Apps and the Future of Travel and Photo Journalism
By Lee Foster
As old markets collapse, new markets emerge for the travel journalist.
For me, December 2009 was an especially poignant illustration of this phenomenon.
Another of my good travel magazine markets folded. At the same time, I released my first travel app in the Apple iTunes App Store.
The magazine that folded was National Geographic Adventure. I had five sales to them for about $1,500 in 2008-2009, so there went another good magazine outlet. Travel writers/photographers are a little like polar bears, just barely surviving on incremental protein.
However, on another front, my first app went on sale in the Apple iTunes App Store.
Here is the December announcement and the iTunes write-up. The San Francisco app went on to become a best-seller in the App Store, selling a thousand copies in the month of May.
The Announcement:
Lee Foster Releases San Francisco App for iPhone
Lee Foster (lee@fostertravel.com) has released his first travel app in the Apple iTunes App Store. The title is San Francisco Travel Photo Guide ($1.99). The direct link to the App Store is http://www.sutromedia.com/apps/sfphotoguide. The app, viewable on iPhones, assists users to create, collect, and enjoy their own postcard-perfect photos and memories of San Francisco. Lee presents his top 100 views of The City, from vistas to iconic details, and shows the user how to duplicate them. The app has Lee’s comments on how to make the photo and why the view is significant, even if you only want to enjoy the view and not photograph it. Interactive maps show what photos/views can be savored in a given neighborhood.
I followed that up in February 2010 with the release of a second app, on Washington, DC. Here is that announcement:
Lee Foster Releases Washington DC App for iPhone
Lee Foster (lee@fostertravel.com) has released his second travel app in the Apple iTunes App Store. The title is DC Travel Photo Guide ($1.99). The direct link into the app store is http://sutromedia.com/apps/DC_Travel_Photo_Guide.
The app, viewable on iPhones, assists users to create and collect their own postcard-perfect photos and memories of Washington, DC. Lee presents his top 100 views of the nation’s capital, from vistas to iconic details, and shows the user how to duplicate them. The app has Lee’s comments on how to make the photo and why the view is significant, making this app both a travel and a photo guide. Interactive maps show what photos/views can be savored in a given neighborhood. Lee’s first app title was San Francisco Travel Photo Guide. The direct link to that is www.sutromedia.com/apps/sfphotoguide.
In November I came out with my third writing/photo app, this one on my home town of Berkeley, CA.
The announcement:
Lee Foster’s New Travel App Berkeley Essential Guide Released in the Apple iTunes App Store
Lee Foster’s latest travel app, Berkeley Essential Guide (Sutro Media, $2.99), has been released in the Apple iTunes App Store (http://sutromedia.com/apps/Berkeley_Essential_Guide). The app celebrates 120 favorite aspects of Berkeley, as chosen by local resident Lee Foster. Foster is an award-winning travel journalist, winner of eight Lowell Thomas Awards. The entries include selections related to food and the Gourmet Ghetto, the University, the cultural/arts scene, the neighborhoods, and the lovely parks, such as Cesar Chavez Park on the Bay. All the write-ups and all the 500 plus photos in the app are original content created by Lee Foster. The app has interactive maps with GPS capacity, slideshows of photos, and external links for each entry to further information from the Internet. Anyone who purchases the app also receives free future updates. This is Lee’s fourth app in the iTunes App Store, following his San Francisco Travel Photo Guide (Sutro Media, $1.99), Washington DC Travel Photo Guide (Sutro Media, $1.99), and an ebook-style app of his book Travels in an American Imagination (IndiaNIC, $2.99). The apps run on Apple iPhone, iPod, and iPad mobile devices. Lee Foster’s 10 books, 4 apps, and 200 worldwide article/photo subjects can be seen on his website at www.fostertravel.com.
What is my analysis of this app phenomenon?
As I think about my apps and the iPhone, many considerations flood my mind:
-The device is quite elegant and lovely. The more time you spend with an iPhone, the more its simplicity and elegance becomes apparent. iPhones are fun, and travel info-and-image products on them are a natural.
-The market for paid apps is huge. Over 10 billion app downloads are said to have occurred from the Itunes store by January 2011. My own San Francisco app, a best seller, has been downloaded in 46 foreign countries. By contrast, my parallel book on San Francisco will never sell outside North America. Paid travel apps are not the largest category of app sales (games is way ahead) and many apps are free, but there was already a robust market of about 13,000 paid travel apps as of January 2011.
-My apps are totally unlike a travel photo book. In my case, there are books parallel to my apps. I have books out, with Countryman Press, titled The Photographer’s Guide to San Francisco: Where to Find Perfect Shots and How to Take Them and The Photographer’s Guide to Washington DC: Where to Find Perfect Shots and How to Take Them. The first and most obvious difference, suggesting that an app is an entirely new product category, is in the number of photos. The book is frozen forever, with about 75 photos presented. My app rollout for San Francisco had 100 photos and the second version had 500 photos. An app allows the presentation of a much larger range of photography than a book. The text was also totally different.
-Apps require a different style of writing and research than is used in a book. App writing needs to be quite truncated and brief, just a couple of paragraphs. Books encourage a more leisurely approach to the subject. Writing more concisely is an art. Also, one critical part of the research for an app is the appropriate web site to present for further information on a subject. You don’t need to do that for a book, but you might, of course, for an ebook.
-Royalty rates for authors of apps are much higher than for authors of books, and for good reason. The deal is that I get 30% of the gross income from my $1.99 app sale, or 60 cents. I have observed that this is roughly typical of the app world—30% each to the author, developer, and Apple store, with 10% going to admin. For my book, I have a 15% of net rate, which is good and possibly a little high. So, for selling two apps for $3.98, I get $1.19. For a sale of my $14.95 book, my royalty is 15% net, and the book will typically be discounted 55% to sell on Amazon or through a distributor. My royalty for that sale is $1.01. The app Author and Publisher have no printing press to buy, no paper or ink costs, no warehouse needed to store product, no distribution hassle, and no quantity manufacturing cost to achieve economies of scale, etc. The traditional publisher strengths of capital and distribution do not apply. However, the app publisher needs Software, and that is a substantial intellectual investment to create or license or buy off the shelf, if and when such software is available.
-The low price point of apps will build a new market. I set my price, so the price could be anything I wish. I chose $1.99 or $2.99. At these low prices, a purchase of my app travel product almost becomes an impulse sale. A huge number of buyers will enter the app market, compared to a small number who will pay for a book costing $14.95. On my first app, the San Francisco travel photo app, I had buyers in 10 foreign countries in the first month. I had one buyer in Korea, two in Italy, and one in Japan. Apps can be sold worldwide in a rarified electronic ether. As mentioned, my physical books will never sell in these countries.
-A referenced website in an app can carry the volatile information, which may go out of date. The app can concentrate on evergreen insight and helpful qualitative observations. A classic example of this would be an app entry for a restaurant. Listing the restaurant website for further information, just a click away, puts all that changeable info, such as menu and price, as a burden for the restaurant to convey and keep up-to-date. One of the major traditional problems with guidebooks has been information that is out of date.
-Apps have an interactive map capacity, far beyond the two-dimensional maps in books. The use of mapping capacity is one of the delights of an iPhone. I no longer need paper maps to get around Northern California. For this San Francisco app, the map can show me where the photo locations are, with respect to where I am. The iPhone map can show me the cluster of photo opportunities in a neighborhood, such as “Golden Gate Park,” for example. The mapping revolution can now be applied to travel products. Who would want to go back to paper maps?
-The device is small and compact, not large and heavy, like a book. In the old days, one would need to carry around large guidebooks, possibly several. Or one would judiciously rip out sections of guidebooks, eliminating all the subjects irrelevant to the trip. With the app, there is nothing to carry around. You need a phone anyway, so why not carry all your info, insight, and images also on the phone, which is also your email device?
-Apps represent a virtuous future in green publishing. Print materials will eventually become assessed as another cause of global warming. It is only a matter of time before printed travel books and magazine will be stigmatized in the buyer’s mind for their “carbon footprints” and rejected as luxurious. Global warming and resource depletion will be tied to the production of physical products, such as printed travel books and travel magazines. Why not convey all this info, insight, and photography in an electronic format at small environmental cost?
Apps, once created, require care and feeding if the author wants them to survive and flourish. Apps are software, and there is an expectation of new releases, perhaps on a 60-day cycle for apps. There are always new entries to write, more photos to create, and an ever more energetic promotional effort needed to help your app stand out in an increasingly crowded field. The public expects an app to be fresh and current. The evolving software also begs for a new release. For example, the latest software release from my Sutro Media partners allows a user to email an entry to a friend. I needed to re-release my products just to activate that new software enhancement.
iPhones and apps are revolutionary. The iPhone and parallel mobile devices will have consequences as immense for all of us as was the personal computer rollout in roughly 1980. The Apple iPad has emerged as a further, elegant app-reading device. The Google Android platform for mobile devices will be pursuing Apple’s early lead. The Apple and Google platforms require different product platforms, so I will be cheering on my software colleagues to get their software prepared also for all devices and for web delivery.
Apps will assist in my survival as a For Profit travel journalist. They will provide a new income stream to replace the old streams that are drying up.
(Note: Lee Foster presents several instructional articles on his web site. If you find this instruction useful, you are encouraged to make a contribution/donation of $1 or more to Lee Foster’s PayPal account at lee@fostertravel.com. Funds will be used to develop further such instruction.)
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