Next-Generation Publishing Platform Hyperink Wants To Transform Blogs Into Books

YC company Hyperink, a next-generation digital book publishing platform, is debuting a new service which helps bloggers create short books from their existing content.

As we’ve reported in the past, Hyperink wants to disrupt the book publishing world. The startup’s digital book publishing platform and full-service agency will help any aspiring author write, design, publish, market, and sell a book without any up-front fees. Hyperink wants to represent the long-tail of book demand. Hyperink’s books production costs are under $1,000 on average, and are published in under a month. And also offers higher royalty rates, and give authors up to 50 percent of their earnings (many publishers give authors around 25 percent).

With the “Blog To Books” program, Hyperink assigns a staff editor to curate a blogger’s posts, structure them into a narrative format, and then create a book in PDF, epub, and mobi formats. This book is then published to Hyperink’s marketplace, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and Kobo (iBooks are coming soon).

Hyperink has developed a set of marketing tools for the blogger too (e.g., a widget to include on their blog) and can also update the book over time, too, based on new content.

So far, Hyperink has already done this with a few bloggers including Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal, and investor Brad Feld of Feld Thoughts. Both books are on track to make tens of thousands of dollars this year, says Hyperink.

Of course, Amazon also offers a short-form publishing platform via Kindle Single’s but Hyperink CEO Kevin Gao says that while the lengths are similar the startup is focused around curation as opposed to just publishing original content with “Blog to Books.” Basically, the blogger writes a forward, and editors will copy-edit and fact check all blog posts and suggest titles.

He adds that not every blog will have enough compelling content for a short book; but he does feel that there is a definite opportunity for thought leaders to package their blog posts into readable formats off the web.

Hyperink has raised $1.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, SVAngel, Lerer Ventures, Launch Capital, Cyriac Roeding, Jack Abraham and others