Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup

by cuchoperl • 15 years ago

46 28 15 years ago

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Hello, we want to share with the HN community our startup, Pictorical.

We are two nomadic entrepreneurs from Chile, and a growing community of artists worldwide. We illustrate classic stories, publish them as ebooks (in Apple iBookstore- Kindle and Google coming soon) and sharing the profits with the artists fifty-fifty. Artists then can earn money doing art, thats quite difficult for them.

We look forward to your constructive feedback!

nandemo• 15 years ago

Saludos!

Great idea. The book covers on the front page look nice too.

1) $0.99? Why so cheap? For reference the Kindle edition of "A Hunger Artist" costs $2.99.

2) Any plans of selling dead-tree books using a print-on-demand service like Lulu? Some of us still like the feeling of good old paper books. I realize it might be much more expensive but with print-on-demand you have little risk.

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Hola!

1. We will probably be selling longer books a little bit more expensive. We can't forget we are competing against free ebooks!

2. Yes, we will sell illustrated paper books in the near future. And also t-shirts and all sort of things with your favorite illustrations.

Thanks for the feedback!

nonrecursive• 15 years ago

From the screenshots, the quality looks incredible. How long have you been developing the site?

A couple additions that I think would improve the site:

* A "coming soon" section

* A link to the artist's web site

* Artist bio

The design of the site itself was very nice, too.

Good luck!

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Thank you! We did the website itself in 3 days. The company, business model, publishing platform, payment system etc we have been working on it for 6 months part-time and since december full-time.

The coming soon section is a good idea, maybe we can do a "work in progress" where artists show sketches of their illustrations and future readers can comment on them.

The bio and portfolios are coming soon!

Thanks for the compliments on the design... I did it myself and I'm an engineer so I need a little of reassurance there :)

acabal• 15 years ago

This is a great idea, and the books look beautiful. I'd suggest making the site title a horizontal header and lining up the books under that, instead of having two columns. But then again I'm not a designer either. Good luck!

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Thanks! I will try that tomorrow. Thanks for the good wishes.

ruchi• 15 years ago

Congrats, it looks great! Another revenue stream could be offering a customized book based on customer submitted story.

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

That's a great idea, thanks Ruchi!

egypturnash• 15 years ago

This is a pretty cool idea! I'm more an artist than a programmer, so I could see myself maybe using this. I keep on thinking about doing my own edition of Alice in Wonderland...

Do you have plans to hook this up to Amazon as well? I'm nerdy enough to consider doing the markup myself, but if you can automate sending stuff to multiple formats that would start to make it worth half the profits for me.

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

We are now working on the Kindle conversion, and we will have it -hopefully- by late May. And also in a print-on-demand hook so you can sell paper (or dead-tree) books in Amazon as well.

derrida• 15 years ago

How do the artists make money? I hope you are part of the solution, too many operators think they can get art for free by throwing the lable "emergent" in front of "artist".

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

The artists get half of the profits i.e. half of the money that we receive from the store. So, for a $1.99 book, Apple will get $0.59, the artist $0.70 and we get $0.70.

vessenes2• 15 years ago

Oh wow, these look lovely. I will try out with my kids tomorrow, and report back.

p.s. First Chile startup post I've seen on HN, did you take some of the government money that's been much in the press?

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Yes, please tell me if your kids like them. Would be good field-testing ;)

vessenes2• 15 years ago

OK, we bought Rapunzel.

The good -- my five year old daughter loved the illustrations, she thought they were cute and rated the book '5 stars' when I asked her to rate it 1 - 5.

The bad -- the illustrations are placed in funny spots from my perspective; many of them give away bits of the story, and are placed before the text. This is fine for an adult who knows the story, but it ruined some of the fun for her, since she only kind of knows the story.

The weird -- one of the illustrations, the one showing the prince's eyes getting healed -- showed up once, then disappeared and would not re-render; I tried changing fonts, orientation, etc. No go; he's missing. But I'm sure I saw him!!

Overall, fun, and we'll buy another one. A little more time on the layout side of life would have made it a more fun experience. Thanks for getting the artists together, I'm glad to have some classics with fresh illustrations.

bugsy• 15 years ago

This is a great idea and I know it is going to be successful. Please fix your typography though by using balanced ‘single’ and “double” quotes and right-single-quote for apostrophes such as in it’s. It does not look professional to have typewriter style quotes.

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Great feedback, I will check the quotes. Thanks bugsy.

schultzi• 15 years ago

Way cool! This must be the best way I have seen for new artists to get their foot in the door. A great way to build a community around it might be to let users vote on future artist/book pairings.

maukoquiroga• 15 years ago

Thanks schultzi. That's kind of a great idea!

lazylland• 15 years ago

Simple and Amazing at the same time : Congratulations ! I have a feeling that there are going to be some copycat businesses soon, but still wish you all the best !

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Thank you! Please help us to spread the word :)

petervandijck3• 15 years ago

That is AWESOME! Congrats. I think it's a fantastic idea.

cuchoperl13• 15 years ago

Thanks Peter! Please help us to spread the word :)

petervandijck3• 15 years ago

Tweeted.

Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup

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