You’re the Boss Blog: With This Start-Up, Your Favorite Novel Never Has to End

Courtesy of Small Demons. Valla Vakili: “the ultimate place to explore the world of books.”

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The adventure of new ventures.

In 2005, Valla Vakili fell in love with a French crime novel. He was so fascinated by “Total Chaos” and its antihero, a hard-drinking detective from the slums of Marseille, that he rerouted a planned vacation through that city, which is France’s second-largest. There he immersed himself in the character’s world.

“I ate some of the same food, drank some of the same wine,” said Mr. Vakili, a former Yahoo executive. “I felt like I was continuing the experience of the book, and it was pretty awesome.”

The adventure drove him to create Small Demons, a literary search engine that appeared online two years ago. Small Demons catalogs and cross-indexes the people, places and things that appear in books, encouraging readers to explore a world Mr. Vakili calls “the storyverse.” Browsing Small Demons, he explained, is like “getting sucked down the literary rabbit hole and finding all these weird connections.” But is that a business?

Co-Founders: Mr. Vakili is the chief executive of Small Demons. He founded the company with a former Yahoo colleague, Tony Amidei, who handles user experience and design.

Employees: Ten full time.

Location: Los Angeles, with two developers in Seattle and a vice president in New York, working with publishing partners and building the community.

Pitch: “When you finish your favorite book, you get to the last page and it’s the worst feeling in the world,” Mr. Vakili said. “There aren’t many ways of rediscovering it open to you. Small Demons is the ultimate place to explore the world of books. This is the place where the book doesn’t end.”

Traction: Small Demons has signed partnership agreements with the publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Norton, Penguin, Perseus, Random House, Simon Schuster and Sourcebooks. “They have an interest in making books more discoverable online,” Mr. Vakili said of his partners. “They provide us with access to their e-book catalogs. We index it and put it up on the site, then share back the data we tag.”

Small Demons’ database includes more than 10,000 titles. Librarians and booksellers have used it to find books that feature their clients’ obsessions, like Greyhound buses or Paul McCartney. (One reporter couldn’t resist doing a sample search for “Jell-O.” This yielded excerpts from 791 books, from authors like Don DeLillo and Tori Spelling.)

Mr. Vakili would not disclose how many users Small Demons has attracted so far.

Revenue: Negligible. The Small Demons team is still focused on bulking up the site and the database that powers it, Mr. Vakili said. He suggested, though, that it could profit by working like a large discovery engine, telling readers, “If you like this type of media, here’s another type of media that goes with it” — and then making the sale.

Links to outside vendors, including iTunes and Amazon, already appear on the site, encouraging readers to buy the books, films and music that appear in their searches. In the future, Mr. Vakili hopes, Small Demons will attract advertisers, like big-budget Hollywood studios seeking fans of the books they are adapting to film.

Financing: Small Demons has raised $3.2 million in angel and seed financing. Investors include Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of the Social Capital Partnership, and Dave Goldberg, chief executive of SurveyMonkey, along with CampVentures and  Yuri Milner‘s Start Fund.

Marketing: Small Demons has been promoting itself at industry trade shows, like the Frankfurt Book Fair and Book Expo America. Otherwise, the marketing strategy is mostly word of mouth and social media, trying to get people and institutions – including its publishing partners – to refer to it on Twitter and Facebook. “It’s a lot of influencer messaging and marketing,” Mr. Vakili said. “Users are helping make it viral. People want to show how the content they like reveals who they are.”

Competition: Google Books and Amazon’s Search Inside the Book feature let readers hunt for specific mentions of people, places and objects, but neither service connects all those elements for exploratory browsing.

Challenge: “For any start-up, until you hit that point where you’re firing on all cylinders, there’s always more you’d like to do than you can do,” Mr. Vakili said. “Right now, it’s all about feeling sure we’re making the right trade-offs, focusing on the right opportunities and developing them as quickly as possible.”

Small Demons also comes up against digital-age skepticism about books. “There is at times a perception that reading is on the decline,” he said. “It’s just unfortunate at times. You’ll see a lot more video and music start-ups.”

What do you think?

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Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/with-this-start-up-your-favorite-novel-never-has-to-end/?partner=rss&emc=rss