About Book Hatchery
The Story
Book Hatchery was born from serendipity. Nick Cash, Founder of Book Hatchery, has provided free tutoring on the ways of computer programming for students at his local university for many years. After repeatedly watching students become frustrated and annoyed with their expensive, low quality, and hard to understand textbooks, he began thinking about writing his own eBook on computer programming for beginners. After spending weeks researching how to market and sell eBooks, he was completely disappointed with the solutions. A short time later Book Hatchery was born.
As it stood, there was no way to easily publish across all online eBook retailing platforms. Doing so manually was logistically intensive and annoying -- annoying enough that very few people were even bothering to do it at all. However, maximizing revenue is linked with the number of retailers through which you sell. Because of this, Book Hatchery would redefine how eBook publishers do business online by allowing them to easily publish and manage their publications on these mediums. With this vision, Nick became heavily involved with the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center at the University of Northern Iowa. He applied for and received space in the Student Business Incubator; this provided Book Hatchery with a home and an incredible environment in which to grow. Nick then set his sights on the John Pappajohn New Venture Business Plan Competition, knowing a win would help Book Hatchery hit the ground running. His dreams came alive in February 2010 when he won the competition, allowing Book Hatchery to formally launch and begin changing the online publishing world.
Book Hatchery's beta launched in October 2010. Since then we have worked with more than 100 authors on over 30 titles, and we are still growing. And our initial success has not gone unnoticed. Book Hatchery's Founder was named one of five finalists in Entrepreneur Magazine's College Entrepreneur of 2010 contest. Book Hatchery was also named one of Inc.com's Coolest College Startups in 2011. Book Hatchery also won the Student Innovation of the Year at the Technology Association of Iowa's Prometheus Awards in 2011.
Book Hatchery is growing and has a very bright future. We are currently raising capital to expand our staff and launch Book Hatchery 2.0 later this year.
The Team
Nick Cash craves knowledge. All of it. One might say his thirst for knowledge is insatiable. He often ends up with twenty Wikipedia tabs open after looking up the article of the day, and consequently knows a lot about many strange things (did you know killer whales are actually dolphins?). When not devouring text or listening to talks at TED.com, he attends classes in Economics and Computer Science at the University of Northern Iowa. Nick's fascination with technology began early in his life. His parents decided to get broadband internet in 1999, and his life was forever changed. He began making web sites in 6th grade, video games in 8th grade, and eventually made an entire 2-D game engine in high school. As a college freshman he was scouted by Lockheed Martin and spent a summer writing flight control software for the Federal Aviation Administration. He later worked for a few years as an embedded systems software engineer before launching Book Hatchery. Nick has always been a writer; he mostly dabbles in the science fiction or fantasy genres. Today, his biggest fiction writing adventures occur every November when he attempts writing a 50,000 word novella for National Novel Writing Month. In high school he began a blog which he maintains to this day.
Dan Cash is a slayer of demons and system errors. His best work happens via the arcane art of the linux command line as he probes to understand the heart and soul of the machines. Since joining Book Hatchery, his main goal is to make sure the website is always available for the authors we serve while also protecting it from the darker parts of the interwebs. In his spare time he loves to read anything with dragons, but no one really knows what all he has hidden away on his precious Nook. When coding, he pretends he is casting magical spells in the hope that one day Python will bestow upon him its secret powers. At night, he dreams of someday releasing the supercomputer that lies dormant in all graphics cards.
Brian Lewis is a bullet dodger and maker of system errors. To create something, one must destroy after all, and his weapons of choice are PHP and JavaScript. When he's not writing code for the web, he's either spending time with the kids in his enormous extended family or trying to graze curtain fire in the Touhou Project video games he is terrible at. Who knows, maybe one of these days he'll play a game or two on the normal difficulty instead of easy.
Taylor Boude is Book Hatchery's social networking paragon. She joined the Book Hatchery team in late November 2010, and her job entails communicating with authors, posting on forums, and establishing Book Hatchery's presence on Facebook and Twitter. Hailing from the small town of Jefferson, Iowa, Taylor started attending the University of Northern Iowa for Social Work and Spanish in 2010 (although she’s keeping her mind open). She enjoys reading and even writes a little herself, a hobby that is common in her family.
People Behind The Scenes
Book Hatchery is supported by an amazing group of people. While it would be impossible to enumerate them all, Book Hatchery owes its existence to the staff at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center. Their expertise and support has been invaluable, and will continue to be into the future.