Tablo Publishing – iBooks Publishing Made Easy

3 thoughts on “Tablo Publishing – iBooks Publishing Made Easy”

1.  
   1) Look around the home page – what is your initial impression of what you see?
        – the background is great but one thing I observed since I have a big monitor the image in the landing page create a white space on the left and right side. Over all the its very great. I like the background-color and color combination.
   2) Think of something you want to find on this website. Now try to find it. Did you find what you were looking for? Was anything confusing?
    –  As I visit your site my first question came up to my mind is how does this site works. And good to say that I found FAQ and it gives me the information I needed. At first in the landing page I read the “We Make iBooks publishing easy” I confused on what is iBook and as I read on the FAQ I understand what’s the meaning of the word.
   3) Are you encouraged to (create a new account, subscribe, sign up for a free trial, etc.)? Can you tell us why (or why not)?
    – At first I’m not really convinced to create an account because honestly I’m not fun of writings.
   4) Go to search engine of your choice and find one other company that offers a similar service. Compare the two companies. Which on do you prefer? Why?
   – This is the site I’ve compared:
   https://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/

      I prefer your site since I can assure that it will sold to the top countries and the steps are very easy basing on your video tutorial. While in the compared site I found very complicated yet there are text to read. I prefer your site because I’m a lazy person. 
   5) Please share any additional feedback/comments you may have.
    – Just add some comment in the landing page. Usually when I visited there’s should be a call to action (like button)  which redirects to your target page which is pricing. And as I see the site I fell like there’s missing in the header. The image in the landing page makes a white space in the left and right of my screen(1920×1080) resolution. 
    

2. 1. My first impression of the home page was that I liked the central image, the tagline, and the intro text, all of which encouraged me to find out more about Tablo, especially since I’m in the process of writing my first ebook. However, I was surprised to discover that the tabs in the navbar were jump links that led me further down the home page. I didn’t care that much for this format and would rather have seen tabs leading to separate pages since I found the length of the home page a bit overwhelming. It seemed as though you tried to squeeze the contents of the whole site onto the home page.

   2. I decided to find out how Tablo works. Was it an app I could download? Was it a SaaS? What was it exactly? I did eventually find out, but it took me a little longer than I would have liked. After looking through the “Features” and “FAQs” sections, I finally found the answer on another page under “More FAQs.” Apparently Tablo is an ebook (or, more specifically, ibook) publisher, and I’d have to publish my book through you in order to make use of your services. Based on the info on the home page, I thought Tablo was a service I could download or access online to manage previously published books. I’ll admit I was somewhat disappointed that I was wrong about that.

   3. Not yet because I don’t know how your pricing and services compare to other publishers. I’ll have to do some research first, and I haven’t gotten to that stage yet.

   4. A search on “ebook publishers” returned the popular Lulu as one of the first results. If you consider Lulu’s home page, you’ll notice that they, too, have an appropriate central image, an appealing tagline, and intro text that clearly identifies their selling points–they’re one of the premiere ebook publishers, and they offer lots of help with editing, marketing, etc. There are navbar tabs in the traditional places as well as two opportunities above the fold to jump right in and find out more about publishing or services. Then the rest of the page is devoted to advertising for their authors. To me, this is good use of home page space. It’s relatively short, all the important information is above the fold, and interested users are encouraged to move deeper into the site to find information. Once you click on the navbar tabs, you’re taken to pages where the information is organized logically and is easily navigable. I’ll admit that some of their pages are a little crowded (e.g., the sidebar in the “Publish” page), but overall, I like the structure of their site better than yours because it’s just more user-friendly.

   However, in terms of their actual service, Lulu is much more expensive than Tablo. And I know they offer some services that you don’t, such as editing, promotional materials, media campaign management, and so on, but they charge an arm and a leg for it, and I see no mention of all the analytic features that Tablo provides. As I see it, Lulu is a luxury service that offers to do it all for the author, whereas Tablo provides valuable sales tools to help the author do things for him- or herself. So it’s a bit like comparing apples to oranges. I WILL say that I think Tablo gives authors more value for their money but lags behind Lulu in presentation.

   5. My first suggestion is to shorten your home page. I’d move everything below the fold to separate pages, accessible from the home page navbar. Since that will leave you with a lot of additional space, I’d also add some selling points that emphasize your analytic tools and the affordability of your services. As I said above, Tablo is going to appeal to a more DIY audience than Lulu and similar publishers attract. Go after that audience by letting them know upfront that you have what they want–affordable support tools so they can manage their sales on their own.

   You also seem to have a video under “Powerful Publishing,” although I didn’t see it right away. If you can add some narration to this and move it up above or closer to the fold, I think that would help introduce your service to visitors. As it is now, it’s almost invisible way down the page.

   My third suggestion is to make sure that everyone understands immediately that you are an ibooks publisher, not a SaaS. Your tagline and intro text make it sound as though you’re going to provide distribution help for existing books. I really think you need to state that Tablo is a publisher with a line like: “Publish your ibook with Tablo! Affordable publishing. Advanced sales support.”

   Finally, I think you need to organize your site more effectively. I’ve already addressed the issue of separate pages for each navbar tab. But then there are other pages that are sort of…hidden. For instance, after I read through the FAQs, I realized there was an additional page with “More FAQs.” Instead, why not keep all the FAQs together on one page, accessible from the navbar tab of that name? Another example: The “Authors Centre” tab ultimately leads to a hub with additional tabs, one of which displays a sample sales report. This is great to see if you’re a visitor, but I would never have known it was here if I hadn’t clicked on “Authors Centre.” It seems to me this should be under “Features” so that visitors can see what they’ll be getting. And so on…

   Bottom line: I think Tablo is an affordable DIY alternative to luxury services like Lulu. If you can rearrange the site a bit so that you emphasize your unique selling points and make things more navigable, I think you might have a winner here.

3. 1) Look around the home page – what is your initial impression of what you see?
   My initial impression was that the homepage was clean, simple and straight to the point. I was able to figure out easily that this site offers publishing of iBooks thanks to the heading “We make iBooks publishing easy…”. I am not familiar with iBooks but the image gave me an idea that this is similar to an ebook.
   I scrolled further down and thought that the homepage felt too long and ended up looking for a “Back to Top” button but there isn’t any.
   The color scheme is good to the eye but when I got to the “Let’s Talk” section, the background color felt too strong for me and was straining to look at.
   Later I figured that this is a single page and I can navigate around by using the links at the top. I mentioned earlier that I felt the homepage was too long, but now I am thinking that it is lacking in info.
    
    
   2) Think of something you want to find on this website. Now try to find it. Did you find what you were looking for? Was anything confusing?
   I wanted to check for more features but as it turns out, everything is in the homepage. I was hoping there was more detailed information available. Like for the “One click, 50 countries” feature, I was wondering whether there is an option to choose which countries to publish the books in. I was also hoping to learn more about the custom templates but seeing that it is marked as Coming Soon, I guess I just have to wait for it. I find that the video demonstrating the publishing process is great and showed how it works once logged in but it did left me hanging on what happens next after clicking “Let’s Publish”.
   I was confused for a moment with the navigation. I was expecting the links to bring me to a different page but all it did was jump to a certain section within the page.
    
    
   3) Are you encouraged to (create a new account, subscribe, sign up for a free trial, etc.)? Can you tell us why (or why not)?
   Since I have no experience in publishing, I want to learn more of how it works but I find it not worth signing up just to test it out. But for people who are already familiar with it, I think the feature of making publishing easier is a good reason to try Tablo out. The interface is simple and looks really quick to get started in publishing books.
    
    
   4) Go to search engine of your choice and find one other company that offers a similar service. Compare the two companies. Which on do you prefer? Why?
   I searched “iBook publishing company” and landed in tyrrellcreative.com. There wasn’t much info about the features they offer either but I felt they explained better why we would need a publisher and not go publishing directly through Apple. It also looks like they offer more services.
   But in terms of simplicity, I prefer Tablo. They have a simple interface for submitting books for publishing and also for viewing reports. I feel like getting started is easier with Tablo as compared to tyrrellcreative’s process – which looks like it doesn’t have an Author Centre similar to Tablo’s.
    
    
   5) Please share any additional feedback/comments you may have.
   Having all the info contained in a single page made me confused for a moment in navigating around. It made me scroll up and down only to realize that I can click on the navigation links at the top to jump to it’s section.
   I feel like the info provided are only quick summaries. There isn’t much detail.
   I see that the Author’s Centre is still in beta. This makes me think whether it is stable enough to use, considering that this section is the main control panel for authors to publish their books.
   I tried clicking on the links under the “Featured Titles” section and it brought me to the apple site in the same tab. I think it would be better if it were to open in a different tab/window cause it made me leave your site when I still wanted to look around.
   For people who are starting out in publishing their books, I think the lack of detailed information in the site can put them off. But for those who already have experience in self-publishing, I think Tablo offers a good service in making things simple. The process is easy and the Author Centre is a big plus.

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