e-picture books by Sandra Horn
This blog is a right cheat, really. As you will know only too well, I am a complete rabbit when it comes to anything more complicated than a pencil, but
someone had asked about the 'how' of creating e-picture books. So I
asked Himself to tell me all about it because he knows and anyway I've
been busy lately what with edebookfest, lifewriting and comedy writing and raiding the goody bag and sorting out the animals, and that's probably enough excuses to be going on with.
Here we go then; the gospel about e-picture books according to Himself.
Now that colour e-readers and tablets are available for a reasonable price and more people, including children, have them, having children's picture books e-published seemed worthwhile. However, the epub and mobi formats are not really suitable for fixed-layout books because of the uncontrolled reformatting, and the requirement to upload from Word isn't helpful. It seemed that the only way to fix the layout was to incorporate the text in the graphic images as a bitmap in Photoshop (or a similar program), drop the images into Word page by page, and upload the whole document. This isn't ideal; the text becomes jagged if magnified and if the image resolution is reasonably high, the files become very large and may fall foul of the upload size limits. Also, they are slow to upload and slow for purchasers to download to a mobile device.
However, the new Kindle KF8 format provided an answer to these problems, but producing books in this format requires some familiarity with HTML formatting. It is covered well by the guide 'Fixed Layout Books for Kindle Fire' by Shirley W Hopkins (a Kindle book price £3.24) but if you don't fancy strugging with this there is a possible short cut. The Kindle KC2 Comic Book Creator module is available to download. It will accept a pdf from your normal desktop publishing sofware and produce a file which will publish satisfactorily in the Kindle store. It's almost idiot-proof! We have used it so far for 'The Crows' Nest', 'I Can't Hear You! I Can't See you!' and 'Suvi and the Sky Folk' and will soon be adding some more of our picture books. Look out for Rory McRory bellowing his way across the universe any day now.
Things are not yet perfect, however. Smashwords still requires an upload via Word, so getting picture books into iTunes, Sony, Barnes and Noble, etc. involves the unsatisfactory process described above and may not yet be worth the hassle.
So far, it must be said, sales have been excruciatingly slow (verging on non-existent). However, the books are up there and out there. They won't be remaindered, we haven't had to raid the zimmer frame fund to print them, we don't need to store them. It just needs time...
This is another attempt to upload this blog, which has changed in subtle ways since my first go last night.
And has changed in some unsubtle ways in the last few minutes! - Sue Price. (That is, I added pictures and links, folks.)
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| Suvi and the Sky Folk |
Now that colour e-readers and tablets are available for a reasonable price and more people, including children, have them, having children's picture books e-published seemed worthwhile. However, the epub and mobi formats are not really suitable for fixed-layout books because of the uncontrolled reformatting, and the requirement to upload from Word isn't helpful. It seemed that the only way to fix the layout was to incorporate the text in the graphic images as a bitmap in Photoshop (or a similar program), drop the images into Word page by page, and upload the whole document. This isn't ideal; the text becomes jagged if magnified and if the image resolution is reasonably high, the files become very large and may fall foul of the upload size limits. Also, they are slow to upload and slow for purchasers to download to a mobile device.
However, the new Kindle KF8 format provided an answer to these problems, but producing books in this format requires some familiarity with HTML formatting. It is covered well by the guide 'Fixed Layout Books for Kindle Fire' by Shirley W Hopkins (a Kindle book price £3.24) but if you don't fancy strugging with this there is a possible short cut. The Kindle KC2 Comic Book Creator module is available to download. It will accept a pdf from your normal desktop publishing sofware and produce a file which will publish satisfactorily in the Kindle store. It's almost idiot-proof! We have used it so far for 'The Crows' Nest', 'I Can't Hear You! I Can't See you!' and 'Suvi and the Sky Folk' and will soon be adding some more of our picture books. Look out for Rory McRory bellowing his way across the universe any day now.
Things are not yet perfect, however. Smashwords still requires an upload via Word, so getting picture books into iTunes, Sony, Barnes and Noble, etc. involves the unsatisfactory process described above and may not yet be worth the hassle.
So far, it must be said, sales have been excruciatingly slow (verging on non-existent). However, the books are up there and out there. They won't be remaindered, we haven't had to raid the zimmer frame fund to print them, we don't need to store them. It just needs time...
This is another attempt to upload this blog, which has changed in subtle ways since my first go last night.
 |
| I Can't See You... |
And has changed in some unsubtle ways in the last few minutes! - Sue Price. (That is, I added pictures and links, folks.)
Comments
Dennis, so far I've got round the illustration thing by dropping the pictures into the text and then saving the whole thing as usual as a .doc and uploading it. It's not ideal, but has worked best so far as full page illustrations with a page break inserted immediately after it.