

Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup - cuchoperl
http://pictorical.com

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cuchoperl
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!

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nandemo
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.

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cuchoperl
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!

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petervandijck
If you're selling books, you're not competing against free ebooks. People who
buy free ebooks are not necessarily the same people that pay money for books.

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nonrecursive
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!

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cuchoperl
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 :)

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vessenes
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?

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

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vessenes
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.

~~~
cuchoperl
Many thanks for sharing your experience :)

About where to place the illustrations: That's a great challenge for us. We
are trying to get as much feedback as possible from kids, dads, professional
storytellers, psychologists, writers, professors etc, to learn where's the
best spot to place the illustration. There's no consensus, but we hope to have
a formed opinion soon.

About the layouts: iBooks renders EPUBs in a funny way. We have improved many
times the way illustrations are formatted each time updating our books in the
iBookstore. We are in the process of updating once again our styling template,
using new CSS3 properties supported by iBooks. We are learning along the way
and improving our books a lot! (If you send me an email to victor at
pictorical com I will send you an updated version of Rapunzel when we have it
ready.)

Thanks for buying the book, supporting Paola and giving us feedback. Please do
a "like" to Paola (the Chilean artist who draw Rapunzel) to send her thanks.

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derrida
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".

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cuchoperl
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.

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egypturnash
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.

~~~
cuchoperl
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.

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

~~~
cuchoperl
That's a great idea, thanks Ruchi!

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bugsy
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.

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

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acabal
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!

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

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schultzi
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.

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

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lazylland
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 !

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

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

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

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petervandijck
Tweeted.

~~~
cuchoperl
Cheers!

