#apps playground

It's been a very strange day. On Friday, the first iPad e-book was released for Apps Playground, the children's app reviews website that my wife and I run. We held off on promoting it until this morning, and since then it's been a bit of a whirl.

First, people tweeted the link and said nice things. Then it started to creep slowly up the UK iBooks store chart – it's currently in the mid-50s of the overall Paid chart, and number one in the Reference category. And then early this evening, Apple featured our book in the Buzz Books section of the store's homepage, right next to Neil Gaiman (pic above).

We won't know what all this means in terms of sales until tomorrow, when we get the first figures from iTunes Connect. But it's been a hugely exciting, meaningful day for a project that's been three years in the making. We feel a bit boggled.

I'm a journalist and my wife Alice is a market researcher – both freelance – but since launching the site in 2010 we've learned about WordPress design, iTunes affiliate partnerships, SEO and social marketing, online advertising, Facebook advertising, Pinterest promotion, design commissioning (when we realised our WordPress design skills no longer cut the mustard!) and most recently, e-book production and distribution – including working with our friend Linda, who came up with the fab cover.

Which is a long, listy way of saying this is something we've built from scratch from our little cottage-industry company, bodging lots of stuff along the way, but where every thousand new readers of the site (and now every sale of the e-book) means so much because it's our thing.

(Obvious caveat: it wouldn't be our thing if it weren't for the imagination, passion and hard work that's gone into the apps we write about – their developers are the real stars of the book).

In truth, how many copies the book sells or how much money it makes aren't as important as it being something we made, and that gives us the confidence to make something else, and carry on from there.

As a journalist, the fact that I started exploring iBooks Author three months ago, and now we have a book on sale that we're proud of, is a hugely exciting thing too, with all manner of implications for the future of what I do. As is the idea of Kindle self-publishing, and Google Play, and...