Publishing
100 Years of Ermintrude is a wonderful example of how an author’s work can be re-purposed for different platforms.
It started life as a PDF download which raised a nice amount of money for breast cancer charity … and ended up with me walking around London in a bra with 15,000 women.
It then morphed into an MP3 and then I wrote two sequels and the printed version of the book appeared a year later.
And now a few years after it was originally conceived, it is being made available on the iPhone and iPod touch.
This, of course, takes the work to a whole new audience in a whole new manner.
The trilogy is being released in installments as iPhone Apps over three months … here’s the schedule:
100 Years of Ermintrude
100 Years of Ermintrude is a narrated ebook with soothing classical guitar background music. It tells the story of a great-great-granny from death to birth.
The story of her life, her loves and her family is told backwards in just 33 stanzas. It’s an ideal story for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Just put your headphones on, snuggle up in a comfy chair and treat yourself to 20 minutes of pure me-time.
“Stunning, I cried, that’s all,” said one reader.
Others said:
“What a stroke of genius to turn it upside down – you’re drawn further and further in, desperate to know what happened before. Very evocative writing, particularly when writing as a small child. I love it and I love Ermintrude and especially the big floppy hat.”
“Really nice app. Very different & relaxing. Great use of voice & txt to tell an unusual, thoughtful story – backwards”
“Endearing. Ideal for the Tube.”
The title was inspired by 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and with the name Ermintrude herself coming from The Magic Roundabout.
Any similarity ends there.
100 Years of Ermintrude now available in the iPhone App Store
If you are an author or a publisher and want to do this, then please get in touch ….
Hi Tom, Happy New Year!
Great to see you have an iPhone app now – it’s on my To Do List for 2010 as well – can you do a post on how you did it? Thanks, and catch up soon, Joanna
Thanks Joanna – just working on four more apps & will summarise when I’ve got a few under my belt showing different aspects of the iPhone for authors – be a good subject for a podcast too – wud u like to schedule another?
[...] who have done this recently are Scott Sigler, Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It as a Vook and Tom Evans, The Bookwright. (Tom will be coming on the podcast soon to talk about how he did it). Also, check out this article [...]