The New Goodbye to the Future of Books?

by Neil Ayres on June 26, 2010

Last year Canongate, in association with a development company called Enhanced Editions, released Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro for the iPhone. Being a musician and charismatic performer, Cave made the perfect test case for a mutli-purpose book app. As well as the novel, the finished product included an audio version of the book and a score by Cave’s long-time collaborator Warren Ellis, plus some video readings by Cave.

I don’t know how many copies the app has sold, but I do believe there’s likely to have been a bit of a sticking point over the price of the complete edition (in general, British publishers are reluctant to put out ebooks at anything lower than hardback prices), but perhaps in the long-term this won’t worry Canongate too much, as there was a ‘lite’ sampler version of the app available. iPhones as a method for consuming lengthy prose are still somewhat untested, but I know of at least one person who sampled the book using the free app, and then went out and bought a print version of the book.

At the end of April this year Creative Review magazine—my employer—released an app version of its popular Annual. With a small amount of publicity, a week on the homepage of the UK App Store, a positive feedback loop on Twitter and a reasonable price-bracket (£2.99) , the Annual app has proved popular in the UK with the Creative Review core audience.

The man who developed the Annual, along with McSweeney’s Small Chair, which is possibly the most popular of literary apps so far developed for an Apple device, has also created a superb app for yours truly.

Taking my novel, The New Goodbye, as its centrepiece, together with a bunch of collaborators Russell and I have produced a truly multimedia application. I would go so far as to say it’s a bolder, more inventive product than Bunny Munro.

As well as the novel, the app includes an exclusively commissioned cover by fashion photographer Nicole Heiniger, illustrations by Johanna Basford and music by Rich Watson, as well as photography from the shortlisted entries of a competition we ran to find a cover model. There is also a behind-the-scenes video of the cover shoot, some short stories and a few other bits.

Currently film-making collective Order is working away at producing a music video to be included in an update we’ll be making next month.

The difference between the Bunny Munro app and The New Goodbye? About £14. We too have released a free, rather generous ‘lite’ version of our app. A publisher’s concerns over potential revenue losses can’t be overcome without a test case, so as few of them have seemed unwilling to go full tilt since Canongate made its move, even though we’ve included far more content than you’d ever get with a regular ebook, we’ve gone in at £1.79 for the full edition.

The New Goodbye is a project aimed at demonstrating to publishers the potential of these new formats. With the iPad now on the market, giving Apple a reading device of yet more scope, the potential is even greater. What I personally want to show, by using the app as a platform to secure a publishing deal, is that, done the right way, these formats can create demand for a printed book, and will not cannibalise print sales as most publishers fear.

I doubt any publisher over the last year or so would have taken a risk on an unknown novelist and produced an app of this calibre to promote such an author. In reality they’re turning away their own authors, so potentially money-sapping ideas are probably not at the forefront of their minds.

And realistically, taking into account the amount of work that’s gone into its production, the cost to professionally produce and commission all of the artists contributing to The New Goodbye would approach £25,000-£30,000; that’s without giving a cut to the author.

I’m lucky that everyone who’s involved in the project has wanted to do it for similar reasons to me and has devoted their time and ability freely. Even if some crazy publisher were willing to invest £25,000 on an untried author, there goes the marketing budget!

I don’t deny publishers’ fears are valid to a degree. There are of course people who have downloaded the sampler of our app, paid to unlock the complete edition for the princely sum of £1.79 and enjoyed everything it has to offer (if this is the case, then to me that’s fantastic, but a publisher is unlikely to see it that way, given the low return).

But to qualify that, there are 200% more people who have downloaded the sampler, looked at and liked what they saw, but don’t have an interest in reading an entire novel on their handsets. Were a publisher willing to put this same book on a shelf in a shop though, the majority of the selling will have already been done for them. By the app. Anyone downloading the app has become actively involved with it, whether from genuine interest or general curiosity. These are people—readers—who have already engaged with the story and its characters. Thanks to the extra content they feel more intimacy with the book.

I don’t like to predict future trends really, but Russell Quinn, who may know a lot more about these things than I do, fails to see the digital book becoming as ubiquitous as, say, the music or video or even digital photography, without everyone working to non-exclusive file formats.

I echo the thoughts of industry commentator Craig Mod – another chap probably much more knowledgeable than I am about all this stuff – that there’s already a great medium for presenting digital text: the web. But, and it is a but, I see the web as problematic for an immersive experience, as there are too many distractions and the web is a ‘flitty’ sort of platform.

That being said, services like the BBC iPlayer and 4oD do a great job of maintaining engagement for a reasonable period with video, so perhaps it’s just that no one’s worked out how to do that for text for the web yet. I think, rather than the iPhone or iPad, the Kindle and Sony readers are closest to the money at the moment.

A cynic might accuse me of putting out The New Goodbye in this manner due to the frustration of not finding a publisher for it. And in truth I did submit an earlier version of the book to a couple of places, and got some encouraging feedback for my efforts. But with the publishing climate of the last year or so, even though I have huge belief in the quality and commercial appeal of the book, I’d be deluded to expect someone to take it on and promote it with my limited profile.

But publishers are stumbling blindly in this arena anyway. Harper Collins just got a lot of PR but very few downloads (according to sources, less than we’ve had in only the first couple of weeks of releasing The New Goodbye) from releasing Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall on the iPhone.

I think their mistake was obvious. They took a grand author and a weighty title—a Booker prizewinner no less—without properly considering—or properly considering and then ignoring—the practical implications. Wolf Hall is a huge book that’s obviously far too long for the iPhone’s small and backlit screen (1,000s upon thousands of iPhone-sized pages) and added to that it has a primary audience—I’m making general assumptions about its market here—unlikely to be the most digitally engaged. And—perhaps most importantly—who have already read the book.

The New Goodbye on the other hand, at a modest 50,000 words (that’s around a 200 page book), is easily read on the iPhone, and benefited from the lessons Russell acquired concerning on-screen legibility creating the McSweeney’s app. The app also comes before the printed product, if there’ll be one, meaning that it’s the ‘early adopters’ to coin a corporate phrase, who will see it first. And these make up one of the most evangelical demographics. Right here and now, it’s ‘App Culture’ is an exclusive club. Its members are more likely to be advocates for the book, rather than only readers. And they will push it to their friends and family who don’t have iPhones but who they know like good books. All it needs is for that printed product to be available.

At another time, maybe I would have tried harder to have picked up a mainstream publisher to begin with, rather than producing the app myself, but by foregoing the traditional route, look at the fun I’ve had, and look at all the great work that’s been created around my novel. I find it pretty inspiring, and it’s obvious very little of this would have happened had the book gone through the usual processes.

Now it’s in the public domain, if any publisher would like a shot at taking it into print and enjoying the fruits of my manifold labours, they’re welcome to talk to me. After all, that’s one of the few advantages of Apple’s proprietary software; all the other rights are still available.

Neil George Ayres is the author and producer of The New Goodbye, a multi-arts iPhone app, which has been developed by Russell Quinn, the man who brought McSweeney’s, Wallpaper* City Guides and Creative Review’s Annual to many people’s mobiles.