Show HN: Tablo – Create and publish books socially | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tablo – Create and publish books socially

tablo.io

36 pointsashdav18 comments

> Don't worry about tax details or bank approvals. The only thing you need is a PayPal email address!

That is an incredibly bad idea to phrase things that way. In general, unless you're a tax attorney, you should not ever tell somebody not to worry about tax details. In the US, it's almost certainly the case that income from self-publishing is taxable, and there are lots of details that need to be worried about -- enough that a self-publishing site probably can't even get close to worrying about it for you.

I don't really like the fact that despite having to pay to use the tools you're not getting all the royalties. Like buying carpenter tools and getting 80% royalties off the table you made.

We've had some feedback about this so we're toying with a new pricing model. See http://tablo.io/plans

More inline with a blogging service. Thoughts?

Yeah I think that's pretty okay I guess. I'm guessing it shouldn't look like this: http://i.imgur.com/QfWgsHs.png

Nope, just a mockup. We'll make the real one look pretty :)

That's much better– I came to comment on the same thing. The people with fewer titles are the ones who need the royalties much more so than anyone else so the current pricing comes across as a hedge on one small author blowing up rather than developing an ecosystem which benefits all small authors. I imagine down the line there are many more services you could offer in exchange for royalties that would make sense– the analytics are one except they're very helpful at the base level too. Perhaps an additonal layer/finer grained analytics, a featured catalog, other promotional services, etc...

The value you're providing is not obvious.

It's really easy to publish an infinite amount of books on the Kindle store; I haven't tried iBookstore but I guess it's not very hard either (and do we need to care about them? What's their market share?)

I'm not ready to pay someone to just sit between me and the Kindle store; and I certainly won't surrender any royalties for this.

There are things in your presentation that do sound interesting, though: - early feedback as the book is being written (that could maybe result in good word-of-mouth marketing) - "incredible" sales reports

But in any case, I think the pricing should be more inline with DistroKid ($20 annual flat fee, 100% royalties, infinite amount of titles).

Looks nice, but there are three things that I absolutely need for any book publishing platform.

* The ability to sell multiple packages, each with different files

* The ability to capture buyer's emails

* The ability to set my own arbitrary pricing

No publishing site on the internet does this, and I am not about to give up these benefits just so I can have some automated convenience.

>The ability to capture buyer's emails

why? I just want your book, why do you need my email?

As an author, it's beneficial to at least ask you for it, so that you can be added to an email list and be appraised of new projects and sent other relevant information. Lots of people are happy to sign up for email lists like that as long as the content is mostly informative and not too much of a sales pitch.

Nathan Barry uses Gumroad, as he suggests in his book 'Authority' for the above reasons. It's not really a 'book' publishing platform though, or at least it's not specific to that.

I'm not entirely convinced it's the best thing for most authors, but that's a longer post for another time.

Authority is where I got these requirements ;), and yes, its best suited for technical books IMO.

There's some encoding issues here. Can't write æøå, which is important letters in the norwegian language.

And it is seriously slow now, might be where it's been deployed, might be that I'm waiting for googleadservices on each page load. Might be the hug of death from hn.

NoScript says your site is attempting an XSS attack.

Nice job! Question, are you guys using an API so users can share their contributions/writing potentially to other platforms?

Crowdfunding should be free, pageviews, editor needs to be like penflip, collaboration like social github, dedicated ircs, all billed by dedicated storage standards. Focus on the real service: publishing to multiple bookstores, ISBNs and collaboration.

Hey! You're the guys I saw in the Avalon lounge Saturday night.

Hope my drunken pool playing didn't annoy you too much. Things seem to be getting off to a good start with Tablo—good luck!

Can you comment on the pricing structure? Breakdown why exactly it is $99?

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