Why We Publish Books and Apps Together

A book press that also ships software

Basalt Sea Press is a small Native-owned house in the Klamath Basin. We publish books. We also build software, and that surprises people. Spirals of Kemush is a paperback and a companion iOS app. The basin itself has two small games we made about its water and its fish, Salmon Run and Return of the C'waam. The question I get most often is why a press that could just make books spends the time to make apps at all. This has been deliberate from the start, and the reason comes down to who actually ends up holding the work.

The reader who never opens the book

A book asks for a lot before it gives anything back. Someone has to care enough to buy it, carry it home, and sit with it long enough for the material to take hold. Most of the people who would gain something from the Modoc origin cycle, or from the story of a fish called the c'waam, will never do that on their own. A book asks a reader to walk through a door they have already decided to open.

A game asks for thirty seconds. Someone taps it on a phone, starts moving, and the material is already working on them before they have decided anything. Salmon Run puts you inside a salmon trying to make it up a river. Return of the C'waam does the same with the Lost River sucker, a fish almost nobody outside the basin has heard of, and one the Klamath Tribes have fought for decades to keep alive. You learn the shape of the water by moving through it. Some of those players come away wanting more, and when they do, the book is there waiting.

What each form carries well

The book holds depth and sequence. The twelve myths in Spirals of Kemush move in an order that matters, and the companion guide behind them traces the cosmology slowly, on the page, where that kind of reading belongs. I wrote about how the paperback and the app divide that labor in The Spirals Model, and the short version is that the page is where the careful, patient work lives.

The apps and the games carry motion, image, sound, and the feeling of doing something with the material yourself. Craft a Mythos, inside the Spirals app, hands you the six-beat structure the Modoc myths are built on and lets you assemble your own. The two Klamath games let you feel the pressure a fish is under in a river that has been dammed and warmed and drawn down. A paragraph can describe that pressure well. A game lets you live inside it for a few minutes and lose.

The two forms hold each other up

This is where the pairing earns its keep. A player who finishes Return of the C'waam and then reads about the fish already understands the stakes in their body. A reader who finishes the book and then opens the game watches the ecology they read about turn into a system they can push against and fail at. Each form deepens the other. A teacher can hand a child the game and know the ecology is already going in before a single page gets read. The person who arrives through one and then finds the other almost always says some version of the same thing, that they did not realize there was this much here.

It works because both forms are rooted in the same ground. Everything we make comes out of the Klamath Basin and the people who belong to it, which is the whole editorial idea behind the press. I have written more about that in what Basalt Sea Press publishes, and about why a Native-owned press matters for this material in particular.

Why we build this way on purpose

Plenty of publishers add an app to a book as an afterthought, a marketing wrapper with a slideshow inside it. We work the other way around. The software gets built first as its own finished thing, a real game that has to be worth someone's time even if they never buy a book. Then it happens to point back toward the books for the people who want to go further. Salmon Run stands on its own. The paperback stands on its own. The model holds because both ends are real and neither one is pretending.

The economics help too. A small game and a small book both have clean distribution, the App Store on one side and print on the other. Both are cheap to keep alive once they exist. Both reach a different kind of person than the other would. For a small press with a limited budget, this is how you put an origin cycle or a threatened fish in front of far more people than a print run alone could ever reach. You can see the whole list on the catalog.

The books and the software are two ways into the same country. We keep making both because the country is worth entering from more than one direction.