We released Jack and Joe for the iPad and iPhone, and now we get to reap the fruits of the media blitz that it created! Well, alright, it wasn’t really a blitz. More like a pfffofohhhhhftzzzz…z..zz..whaaateverrr… I guess we had high hopes, but that’s a good thing in the end. The Norwegian version is selling like hot cupcakes in a fire sale where everyone’s super hungry so far, we have had almost 1300 sales in only 10 days. That’s pretty good for a book with no promotion, no marketing department and no fancy publisher behind it. Our budget was about 400 dollars. Time spent: ahmm…let’s not talk about it. It’s been a fun ride so far, and the coolest thing of all, is that we’ve MADE THIS. We actually have a fully working, pretty good (in our humble opinions) app! One that’s on the App Store, sold by Apple! And about 1400 people have downloaded it and had fun with it! That’s incredible! A giant pat on the back to ourselves.
My brother has done a fantastic job coding this app. He had to learn Objective-C from scratch in just 6 months, and then put all of this together. He’s got two kids too, so getting this done and on schedule with this sort of quality has been an amazing achievement. I couldn’t be happier with what he’s done for our book!
So, what’s this about a media blitz? Let me tell you…
So far, we have gotten two AWESOME things:
An A- rating and review from the big-league iLounge.com. We really couldn’t have gotten a better review than what iLounge wrote about us. These are the nicest things they said about us:
“Our top pick in the bunch is Jack and Joe.(…) a two-brother writing, illustration, and programming team that has more combined talent than most of the larger children’s book developers in the App Store.(…) Jack and Joe is a really cute little book that has plenty of art, audio, and fun for the price; it’s certainly worthy of our high recommendation, your attention, and further editions.â€
And a super fantastic interview/review with the amazing illustration resource FuelYourIllustration! .This was a really fun and entertaining interview for me, so I hope what I wrote was interesting to their readers too! Check out what Nikki said about “Jack and Joe”:
I loved the illustrations! Bright, colorful, good movement! Very cute and great style for kids. The illustrations were really engaging and I felt the artwork went along perfectly with the story.
The interactions build into the book are fantastic. The hide and seek page was one of my favorite parts! There are also pages you can shake and some where you can pet Jack! In talking to Bard, I learned that in a future version of the story there will be even more interactive pages.
Jack and Joe very much felt like characters that could be on Disney or Nickelodeon – the voices were good too and there was a good pace to the book and the reading.
Many thanks to the wonderful Miss Nikki Jeske and the gracious Mr. Jeremy Horowitz!
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