Publishing an iPad Photo Magazine

I am coming out with a new iPad/iPhone app. I have to release it in October. It is the next incarnation of the Curvy Girl Superheros app. The new iPad photo-magazine:

  1. is expanded from 21 photos into a set of 50 photos without text
  2. is published simultaneously in the following language appstores: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, German, Swedish, French, Portugese, Russian. Apple makes it simultaneously publish in multiple languages. Making the App non-textual help enormously, but it still needed product names, descriptions, and keywords for each language.
  3. is Free to the user. I have built in iAds which are the iPhone version of Google ads. These are localized to each market.
So basically what I am publishing is a new trans-national photography book which reaches all iPad owning world-citizens in New York, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong Berlin, Mexico City, Madrid, Rio, Milan and Paris. My cost per unit of production is 0 cents and the magazine contains 50 amazing full color prints. At a unit cost of 0 cents, advertising becomes a truly interesting Business Model for the cultural producers of today. Apple is supplying me with localized ads through their ad network. Earlier waves of media were financed by advertising. This one will be too. The Photos I spent most of 2009 and 2010 taking ethnographic street fashion photography in the San Francisco Bay area. I explored Queer, Crustpunk, Burning Man, Transgender, Neo-Hippie, Dyke, Burning-Man and Sex Radical groups and documented them in thousands of photos. A friend said ‘It is FRUiTS for San Francisco.’ He was referring to the legendary Tokyo Street Scene photo magazine from the first years of millenium 3. My work is like a continuation of FRUiTS and an extension as an international iPad photo-zine. iPad Magazines and Newsstand Magazine and Comic Book companies are some of the top earners in the appstore. Dark Horse Comics, for instance, gives an app which is your Comic collection. You use the app to read and buy your comics. each of which cost a dollar or two. The unit costs are zero. Apple takes a 30 percent cut and give the media company 70 percent. This model is working out well and apple is adding better support for it in the new 5.0 software for iPad/iPhone. The new feature is called Newsstand. what they give you is
  1. the infrastructure for podcast type subscriptions (paid and free)
  2. a special app for all of the users magazine issues. The newsstand always shows the most recent magazine cover and auto-downloads the most recent issue (like a podcast)
  3. A dedicated section of the itunes store for magazines
Basically Apple is providing a small media producer like me the infrastructure that Marvel and Dark Horse build for themselves.