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).

#Inktober2015 - the plan

I sat down at lunchtime today and tried to think about what on earth I'd draw for Inktober,  31 days in Inktober, means 31 inked pictures.
Without a theme its entirely possible I'd end up just sitting in front of my drawing pad each lunchtime, and draw nothing.
So I thought I may follow up on the idea at the beginning of my (still unfinished) book NDvsPR:

"There have been many

discussions about who would

win in a fight between

Ninjas and Pirates...

Robots and Dinosaurs...

Werewolves and Draculas?

What if the Dinosaur was a Ninja?

What if the Robot was a Pirate?"

I drafted a table that mixes up a few of these archetypes:

---

	Ninja	Dinosaur	Robot	Pirate
Ninja	XXXXXXX	XXXXXXXX	XXXXXX	XXXXXX
Dinosaur	Ninja-Dinosaur	XXXXXXXX	XXXXXX	XXXXXX
Robot	Ninja-Robot	Dinosaur-Robot	XXXXXX	XXXXXX
Pirate	Ninja-Pirate	Pirate-Dinosaur	Pirate-Robot	XXXXXX
Vampire	Ninja-Vampire	Vampire-Dinosaur	Vampire-Robot	Pirate-Vampire
Werewolf	Ninja-Werewolf	Dinosaur-Werewolf	Robot-Werewolf	Pirate-Werewolf
Zombie	Ninja-Zombie	Zombie-Dinosaur	Zombie-Robot	Zombie Pirate
Space	Space-Ninja	Space-Dinosaur	Space-Robot	Space-Pirate
Super	Super-Ninja	Super-Dinosaur	Super-Robot	Super-Pirate

---

Vampire	Werewolf	Zombie	Space	Super
XXXXX	XXXXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXXX
XXXXX	XXXXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXXX
XXXXX	XXXXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXXX
XXXXX	XXXXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXXX
XXXXX	XXXXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXXX
Vampire-Werewolf	XXXXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXXX
Zombie-Vampire	Zombie-Werewolf	XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXXX
Space-Vampire	Space-Werewolf	Space-Zombie	XXXXX	XXXXXX
Super-Vampire	Super-Werewolf	Super-Zombie	Super-Space(r)	XXXXXX

---

...and Voila I have over 31 things to draw!

iPads

Adam is home from Uni, so I thought I'd check out how the ibooks stuff looks on an iPad3 (which he has) compared to my lowly iPad2. can you tell which is which?

Dom - Flash Ninja

My son Dom is a Flash Ninja, he'd been complaining about the creaky old version of Flash MX 2044 not working, so I sprung for a student copy of Flash CS6 pro++ gold star, or whatever ridiculous title it has.
Installed it at lunchtime, and Dom has managed to animate the ninja dinosaur quite nicely...
obviously it's flash, created on a PC etc... so I can't look at it on my iPad etc, but I think the lad is showing some promise...

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.

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