Final Draft - picturebook publishing to Kindle

In the last Millenium when I was an illustrator I worked on a lot of books, maybe hundreds, but I got lured away from publishing by the glitzy world of TV design, and my contacts dwindled.

Collins Grammar Rules from way back in 1997

When the fancy TV work dried up around 2005 I started working on a self published kids book as a way of re-presenting myself to the world of publishing, and something I could show an agent, and this was about the time the Kindle came out. The early kindle platform was pretty restricted, with a black and white screen, and tiny file sizes, making it less than ideal.
In fact I used the platform later for the outputs of my 24 Hour Comic Day efforts which were pretty much black and white anyway.

24HCD 2011 kindle version

24HCD 2011 ibooks version

However I never managed to finish the artwork for the proper story as I was distracted again by learning technology.
Then iBooks came along with an iPad platform perfect for the sort of picture books I had in mind,  and even allowing for a flourish of adding "widgets" to the pages, so I dallied with Tumult Hype, and built some samples, but again I never quite managed to finish the thing.

Well now I have.

Finally.

I spent the last Tuesday tarting up images and tweaking text, and then bundled the whole lot up through the completely clunky Kindle Kids Book Creator.
I've uploaded it to the store, and once I've tested it on a range of kindle readers, and had it proofed by Ali  I'll publish it.

34 pages of pics, and some words.
I'm putting it on the kindle store as a paid book, just to see what happens... to be honest I don't expect much,  though I was delighted a few years back when Amazon accidentally sent out cheques to all their suppliers, usually they hold back payments till you make a few quid... I'd clocked up something like £1.29.

Once that's done I'll try the same for the iBooks store, which involves either suffering the pain of iBooks Author (not nice), or the slow and clunky route of adding images to Adobe In Design and then arranging text etc etc.

24HCD "sales" stats through iBooks

I will try and make a short video about the process as it could be useful/interesting, I can say it's nowhere near as involved as it used to be. When the platforms were new it required a phone call to the US tax office, the issue of a special secret "withholding" number and whatnot, now all just tick-boxes and buttons (famous last words).