interactive books, apps and games.

The people that make Hype now have a book they can turn to. This is helpful in getting schools and businesses to adopt the software. Apple’s Volume Purchasing Program (VPP) https://vpp.itunes.apple.com/ is enabled for this book.

Then there’s Photics.com. The business was started 17 years ago. It was focused on publishing. I was thinking about printed newspapers and magazines. I didn’t realize that one day I’d be creating interactive e-books, that run on portable supercomputers. Software like Hype and iBooks Author was used to make this possible. That’s why I think this new book project is special. Years and years of effort and ideas are merging to make this moment possible. It’s pretty cool.