Month: June 2011

Apple

How long does Apple take to approve an app?

So exactly 1 week after we received the “Waiting for Review” email from Apple, we received the “In Review” notification.

The review of our Outskirts Press Free Publishing app took 4 hours and 38 minutes.  At 4:38 in the afternoon on Tuesday, one week after submitting it, we received the following notice from Apple:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to Processing for App Store.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID: XXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

And then, 21 minutes later, we received this notice:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The following app has been approved. The status has changed to Ready for Sale.

If your contracts are not in effect at this time, however, your app status will be Pending Contract. You may track the progress of your contracts in the Contracts, Tax, and Banking module in iTunes Connect.

Note that it may take up to 24 hours before your app is live on the App Store. This delay is dependent upon any app availability issues.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID:XXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Sincerely,

The iTunes Store Team

 

Apple

App approval time

For a new application, from a new developer (us), our “Waiting for Review” status lasted a week, to the day, so this gives other developers a good idea of what they can expect when they submit their first application. Apple doesn’t give you any indication of how long anything takes, so you don’t know whether to set your expectations for “an hour” or “a day” or “a week” or “a month.”

Last Tuesday, when we first uploaded the app we received the “Waiting for Upload” status notification, followed shortly thereafter by the “Waiting for Review” status notification.

Then …. nothing… for days…

Then,  yesterday, the following Tuesday after we uploaded the app,  at 10am, we received the following notification:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to In Review.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.xxxxx
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID:XXXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

At 4:38pm on the same Tuesday, we received the next notice, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.

Apple

Waiting for app approval

With step one of the Apple app review process complete — which I discussed last time — we uploaded the app via the Manage Applications portion of our iTunes Connect Account. And in doing so, received the following email notification from Apple, a mere 16 minutes after the first notification:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to Waiting For Review.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID: XXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

Apple apparently hasn’t learned an important fact about email marketing – people don’t read emails, they browse them.  The emails look nearly identical, and could easily be mistaken for duplicates. The only difference is that instead of “Waiting for Upload” the status is now “Waiting for Review.”

And that’s where we still are. We received that email on Tuesday, June 23.   And you’ll notice the app isn’t actually “Under Review” yet; it is “Waiting for Review.”  I suspect we will receive another notification when the review process has actually begun… and then we will be able to proceed with this topic.

 

Apple

Apple app review process

Once you have your app “build” and are happy with how it performs on your testing device, you upload it to the Apple App Store.  You do this by logging-into your iTunes Connect account at http://itunesconnect.apple.com and clicking on Manage Applications.  You must first “set-up” your app by defining its content, entering its name, describing it, uploading screen shots, etc.  Then you’re faced with one of most annoying aspects of Apple — you have to have an Apple computer to actually upload something.  Whether that makes Steve Jobs a genius or a jerk is a discussion for another day.   Unlike my posting about how to create a certificate with a Windows-based machine, there’s no way around this one — believe me, I looked.  No worries at Outskirts Press; we have lots of Apples, but for many people, I’m sure it’s a pain and, deep down, you have to wonder if it isn’t playing a role in Android’s impressive market gains.

Once we initiated the uploading process, we receive the following email notification:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to Waiting For Upload.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID: XXXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

We received that at 2:50.

Step one complete. Stay tuned for Step two.

Apple

How long does it take for Apple to approve an app?

Over the past few months this blog has touched upon our on-going process to establish a developer account for Apple apps, get our certifications, get approval, and deal with their Customer Service when issues arose. Whew — all that finally got done and then we were faced with developing the actual application, which I’m happy to say is complete and now in Apple’s queue for approval.

So that brings us to the next part of the process, which is waiting for Apple to approve the application. “How long does it take for Apple to approve an app” you may be wondering.  It depends upon a couple of factors.  First-time apps from first time submitters/developers seem to take longer.  The “complexity” of the application itself also plays a role in the review time line. In general, it can range from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. I’ve even heard horror stories of review processes taking a couple of months (albeit, that involved several rejections and iterations of the app to achieve approval).   Then again, our developer approval process took months when it was theoretically only supposed to take days, so it’s anyone’s guess.

Our Outskirts Press free publishing app is relatively simple. It grabs various RSS feeds from our social communities and displays them within the APP so our authors (and potential authors) can keep up-to-date on the happenings and goings-on with self-publishing, book marketing, and Outskirts Press in general.  As a result, I don’t expect our app to take VERY long to approve.

The approval process is comprised of a number of steps, several of which we have already completed, and I’ll cover those steps next…

ceo

An author’s experience with Outskirts Press

Yesterday I referred to a letter I received in the mail regarding Amazon.  Today I’m going to refer to another letter I received in the mail recently, one I received permission to share in its entirety.  This letter refers to our book publishing and book marketing firm Outskirts Press and, more specifically, to one of our Publishing Consultants and one of our Author Representatives:

Dear Mr. Sampson,

When I saw one of your promos praising Outskirts Press I thought yada, yada, yada. Then when I began to struggle through the labyrinth of the self-publishing world, I encountered two angels. They are both extremely modest which is why I am going to the top. Tinamarie and Jodee are every manuscript author’s answer to the critical junction of publisher or dumpster.  At 70 years of age, the cyber-world has left me behind, but each of these wonderful gals was amazingly patient until we got every “i” dotted and “t” crossed.

As a retired high school teacher, I know first-hand that complaints outnumber compliments 10:1. Therefore, it is both my honor and privilege to offer these two women my sincerest praise and thanks for helping Biodesign Out For a Walk come to life. If the rest of your staff measures up to their standards, you must have a fine company indeed.

Sincerely,

Lowell H. Young

Thank you, Lowell, for the wonderful letter.  You’re right, Tina and Jodee are great! Thank you for giving me an opportunity to join you in singing their praises.

Amazon

An author’s experience with Amazon advantage

Amazon has been the subject of my blog for the past several postings, so why change now?  I recently received a letter in the mail from an author (not one of ours at Outskirts Press), who contacted me after reading my book Sell Your Book on Amazon.  A lot of authors contact me as a result of that book (evidence in itself that publishing a book can open up opportunities for new business).

This was the interesting paragraph from his two page letter: “I decided, based on your book, to try marketing a new book I just completed through the Advantage program. It has turned out to be the worst Internet experience I have ever had. To begin with, as you probably know, there is no way to communicate with anyone at the Advantage Division. Amazon’s corporate Customer Service reps [I have spoken to 5 of them] simply say Advantage has no phones. Even these customer services reps can’t contact Advantage by phone. That would be bad enough but they either do not receive faxes or do not respond to them. I tried to upload a picture of my book, following their instructions. That didn’t work at all and I should have been suspicious about what was to come.”

He goes on to elaborate on his frustrations in dealing with Amazon, including sentences like “The whole Advantage system is hopelessly, and needlessly, complex…” and “This Advantage program is a blot on Amazon’s otherwise good reputation.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, the only part of his entire letter that I disagreed with was the part where he entered the Advantage program as a result of reading my book.  Perhaps my book was too subtle – so that’s my fault.  Sell Your Book on Amazon encourages authors — as diplomatically as possible —  to AVOID the Advantage program.  This author’s letter covers just a couple of reasons why.

So let me be more clear now.  Amazon’s Advantage program is only advantageous to Amazon. There are much better ways to get your book on Amazon, Outskirts Press being one — How’s that for a blatant plug?

Amazon

Fulfillment by Amazon notifies its users of a price increase

Speaking of Amazon, Amazon customers engaged in Amazon’s FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) services recently received notification of a price increase.  It may have been easy to miss the intent of the notice, since the increase was cleverly disguised as a “discount” but it was ultimately difficult to miss the fact that, on average, Amazon would start charging its FBA customers approximately $1.10 for each book Amazon held unsold in its inventory for longer than one year.

If there is yet another advantage to publishing through Outskirts Press, this is it.  Outskirts Press authors are not assessed this new fee by Amazon.

Amazon

Does Amazon represent the future or the end of books?

One has to marvel at Amazon.  In spite of the warnings provided by the music industry and iTunes, authors and publishers keep right on giving (yes, giving!) away their content to Amazon for the “privilege” of being listed on Amazon’s store and having a “Kindle” version of a book.  Do authors or publishers get a percentage of the Kindle device sales? No.   Should they? Well, for an answer to that question, you might want to ask a few unemployed music executives who thought a 70% margin on $0.99 iTunes downloads was sufficient, never realizing that Apple’s real cash cow was the device itself (the iPod), sales for which the music industry received nothing, even though without music the iPod was useless.    Does that sound similar to the Kindle?

Or you may want to ask musicians ranging from Garth Brooks to AC/DC, who believe iTunes is “killing” music, according to Prefix Magazine.  The analogy is right on point with what is happening in the publishing world today.

While I would never think to suggest that authors who choose to publish directly through Amazon are literally digging their own graves, it is worth considering.   I was reading the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Boston Review article “Books After Amazon: Publishing’s Race to the Bottom” by Onnesha Roychoudhuri, and I wanted to share this excerpt:

Cheap books are easy on our wallets, but behind the scenes publishers large and small have been deeply undercut by the rise of large retailers and predatory pricing schemes. Unless publishers push back, Amazon will take the logic of the chains to its conclusion. Then publishers and readers will finally know what happens when you sell a book like it’s a can of soup.

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

Uncategorized

Amazon threatens all publishers – It’s not just POD

When I was reading the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Boston Review article “Books After Amazon: Publishing’s Race to the Bottom” by Onnesha Roychoudhuri, I was reminded of the period of time way back in 2008 when Amazon threatened to remove all the “buy buttons” from books published by print-on-demand publishers who didn’t print their books through Amazon’s own company.  That attempt at an anti-trust monopoly ultimately failed, which was good news for authors and publishers alike, but this article referred to similar tactics Amazon has been employing with traditional publishers for even longer, which I found interesting.  Here’s an excerpt, and I encourage you to read the article in its entirety by clicking here: 

Buy-button disappearances are just one of the tensions that have emerged between publishers and Amazon. Publishers accustomed to the more bibliophilic operators of independent stores and even Barnes & Noble find it jarring to deal with Amazon’s lawyers. Wood’s frustration at Amazon’s lack of “gentlemanliness” is echoed by many other publishers who wonder why Amazon keeps putting the screws to them. (The majority of publishers contacted for this article chose not to speak on the record, citing their fear of retribution for divulging Amazon’s tactics, which one publisher described as a “You do this, or we’ll fuck you over” approach.)