Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup
pictorical.com
pictorical.com
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!
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.
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!
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!
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
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.