This is Part Two of Dean Johnson’s look at how to survive in the cut-throat business of app development. Read Part One here.

RULE THREE: Design and build a great app not a good one

Create an app that does the original (or new) content justice. If you don’t, you will risk Apple rejecting
your title, or worse, the consumer voting with their wallet, star-rating and review.

The app business can be as cut-throat as any other. When Brandwidth launched our first Guinness World Records app in April 2010, we were accused of jumping on the bandwagon as many other developers had either been creating apps for the iPhone or publicly immersed in the publishing world for years.

There’s something really inspiring about watching a group of people come together to create a whole new literary experience.

This time we’ve stumbled upon Letters You Never Sent.

Zakia Uddin is part of the ‘crew’ who have put it together:  “We wanted to make our event interactive. We wanted to revive the letter as a dying form of story-telling, while also reconciling our love of pop culture and great literature”.

Want to write a blog? Unsure how to get started? Joanna Farrow, has 5 key tips for bloggers…

First, you have to start. It would be perfect if someone could formulate a blog with a specific purpose, a blog that had a clear identity and always needed updating, this isn’t how starting a blog usually works. It might start off as a mess and might end up as something completely different than what it started out as. My blog started off just reviewing a couple of books. Now that is only a section of the blog.

One of the biggest reasons that Facebook has become such a behemoth was the introduction of a simple feature. The ability to tag your friends in photos and have those tags show up in friend’s news feeds was revelatory. Ask any early Facebook engineer and they will tell you that people literally spent hours just clicking through hundreds or thousands of photos of their friends. Photo sharing is still a hugely popular field – with tons of people competing for your snaps. These guys are making a lot of the headlines at the moment.

Behavioural economics is something that numerous online and mobile platforms have tried to corner in the recent past. Rewarding people for their behaviour and engaging with them in order to encourage loyalty is something that Foursquare, SCVNGR and many other startups are already doing. Kiip are one of the most hotly tipped companies in this sector at the moment.

There’s has been a huge amount of hype around mobile apps since the New York Times declared a Gold Rush two years ago. Clients are being quoted absurdly high prices for apps. Businesses are developing them purely on the basis that ‘we need an app’ without thinking of how to promote them.

The reality is that they are important. They’re not expensive. They do require a little thought though. Here are two of the best companies active in this sector at the moment.

In an era where you’re competing with umpteen websites, Facebook feeds, Twitter streams and mobile apps – promoting new books and publications can be somewhat daunting.

Over the course of the next few days, I’ll show you a few tools that are highly effective, low cost (or free) ways of promoting books and authors, engaging with readers and generally doing all you can to sell more books.

The first area we’ll look at is audio. Often overlooked in the rush to create YouTube videos or trailers; audio is still hugely popular. I can honestly say that there hasn’t been a project that I’ve worked on where the number of audio streams accessed or number of podcasts downloaded hasn’t ended up surprising me and my clients alike. It’s definitely worth thinking using a tool like Soundcloud as part of your promotional efforts.

Literary Death Match is a competitive literary night which began in New York and has spread to 33 cities worldwide, including London, Cardiff, Dublin and Glasgow. Here founder Todd Zuniga tells all…

Wakatake Onikoroshi: Fuel for “Bright Literary Ideas”

Literary Death Match was hashed out one early NYC evening, over spicy tuna rolls and hamachi sashimi. The question was how to make readings fun? The usual readings, we discovered, were: one reader shined, one went way too long, the other was lazily plodding through a blog entry they’d defecated earlier that afternoon. So, our sake-fueled yammering basically asked: how do we get only readers who shine? Tall task, until ComedyCentral.com’s Dennis DiClaudio jokingly said the words, “Literary Death Match.”

A mighty impressive tale of starting out as an online publisher – Clare Hey, founder of Shortfire Press  shares her experience… what do you think?