Las Vegas: Best Selling Author Warren Whitlock, publisher of this blog and others has been named a “Forbes top 10 social media power influencer”

Whitlock, active online for the last 32 years, best-selling author, speaker and serial entrepreneur in publishing, advertising and marketing consulting and more commented “I am always happy to be acknowledged by these lists. None of these accolades suggest that there’s some competition and a winner but it’s nice to be included with colleagues that I know are helping business take advantage of the revolution in marketing that we currently call social media

“Social media tools that we have today have helped to enable a change from the 20th-century model of doing business where a centralized organization could push out a marketing message to the masses, limited only by the large budgets it took to communicate one way

“thanks to the Internet and especially these tools, consumers have the expectation that communications will be two-way conversations. Those businesses that learn to implement this in every part of their business will see their best years ever while those who continue to try to control a message and push consumers into old models will go downhill.”

Best Selling Author

Whitlock is the best selling author butof two books on social media, including the first book about Twitter and mobile marketing “Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing are Changing the Way We Do Business” and “Profitable Social Media: Business Results without Playing Games”

Smart authors are looking at new ways to deliver their book. We know about ebooks, but what about apps. Here’s some news today about Ebook App Creation, and information about a case study that you can download free.

Ebook App Creation

This blog post is an excerpt from a case study that is available as a PDF download from Digital Book World.

In digital publishing today, storybook app creation is still a niche. Compared to printed books, creating book apps is in its infancy and still chartering the road “less traveled by” to borrow the words of Robert Frost – and at Wasabi Productions, we believe it can and will make “all the difference.”

Clearly, we aren’t the only ones who think so as this nascent industry is teeming with innovative app creation (especially for children). Device adoption is exploding in both homes and schools – this year, International Data Corporation (IDC) said it expects the tablet market to reach “a new high” of 190 million shipped units, with year-on-year growth of 48.7%, while the smartphone market is expected to grow 27.2% to 918.5 million units. Device variety and price points are also diversifying, and their ubiquity and storytelling potential mean that apps won’t be the marginal choice for digital publishing for very long.

But, when a path is (relatively) new and untrodden, it’s intimidating to know what it takes to get to the other side. It’s even intimidating to talk about the craft, as there are no agreed norms and few benchmarks. For this and a myriad of other reasons, it’s not yet fully known what it takes to create a profitable storybook app.

Lazy Larry himself

This case study explains how Wasabi Productions created its first app, Lazy Larry Lizard, and provides insight into the development of soon-to-bereleased app, Gorilla Band. We share notes on how the storybook apps are produced from start to finish, including costs, production process, people, technology, pricing, release cycle, marketing and more.

While the case study is far to long to publish here (it’s available here as a low-cost download), below is an excerpt about the first and perhaps most important step in storybook app creation: Idea and exploration.

See full story on digitalbookworld.com

Sony has a new interactive infographic that it hopes will help readers discover new books (pictured below).

By answering a set of questions about books, readers are shuttled to one of 15 highly popular titles. While the map may help the reluctant reader discover a newer title, or help Sony sell more of each of the ebooks (each of the book covers on the graphic links to the sell page at the Sony Reader Store), publishers worried about the problem of new book discovery will not be impressed.

For those publishers, the worry isn’t that readers won’t discover their most popular titles, it’s that readers won’t find their mid-list titles and books by new authors.

See full story on digitalbookworld.com