Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup(pictorical.com)
pictorical.com
Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup
http://pictorical.com
11 comments
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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!
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 :)
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 :)
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?
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?
Yes, please tell me if your kids like them. Would be good field-testing ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great feedback, I will check the quotes. Thanks bugsy.
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!
Thanks! I will try that tomorrow. Thanks for the good wishes.
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.
Thanks schultzi. That's kind of a great idea!
That is AWESOME! Congrats. I think it's a fantastic idea.
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!