With Scripted, I had used their Kindle Create software program to format both the ebook and paperback, and in the end it wasn't too difficult. It turns out you can't really do that with illustrated books. They have software specifically for children's books called Kindle Kids' Book Creator, but it only exports ebook formats. I knew I wanted a paperback version, so I had to... gulp... learn to format it myself.
There are actually some nice video tutorials out there about how to format a picture book on Word or Canva. I chose Word because Canva's measuring tools are more approximate, and I wanted to have the exact paper size. Also, you can export your Word document as a PDF and then upload that to Kindle Kids' Book Creator and thus get the ebook to look exactly like your paperback.
The first thing I discovered was there are specific sizes Kindle will publish an illustrated book in. I went for a square 8.75x 8.75 because it seemed to be fairly common, and my pictures were all squares already.
The next thing I discovered is Kindle will only publish a paperback if it has at least 24 pages.
Uh-oh.
I had only prepared thirteen illustrated pages.
The idea of creating more pictures was exhausting. First I would have to come up with more magical creatures and clothes they do or don't wear, then rhyme them. And then I would have maybe another month or two of work making the pictures.
Or... I could just put the words on separate pages. Children's books do this all the time. The words are on one page, and the illustration is on the page facing it. I decided to do that, as I could easily reach 24 pages doing that. With the title page, copyright page, acknowledgements, and the author page at the end, I even had a few pages that had the text right on them as I had originally planned and still reached 24.
I do wish I had created more pictures that would completely stretch across both pages. When I was making the pictures on Stable Diffusion, the default output was 512x512, so everything came out as a square. It would have required more time, but I could have made more pictures that were 512x1024 so the text was on a background that was more interesting than a solid color or a simple gradient. But that would have needed to happen early on in the process.
The next thing I discovered is that there are magic numbers in printing. When you have a book with lots of pages, this isn't as important, but when you have, I would say, less than fifty, it's a bigger deal. This video does a fair job of explaining why.
Basically, because of the way book pages are cut and bound, you want to have a multiple of sixteen pages, but multiples of eight are acceptable. Otherwise, you're going to end up paying more because the printer has to use up an extra sheet (or half-sheet) of paper for your extra pages.
Well, there was no way I was making it to 32 pages, so 24 exactly was my goal. In retrospect, I wish I had written the book with all this in mind so I could have 32 pages. I probably would have written more.
The next thing I discovered was bleeding. It turns out if you want to ensure your pictures run all the way to the edge of the page, you actually have to format the book so each picture hangs off the edge just a little bit, .125" inches on the top, bottom, and outer edge. Also, because of the way pages are cut, there's a little bit of uncertainty about how much of the image will be cut out between each printed book. Thus, you want to make sure that really important things, including text, are at least .25" away from the edge of the page. That's called the safe zone. I ended up having to add a little more to some pictures because some key details (a pair of socks, for example) weren't in the safe zone. I used a tool in Photopea called Content-Aware Fill to easily add a centimeter or two to said pictures without having to completely redo them. I also had to shrink some text to get it to fit in the safe zone.
Again, if I had known about these formatting requirements, I would have made may pictures a little different from the beginning, making sure my subjects were more centered to ensure they wouldn't get cut off.
Well, I finally had my book all formatted, with everything inside the safe zones and the pictures bleeding all the way off the end of the page (this probably isn't the correct terminology...). I uploaded the ebook for pre-orders about two weeks ahead of my chosen publication date, and ordered a proof of the paperback to make sure it looked good.
While waiting for my proof to arrive, I sent out a few ARCs, set up an author website with the help of my programmer husband (please don't ask me to explain that process. All I know is I now have a website), set up an author profile on Facebook, and started an application with the copyright office. I'll have to let you know how that last one turns out later. There's now an option to say some of your work is copyrightable and some isn't. I explained that my text is completely my intellectual property, but the artwork was created using AI and heavily edited, and left it up to them to decide how much of it to copyright. I won't hear back from them for a while, though.
Another side note on copyrighting, I wish I had waited a few days between publishing the ebook and the paperback, because if you have a physical version of a work, they require you to send in a physical copy, which of course costs money. If there's only an electronic version, you can just send that in, and that is cheaper (although you still have to pay the $70 fee). There's also the question of whether officially copyrighting a self-published work is worth it, but since AI was involved, I really wanted to know how much of my book was my intellectual property in the eyes of the US government.
My proof arrived and I discovered one last thing: how a picture looks on your screen isn't how it looks in printed format. Things that were easily readable on my monitor were not so on the page. The darker pages were really dark in the book, and there were even a few pages with bright, saturated colors that were... hard on my eyes.
I fixed the difficult to read text by switching from black to white or the other way, but I wasn't sure how to fix the saturation problem. I realize now I probably could have easily brightened the pictures using Photopea, but at the time I ended up approving the pictures as they were and hoped others wouldn't mind the self-published author's first time children's book had some imperfect illustrations. And then, once it was published, I realized how easily I could fix the problem, but I felt guilty changing the book when so many people had already bought it, and why did people who bought the book later deserve a nicer-looking one than my loyal fans who bought it when it first came out?
So, if you bought the book and you've wondered why some pages are oddly dark or not the soft pastels of most kids' books, I'm sorry. As I've read other books with my kids, I realize there are few picture books that actually use the color black. Most of them use dark grey and your mind tells you it's black. Anyway, one more thing I've learned in this journey is to go lighter than you think you need to, or turn down the brightness on your monitor so you get a better idea of how it will look when printed, or give yourself more time from when you order proofs to when your book goes live so you have time to examine the printed book, ponder over issues, and fix them, with maybe even more time to get a second proof and make sure that one looks right.
My kids have yet to complain about the pictures, and no one else has mentioned the darkness or saturation problem, though, so maybe it's just me being a perfectionist.
If I ever write another picture book, there are definitely some things I'll do better, but for now I'm going back to working on novels. Kindle Create does all the formatting work for me with those.
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