Author Tools & Resources

Want to turn your book into an app? Here’s how to do it.

Authorly LogoQ&A with David of Authorly.

When I heard about Authorly, the nerd in me got very excited. I see books moving in the direction of interactive apps in the near future, but in the meantime they can be very expensive and time-consuming to produce. So what is an author without the backing of a big publisher or the right tech/coding skills to do? Enter Authorly, a tool that does just the trick. I asked David Hooper from Authorly my burning questions in the Q&A below, and Authorly are very generously offering all 30 Day Books’ readers the chance to create a free Authorly interactive app! See below for details of this great offer.

1. Tell us what Authorly is in under 100 words

Authorly is a tool that lets children’s book authors and illustrators easily and affordably turn their stories into interactive applications and publish them to the Apple App Store, Google Play App Store, and Kindle Fire App Store.

Authorly app

2. What inspired it?

After creating custom storybook apps for New York Times’ best selling author, Carl Sams, we recognized that there was a problem. Custom app development took 6 months or more and costed tens of thousands of dollars. There was no guarantee that the creator would make that money back or that it would be worth their time. More importantly authors wanted control over the look and feel of their app. They didn’t want their creative vision to get lost in translation when communicating with developers.

We decided to remove the developers from the equation and give authors & illustrators a tool to create and publish high quality, interactive apps themselves…no coding needed and no need to hire a computer genius. Now authors can forget about the custom developers, the thousands of upfront dollars, and the wasted time associated with app development and can bring their stories to life with Authorly.

3. What kind of authors can benefit from using Authorly?

Authorly was designed with children’s book authors & illustrators in mind. Any author, illustrator, or publisher that wants turn an existing print book into a digital app would certainly benefit from Authorly. Even an author that has a new story that they’ve yet to create, but would like to tell in the form of an interactive app would benefit from Authorly.

It is important to note that Authorly works best for visually driven narratives such as picture books.

4. How much time and money is spent invested in creating an Authorly app?

This depends on a few different factors such as the number of books you plan to publish, the length of your books, how many interactive features you’d like to add to each book, and whether or not you have all of media ready to go (illustrations, sounds, videos, text and font, etc…).

Creating an Authorly app can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. There are no upfront costs associated with creating and publishing your app. We simply take 20% of the revenue that your apps generate. Additionally, if you don’t want to create the app yourself and would prefer us to do it for you, we charge a production fee of about $20 per page.

Currently, as part of our private beta, we are letting select authors & book illustrators create and publish apps for free and keep all of the revenue that their apps generate. We’d like to extend the same offer to your readers. If anyone reading this would like create and publish 1 free interactive storybook app with Authorly, visit our landing page and sign up for your free account!

Authorly logo


5. Where can the final app be published/ bought?

Once you’re finished with your app you can publish to the Apple App Store, the Google Play App Store, and the Kindle Fire App Store directly through our user interface. You just click a button and we handle the hard stuff.

6. Anything else authors should know about Authorly?

We want to give your readers exclusive access to Authorly’s private beta. This means that they will be able to create a free account, create 1 free storybook app with Authorly, publish their app to all of the major app marketplaces, and keep all of their app’s revenue! If interested, sign up here to start creating your free storybook app!

Find out more about making apps with Authorly…