Given that NOOK Color has a majority female market demographic, I thought that decoration and customization would be a clear winner within NOOK Apps. Also given that end users tend to be a-technical, packaging as a Live Wallpaper meant simplifying adding them via Wallpaper Manager and making them easy to use. Ideally I wanted to avoid any type of settings within the apps and have all interactions occur on the desktop. My expectations were that I would most likely break even against licensing of images and open up the market for wallpapers on the device. Little did I know
With licensed images in hand, Android SDK, and configured Eclipse, I went about coding up a simple interactive live wallpaper for image viewing. The codebase started very simple and I build in image automation using ANT and ImageMagick. I used Adobe Fireworks for master image manipulation and cropping and added support for opening the Wallpaper Manager via API (Android Intent) and deep linking into NOOK Shop via API (Android Intent) for cross-promotion. By the end of the weekend I had built 3 live wallpapers.account and entered in all my banking info, and added all 3 apps for meta-data approval. Working with my wife Linda we decided to brand everything Abbeys Wallpaper given the demographic and marketing fit. When the apps were approved I uploaded the final APKS, final icons, and screenshots and waited til the apps were approved and published. Once published to Shop we began to get some eye turning reports
June 17 Fri $412 Interesting..
June 18 Sat $722 Almost double day 1. All right!
June 19 Sun $746 WOW Wait is this a mistake?
After the first weekend of sales we were break even on costs of 30 licensed images and selling the collections at $0.99 each was doing very well with end users.
Today total revenue sits at $19,630.43 against costs of $6800 plus 40+ hours of my time, for a profit of $12,830.
I never anticipated that on weekends I would find myself packaging Live Wallaper nor did I ever expect to see a market for wallpaper exist on NOOK. I had doubt that I would break even and the results today seem amazing to me given I work for Barnes & Noble on the NOOK Apps team. In doing research against my success, apps and games are yielding 10x results to what I have been seeing with wallpapers. The customers attached to NOOK Color have no hesitation to purchase interactive content, they are the same customers that have been purchasing content from Barnes & Noble for years and as they say habits die hard. Given that apps tend to do far better overall, I am refocused on providing apps and games onto NOOK Apps but will continue to push in wallpapers via automation from time to time. Obviously one can dismiss this as a small success but the proof is that there is a real market of consumers attached to NOOK Color and they do not hesitate to purchase digital content. Even things as simple as wallpapers sell well provided the content is of quality. All told with about 40 hours of weekend work, it has yielded a small side business for me and my family and I have learned a ton about the market attached to NOOK