Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup

Hello, we want to share with the HN community our startup, Pictorical.<p>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.<p>We look forward to your constructive feedback!

From the screenshots, the quality looks incredible. How long have you been developing the site?<p>A couple additions that I think would improve the site:<p>* A "coming soon" section<p>* A link to the artist's web site<p>* Artist bio<p>The design of the site itself was very nice, too.<p>Good luck!

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

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".

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 <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>...<p>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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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 !

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