Authors Electric

In between bouts of editing the Sterkarms, I've been having a look at Kindle Kids' Book Creator. I'm interested because I'm hoping to publish some picture books, with my brothers as illustrators. Brother Adam's chapati chasing tiger So, what does the Kindle Kids' Book Creator offer? It allows you to import art work in jpeg, tif or png format (it says here. The only one of them I know anything about is jpeg.) It recommends, however, that you save your book as 'a multi-paged PDF file,' with the cover included as the first page, and upload it like that - which is what my brothers and I will be doing. The part that really interests me, though, is the 'text pop-ups.' Since the text will probably be embedded in the art-work, and might be viewed on the small screen of a mobile phone, it will be quite hard to read. Kindle Kids allows you to programme in a 'text Brother Andrew's goat-bothering troll pop-up'  - ...

     My book, The Wolf's Footprint, has had quite a history. The Wolf's Footprint, original cover: Parkin It was first written, long ago, as a 300 word picture book text, for a conventional publisher. To be honest, I forget which one, I've worked with so many.      The editor who asked for it was enthusiastic - but picture books are always a hard sell. They're expensive to produce as paper books, and have to be pre-sold to a large market to make them viable. This means producing a book where both story and illustrations appeal to either Europe or the US as well as the UK. In the end, The Wolf's Footprint didn't make it as a picture-book.      Some time later, Hodder asked for a short story that would appeal to young children. So I expanded The Wolf's Footprint, and turned it into a longer story for rather older children. Hodder accepted it, found an artist, and produced a rather attractive book, (see above) with excellent i...