Indie publishers are crowd funding iPad Magazines

As we write, there are 50+ peri­od­i­cal pub­lish­ing project behind crowd funded on Kick­starter and 30+ projects on Indiegogo. All of them together might be able to go to mar­ket in a mat­ter of months and get the nec­es­sary bud­get to release the first issues. The idea behind that is going to mar­ket quickly and see how read­ers will react to the new App hit­ting the AppStore™.

It’s part of the Sil­i­con Val­ley motto do the thing, the peo­ple will come

Only a few years ago no one would have imag­ined to be pub­lish­ing a mag­a­zine with no bud­get, no his­tory, no audi­ence and no heavy back­ers behind it. Most of all, in a short period of time from idea to market.

It’s a whole new par­a­digm for authors and con­tent cre­ators to be able to pub­lish some­thing really big­ger that an ebook made of plain text and con­verted by online ded­i­cated services.

On March 24^th two jour­nal­ists with a past and a cur­rent job in the infor­ma­tion indus­try suc­cess­fully funded their edi­to­r­ial project of a long form dig­i­tal only mag­a­zine aimed at pub­lish­ing one in-depth story a week. Mat­ter is actu­ally being devel­oped by Jim Giles and Bob­bie John­son and is planned to be released on the web only by this summer.

In a World dom­i­nated by talks over pay­walls and new sources of rev­enue, with news­pa­pers and main­stream pub­lish­ers strug­gling with falling adver­tise­ment rev­enue, there’s a new move­ment in town named Indie Publishing.

The project was able of get­ting a huge fund­ing on Kick­starter with an out­stand­ing 140K $, bud­get that is being well used in invest­ing in qual­ity con­tent and great col­lab­o­ra­tions such as the one by Mr. Dan Baum. The for­mer author of sto­ries for The New Yorker, who has been fired by Condé Nast, imme­di­ately turned out to be the rock star of self pub­lish­ing, mak­ing the smart move to embrace Ama­zon book pub­lish­ing and join­ing with the team at Mat­ter.
We are grate­ful to Dan espe­cially for inspir­ing us with the insight­ful story of his The New Yorker rais­ing and falling career.

The Human Project got about a third of what Mat­ter has been able to raise, but still it is on the top list of the fund rais­ing cham­pi­ons. Erika Ilves and Anna Still­well moved from the TEDx con­fer­ence in Dubai directly to Kick­starter to be among the Indie pub­lish­ers that count.

Their iPad App is still in the devel­op­ment process, partly because of some exe­cu­tion trou­bles they are deal­ing with.

Break­ing apart from all the crowd fund­ing buzz, I still want to be gen­er­ous with you and tell out some truth

Great ideas are flow­ing under the bridges of cre­atives and authors every day, and the will­ing­ness to suc­ceed in deliv­er­ing the final prod­uct is a real guar­an­tee of suc­cess. That’s truth and real­ity in only one case, tough. Not all of the started project or the suc­cess­fully funded teams arrive to an happy end­ing. Small teams and young entre­pre­neurs face daily trou­bles and some of them may lack the integrity and per­sis­tency that is a pre req­ui­site to every startup business.

Not all ideas are great, and of those that really are, not all are warmly wel­comed by the Audi­ence. The sud­den suc­cess that we have become used to is in the real world lim­ited to a dec­i­mal frac­tion of all the started busi­nesses. Face it, face it fast and let it fail in case you need to.

Fail­ing might be some­thing hard to explain to back­ers tough. Since the last year, entre­pre­neurs were used to get fund­ing from banks, investors, Angels, VCs and other insti­tu­tions well used to fund­ing star­tups with a poten­tial suc­cess rate of 1% or less. In the democ­ra­tiz­ing era of crowd fund­ing, entre­pre­neurs should pay atten­tion to the beg for money strat­egy with the gen­eral pub­lic. It might become dan­ger­ous, time con­sum­ing and some­times evil. You need to keep your face clean and pol­ish your social image every day like a politi­cian to be the social rock­star of publishing

The strat­egy of crowd fund­ing has been avoided by the two fun­ders of the TRVL iPad mag­a­zine — Michel Elings and Jochem Wijnands.

In about six months time they have become the high­est rated News­stand App on the App­Store™, appeal­ing read­ers with great sto­ries and photo gal­leries from places around the World, mak­ing peo­ple fancy to travel with them. The App is free and so are the edi­tions they push to users’ devices about weekly, giv­ing an expe­ri­ence of curated travel con­tent for free.

They have hit the 500K user level dur­ing the last month, and the great­est hon­or­ship demon­stra­tion to be part of the open­ing video of Apple’s WWDC 2012.

Press cov­er­age fol­lows at its max­i­mum, in a game of roles that we are well used to. Exam­ple of heavy cov­er­age at The Next Web

The whole 2012 dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing land­scape is get­ting more and more crowded and worth being mon­i­tored tightly. I feel the need of mut­ing some of the noise cre­ated by the rais­ing con­tent frag­men­ta­tion, and take care of read­ers’ need for a cen­tral source of legit­i­mate con­tent and authors’ authority.

This very last para­graph will be the white can­vas for fur­ther writ­ing, sto­ries and devel­op­ment you will be read­ing on these pages soon.