Fits and Starts, A quick review.

It has been nearly two years since the apps were first released into the market place. Progress has been patchy to say the least, finding the time to dedicate to app development has been difficult and the attention they have received has been sporadic at best.

Think and Grow Rich has had some great success with nearly 25,000 downloads in the market place! The revenue stream changed a bit when I had to convert all the embedded ads. from adsense (which was paying around 50p./click) to admob which is about an order of magnitude less, the api is relatively easy to use so that was a bonus.

The Law of Success has been by the most popular of the paid works with almost 250 people taking the plunge and purchasing the app. I have been a bit surprised by the number of cancellations and failed payments, but I am generally using each of those as a motivator to improve the quality of the reader platform :)

Goody Two Shoes was a bit of a shot in the dark, purely selected based on its popularity on project gutenberg, as a paid app it had extremely modest sales, I took the decision to introduce the ads. and put it on the market as a free app. This increased the downloads but again still fairly slow on that front with minimal revenue being drawn in from the ads.

The Prince has enjoyed reasonable sales sitting around 150 but at a cheaper price.

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci v1, has been a little disappointing. After a fairly significant effort to reformat the text and images of the source material, it has not enjoyed much success and has one mediocre review.

The lessons that have come from the process so far, is that you need a massive number of downloads to generate any revenue from ads. You need a well presented application, even something that isn't graphics heavy like the text of a book, still needs nice packaging to get noticed. Marketing while still being a dark art for us is something that needs to be embraced if any success is to be achieved, along with networking and liasing with other people in the mobile development community.

I am still confident there is a great opportunity to be had in the mobile app market, the next step is some more reflection and planning to figure out how to capitalise on it!