Originally posted on Art by Claire NgM (formerly The Creative Corner) in January 2015:

In this next post on our experience with eBook publishing, I am going to talk about my first step using Amazon’s Kindle Kid’s Book Creator.

Overview

When I started creating the electronic manuscript for publishing on Kindle, it was before the days of the Kindle Kid’s Book Creator. Our book is full of colourful images to complement the story, and because of this, I wanted to ensure that the images were presented perfectly. Using Amazon’s standard KDP Publishing process, though fairly straightforward for text-only books, did not yield the best results for images. My research on the issue led me to the most common solution of tweaking the relevant html code to get to the desired image presentation; a daunting prospect for someone who has very little knowledge of html… After a few months of trying unsuccessfully to correct the image presentation, Amazon launched Kindle Kid’s Book Creator.

This new tool is so much more user-friendly and is built to produce picture books. It also has added features like fun pop-up boxes that allow children to tap text that will expand and pop out for them on their devices. In addition, it accommodates the traditional landscape layout that children’s picture books adopt, and fixes it so that devices default to landscape when opening the book.

Step 1 – Manuscript Creation

Manuscript creation doesn’t start in the Book Creator but in Word. Outlined below is the process that I followed. You may have already thought of some of these steps before starting your creation process, but I discovered and decided a lot as I was going along:

Initial layout

• Start in landscape format, adding story text and inserting images in relevant places.
• Go back to your text and delete passages that you will want to transform into pop-up boxes – pop-up text will be added in the Book Creator.
• Keep a record of the passages that you have omitted for later.

Formatting – text & images

The manuscript is uploaded to the Book Creator in PDF format. Therefore, very little editing of format and presentation can be done once it’s uploaded.

• The Book Creator currently only comes with Georgia font. There is the option to add additional fonts, or the code can be adjusted in CSS to accommodate other fonts. However, my experience with the latter was that it would default back to Georgia in my testing phase on my Android tablet, despite still showing up as my chosen font in the programme itself (I have not established whether this is related to the device I’m testing on or whether it’s a glitch in the programme but it’s something to bear in mind).
• I learnt (the hard way, after days of work!) that the Book Creator font sizes don’t line up with Word font sizes. If you’re planning on adding a mixture of Word text and Book Creator text, do a little experiment first by uploading a small section of text to play with in order to find a close enough match.
• Go back to the images and think about whether or not you want text to appear over them, in which case, add text to the image at this stage (there is functionality in the Book Creator that enables you to add a text box but I found that it always adds the box as a pop-up even though I haven’t selected it – this is something that will hopefully be fixed in the next update to the programme).
• Format your text presentation.

Saving your manuscript

Prior to uploading, the Book Creator presents you with the option either to upload your manuscript as one PDF document, or to upload it page by page.

Choose the latter option.

If you encounter a mistake that you missed on one page, or if you change your mind about anything at all, the latter option enables you to delete and rectify the affected page, without affecting the rest of your manuscript (another lesson I learnt the hard way!).

At this point, you’re ready to upload your manuscript and start reviewing and/or adding features in the Book Creator! More on that next time…

And on another note, our trademark application for our book characters has been accepted :).

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Copyright © 2015 Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.