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).

In Design CC 2014

My target for the holiday period is to finish at least one of the children's books I have in development hell.
The biggest issue was that iBooks author is a bit rubbish for creating static layout books, and when it does work it insists on using templates with tables of contents, and chapters... great for academic works, not so good for picture books.

Luckily Adobe In Design has an export to a static layout epub3 format, which will work nicely on an iPad, and I'm hoping will upload into the iBooks store with ease (just as soon as it's back from it's holidays)
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/how-to/ebook-fixed-layout.html

So I did a quick trial adding pictures to pages, and exporting and iBooks on my mac opened it just fine.
I stuck the ePub in Dropbox and opened it on my iPad, and again it worked just fine.

So now I need to examine which images are ok, and which need updating... Which turns out to be a fair bit if I'm critical... If I'm a little more relaxed I reckon there's about 5 pages of proper work, then lots of tweaking.

iBooks Authoring with Ninja Dinosaurs

I've been colouring some of the images I sketched for the iBooks Authoring effort...I'm still not sure what sort of optimisation I need for the book, the screen of an iPad 3 is 2048x1536 pixels... at around 300dpi.. The advice on the apple support pages is to use JPGs, and keep the whole book below 2Gb...Aside from that it seems pretty open to interpretation. So I'm working at around 2048x1536 at 300dpi, RGB colour, and saving at 10 in jpg. This is giving an image size of about 400kb, so for 30 pages of straight book we are looking at 12 Mb... probably double that when I add widgets, which is a sort of ok size I reckon.
I'll have a look at what Sort of size other books come in at, it may be I can save with no compression, or as PNGs?
iBooks Author isn't really set up for building picture books... it wants to have Chapters and sections and table of contents. It seems the way folk have found to get round these issues is a bit of a bodge... but I'm happy to go with that.

...

Ninjasaur VS Ninja Bunny

Instead of spending my lunchtime getting stuff up to date for the http://www.wychwolf.com, I sat looking in awe at the Ninja Bunny prints I got from Phil Spence at the Webcomix thing on Saturday.

I then managed to cover my desk with DELETER no 3 ink, as I tried in vain to replicate his style.

I ended up with a far too fiddly sketch, but will persevere.

Webcomix sticker fun

I got some stickers for the bargain price of £5.99 from Staples, which are nearly the right size for the Webcomix Thing DIN-O-SAUR-US passport scheme.

I tried using the template in WORD for Mac, but it was a dismal failure..

This is a rare thing in the world of Mac, usually it just happens, things just work...

So a brief search turned up articles on various fora, but they all seemed to say it's tricky...

Strangely a Google add at the bottom provided the result, a free app from Avery labels, called design pro..

Webcomix thing March 2010, getting closer

This weekend was the last call for submissions to the UK webcomix thing anthology.

The theme this year is dinosaurs, I decided to link in my submission to the prologues to the story I'm pulling together for the event: "Wychwolf", and created a very short 2 page skit, about evil nazi scientists being too clever for their own good.

Adam has posted the first of the transcripts of the original prologues, so we are slowly getting there.

Just waiting for Dom to get some dinosaurs drawn.

Comic Thing 2010

Have signed up for a table at Comic Thing 2010, http://ukwebcomixthing.co.uk/index.php

The idea being that if we have a real point in space and time that we have to get something finished for, it is much more likely to happen. Dom (my younger son, aged 13) is going to help work on the Project.

Adam (my older, feckless teen 16), has offered to write a script for Dom to draw... so it's going to be a family affair.

When we launched "Strange Biros" at the UKCAC 1991, we took along a wad of comics, and sold a few, had a great time talking to other creators... all that and the guys I went with were dressed as characters, Paul as Judge Death, and Adrian, as someone purple...I seem to remember we drove up in Adrian's Classic Ginormous white Merc.

I'm not sure I can rekindled that level of oddness, but it should be a good day out.