A new marketing opportunity for Serif?

[John Kay]

I remember the good feeling I used to have as a Serif user when I felt that the management were really keen to listen to and take heed of the suggestions and the feelings of its users.
Serif, now as serif affinity, gets larger and has made substantial inroads into Adobe profits from through superior and affordable know you are getting an yet software it also seems to the humble user that they are getting away from this friendly tradition.
There is a comparative newcomer on the software block that it would be profitable to take a profound look at, Scrivener.
It is taken up with alacrity and enthusiasm by the large number of people who would write fiction and other kinds of texts with the express end-purpose of publication. The slack for this has been taken up by many publish-on-demand firms who make large profits from this market.
With all its many uses and facility in organising text, Scrivener is not however quite as good at producing final PDFs for printing.
I'm sure there are many of these Scrivener users who would like to know the excellent means of making these PDFs offered by Affinity Publisher.
If you want to see the support for this program, all you have to do is to google "Scrivener" and "videos".
Lo and behold, a multitude of amateur and professional tuitional videos will appear by the many enthusiastic about this program. Most of them seem to be Apple users as well as long-term Scrivener enthusiasts. To me they seem to offer all the makings of potential customers for Serif.
They also tend to A New Marketingprovide extra evidence that the many exPageplus users who specialise in publications which are heavy in textual content should perhaps be better catered for in their requirements for editors and footnotes.
 Just a thought that I felt could be of interest to those that make decisions.
John

[Guest]

FWIW many folks using Scrivener export to Word (industry standard) for final edits/review, and then on to InDesign (another industry standard) for final layout and export to print ready and digital pdf as well as epub. The workflows they have established are very well known and used throughout the industry, and I suspect will be very hard to disrupt.

A growing number of self-published authors and small indie publishers will often export to Word (to do final edits/reviews) and then import that document in Vellum (Mac only) which will allow them to format and style their book and then publish both epub and pdf files suitable for distribution to all ebook marketplaces, as well as print ready pdf files suitable for print-on-demand services such Amazon, Ingram Spark, etc.

I’m not saying there isn’t potential for Affinity within these groups, but it would need to go far beyond marketing, and clearly illustrate why using Affinity products would improve their workflows, enable them to work faster/cheaper, or create vastly superior output. As it stands, Affinity doesn’t do any of these things for these groups, so I can’t imagine it would even be worth the marketing investment (and could potentially damage the Affinity brand if new user expectations don’t align with the current reality). Perhaps if excellent epub export was supported it might help, but I find it hard to believe many publishers would currently invest in migrating to Publisher in their workflows when InDesign is the industry standard and all of their workflows (incl. extensive automation) are built around it. Mistakes are too expensive in an industry where margins are thin already.

[John Kay]

Thanks for that Bryan, a very well explained contribution and I do appreciate your points. As you can perhaps gather, I am one of the book publishers who deal with large text heavy publications, even though there are many illustrations in my books, there tends to be a heavy set of textual content through the whole book. I have also published translations and local history books. I frequently need footnotes and cross-references so I do currently have an axe to grind.
John

[kaffeeundsalz]

Not sure how you'd define a newcomer, but Scrivener has been around for ~15 years now.

[John Kay]

Sorry about the term, but I am pretty old, my first computer was a Commodore 64 and I started using PagePlus from when it was first put on the market in the 1980s.
John

[Ali]

1 minute ago, John Kay said:

I started using PagePlus from when it was first put on the market in the 1980s.
John

So did I, and I'm still using it. Too much that Affinity Publisher doesn't yet do that I need for me to switch.

[Guest]

Ah, I LOVED the Commodore 64, my first computer was an Apple ][e and ended up on Macs from the mid 80s on. I recall using Brøderbund’s “Print Shop” on the C64 in the early 80s to create flyers, etc. I had never run across Serif prior to the release of their Affinity apps. Is there any history of Serf published anywhere? It would be fascinating to look back at how they started, and their journey to where they are today.

 

[John Kay]

Yes Bryan you'll probably find it on Wikipedia.

John

[Ramon56]

I have used Scrivener myself, and agree that Serif would have a good opportunity in grabbing the market for indie authors and small publishers.

However, Scrivener has a couple of things that Publisher does not have, which is surprising because its predecessor (Pageplus) had them:

1. Export to RTF and ePub
2. Modular (combination of several files such as separate chapters and viewing/publishing them as a single book)
3. Footnotes/Endnotes
4. Internal cross-linking