The iPhone entrepreneurs – Neal Hoskins of WingedChariot Press

When Neal Hoskins left his job at Oxford University Press to set up a boutique publisher of english versions of children’s picture books from all over the world, booksellers and others in the industry raised a doubting eyebrow.

It’s just too hard to sell children’s books from non-english speaking authors to parents in the UK, they said.

Four years later and Neal’s business, WingedChariot Press, is one of those leading the publishing industry into the brave new world of digital, with the launch of an application (App) for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

He joins a growing band of ‘iPhone entrepreneurs’ who recognise the potential of the mobile platform to prompt innovation and disrupt the distribution models of traditional industries like publishing.

The picture book App, called ‘The Surprise’, has a simplicity and charm which parents and children alike will enjoy – very much in the spirit of Apple’s own design ethic.

It’s digital, but it’s also warm, benefiting from the gestures and beautiful screens of the iPhone and the Touch.

Distribution, distribution, distribution

With startup funding from the Arts Council, WingedChariot published its first books at the end of 2005, but rapidly found getting them into shops was the real challenge. As Neal admits:

Distribution is the hardest puzzle to solve and in some ways you should look at that first before throwing yourself into the deep end, but if you did you’d probably never take the plunge.

A link up with Walker Books in the UK has helped, but the distribution possibilities of the iPhone and other mobile devices was one of his main reasons for exploring digital.

It also has the potential to make WingedChariot, more of a publisher, rather than a translation, marketing and re-publishing business for foreign language picture books.

With digital overheads so much lower than printing and shipping dead trees to bookshops, Neal has ambitions to bring on new artists and authors who wouldn’t normally attract the attention of mainstream publishing companies.

Developing for the iPhone

A chance meeting with a developer at the Bologna Book Fair began the initially daunting phase of getting an App built.

In fact, although slow and sometimes difficult to begin with, Neal has learned a lot along the way about how to manage the publishing process in this new medium.

It was quite a tortuous process for us to learn how to work within that framework, how we work with editorial, images and so on. But I think it taught us a great deal. If this is really going to take off, we’ll want to develop ourselves in-house.

Of course, large publishers are already experimenting with Apps.

But by being in there early and by creating a new process and browser-based platform to streamline production and distribution on mobile, publishing minnow WingedChariot, like lots of disruptive startups in the web/tech space, has given itself the best chance to compete with larger rivals.

Marginal Margins and Speaking in Tongues

The irony is, despite slashing printing, distribution and other costs associated with getting a £15 children’s picture book into the hands of eager young readers in bookshops, margins for a 56p story in Apple’s App store are just as slim, if not slimmer.

And that’s the fundamental challenge. Will it pay?

Neal recognises pricing is untested and a bit of an experiment.

But plans to up the frequency of new titles, develop an App for WingedChariot itself to house collections of picture books and the promise of audio and images as a tool to teach reading, suggest there’s a lot of potential to sell in volume. The kind of volumes that even large publishing houses would envy.

WingedChariot’s roots are in publishing foreign language books in translation. And language may again be its biggest opportunity in the digital world.

Multi-lingual versions of its picturebook apps and the borderless appeal of the illustrations themselves, mean being big in Japan, Brazil, Russia and China is a real ambition, not a pipe dream.

As Neal says:

If we get this right, it gives us possibilities beyond our wildest dreams.

Like the books it publishes for kids, the WingedChariot story looks set to be a colourful adventure.

Let’s hope it has a happy ending.

Alex is the founder and editor of SmallBizPod, the UK's first podcast dedicated to small business, start-ups and entrepreneurship. Alex writes about topical small business issues, entrepreneurs and anything else that catches his eye here on the small business blog. http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk