As we welcome the New Year, I've asked a former colleague to shed some light on a new medium. Mary Kay Carson was an editor on Scholastic’s science
magazines back in the early 1990s, when I was editorial director. She’s spent
much of the time since then as an independent author of more than 30 nonfiction
books about science and nature. She’s also written a book-app, which was just named a one of the finalists for the 2012 Cybils. She chronicles the process of writing that app here. Enjoy, and have a great 2013.
In the spring of 2011 a
book developer/packager that I’d previously worked for contacted me about
writing a book-app. (At that point, we were calling it an m-book, as in “multimedia-book,” as opposed to an e-book.) The book packager was starting up a new all-digital division
called Bookerella and wanted a nonfiction kids “title” for its launch. Like so many start-up
and new media ventures, payment was a promised slice of future profits. Writing
on spec is not something I can afford to do much of, so I agreed to the gig
with the stipulation that the subject be familiar, which is how the book-app
ended up featuring bats. Houghton Mifflin had recently published my Scientists
in the Field book, The Bat Scientists, so I was up on all things batty.
In truth, I had no clear idea of what the final product would be
like. I thought it might be an e-book with video, zoom-able images, and maybe a
map with pop-out labels—something like Al Gore’s Our Choice. This format
seems to me like a natural evolution of nonfiction illustration. If you’ve ever
written a book with only black-and-white photos or two-tone illustrations, you
know how constraining it can be. And even color photos still sometimes leave me
with that same old frustration of wishing that my reader could see what I
see—bats swirling up out of a cave, video of geysers on Saturn’s moon
Enceladus, the squeal of a happy rhino. Aren’t e-books or book-apps just the
next step in illustration?
Content Provider, SME, or Author?
I wrote up text for eight
spreads of basic bat info for the book-app—what bats are, what they eat, where
they live, echolocation, etc.—in a somewhat picture-bookish narrative style. (It’s nearly night. The sky is darkening.
Look up! What is flying overhead? ...) I also specked some image samples
for each spread and offered some possible multimedia ideas. From then on my hat
as a writer pretty much stayed on its hook. My role switched to SME (subject
matter expert). The designers would telephone conference and throw out ideas for
“experiences” like an interactive of echolocating bats hunting bugs with sounds
effects, and I would say science Nazi things, like: “You can’t hear ultrasonic
sounds, that’s what ultra sonic means.” This continued through reviews of
sketches and sample builds of experiences.
Whatever vague notion I’d originally had of what a book-app can be
was greatly underestimated! This one ended up with a spinning wheel that
highlighted featured bats and their foods, scenes of different habitats where
kids look for roosting bats in caves or under bridges, and other sophisticated interactive
features. Bookerella built it on an iPad-native gaming platform so it takes
advantage of the tablet’s bells and whistles. For example, the final chapter
features a bat flying high above the landscape and you get to steer the bat by
tilting the iPad, like driving in a racecar app. Once images and experiences
were finalized, I did do some caption and label writing, but my primary role
again switched—this time to fact-fixer and bat species checker.
Bats! Furry Fliers of the
Night was released in early 2012. It received some
nice reviews, garnered a
bit of acclaim, and was adapted and installed into the Memphis Zoo’s bat
exhibit. But the book-app hasn’t made a profit, and I don’t expect a check
anytime soon—if ever. Why not? I’m no expert, but people don’t like to pay for online
content and apps. It’s all free, right? Bats!
was priced at $4.99 initially, then dropped to $2.99, and is now offered for
free at iTunes in a teaser version of two chapters. Sophisticated
book-apps aren’t cheap to produce, and software developers and techies are
where most of the money goes—not writers. It’s sort of like making a movie. How
much of a multi-million dollar blockbuster’s budget goes to the scriptwriter?
Content is important, but relatively cheap in the scheme of things. What our
role as nonfiction authors, writers, and content providers is in the new media
age is evolving as the media evolve. Here’s hoping there’s a place for us!
