A couple or so weeks ago, Amazon released an interesting new, free Kindle digital book development tool, its Kindle Kid’s Book Creator. The tool is supposed to simplify the creation of illustrated children’s books for the Kindle — ebooks for kids. That was enough to catch my attention; that it also offers a “Kindle Text Pop-Ups” feature that promises to make the books easier to read on mobile devices (smartphones, tablets) and PCs, you betcha this was something I just had to play with!
Some of you may know that I am Bwaha Bean, and under that nom de plume, earlier this year I released my first book for children, Dinofart: The Book. I created Dinofart using another free Amazon Kindle development tool, its Kindle Comic Creator. Although the Kindle Comic Creator wasn’t really technically designed for creating typical children’s illustrated books (large pictures, a bit of text), it could be procedurally kludged to produce just that, as I did. One just has to figure out the language and minor technicalities and learn to navigate the software’s features and functions (basically, learn to ignore the irrelevant) to produce a picture ebook for young readers. It was an easy enough process that I figured it was an excellent tool for the job, particularly with its free price tag.
But now, with the Kindle Kid’s Book Creator promising to make the job even easier and clearer, and adding a few beneficial features besides, I decided to convert Dinofart over and produce a new edition using the brand spanking new tool.
Here are my notes and initial impressions of the new software, purely as a result of that relatively quick conversion. I did not, in other words, dive too deeply into the tool’s features and capabilities, at least I don’t think I did. That just happened to be one of the things I wanted to see and test, how easy it would be to get it to do what I wanted it to do, without really reading any documentation and instructions and just clicking around, following the prompts and absorbing whatever the software was showing and telling me on screen.
So keep that in mind as you read through the following — all of it is what I call “raw use,” without the benefit of much documentation or instruction, just diving right in and figuring things out as I went along. The software itself does provide a lot of guidance and descriptive instructions in context as you use it, which is really all I needed to get the job done. That I got from the starting line to “publishing” Dinofart on KDP in what I estimate to be somewhere under 2 hours of total software use time the first time out is, I believe, testament to this conclusion: Kindle Kid’s Book Creator is undeniably easy to use and figure out.
But it isn’t perfect. See the last point for some glitches I’ll have to deal with.
From what I can see, there are two ways to convert an existing ebook to a Kindle Kid’s Book Creator “book”: import a PDF of your existing book, or recreate it from scratch. Doing the latter with Dinofart would not be a huge project — no fancy layout, Dinofart follows the basic “large image + some text underneath” illustrated children’s book style — but I wanted to see how the PDF import thing worked, so I tried that first.
PDF import worked easily and well. So if you have existing children’s ebooks, or PDF versions of print books, I would take this route to do the conversion to Kindle digital books. However, I found the resulting images (which include the text, remember) a bit too small for my taste. Fixable at the source, I figure — produce the PDFs a certain way by fiddling with the resolution and margins — to get the final pages to look just right. But that’s likely a trial-and-error process.
So, impatient me, I stopped futzing around with PDF imports and proceeded with rebuilding Dinofart from scratch, so to speak. Turns out this route is dirt easy… as long as you figure out that individual images essentially are meant to take up the whole page; any text you add will be within the confines of that image.
Although adding text blocks and moving it around for placement is not difficult, it wouldn’t let me move it outside of the image itself. At least, if it’s possible, I didn’t figure out how.
What this meant was that I had to make adjustments to the images I imported, essentially doing page layout on the image itself externally before bringing it into Kindle Kid’s Book Creator. Not difficult for me technically and layout-wise — again, basic “image on top, text beneath” layout — but that meant I had to prep a whole new set of images, with the actual original images on top and some space underneath. So, when imported, I was able to add text to the white space at the lower half of the page, which technically still really is part of the whole image. I hope you’re following this, since this is something you’ll seriously need to keep in mind when prepping your images for use with this tool.
The software has good text controls that are easily adjustable — alignment, line spacing, even kerning — but “out of the box” it only presented me with a single font option (Georgia, I believe). But that doesn’t mean that’s the only font you can use! You can add fonts to the book project at will (Tools|Add Fonts). It looks like the added fonts will only be applicable to the book project you’re working on, though, and unless you’re using Georgia, you’ll need to install the fonts you need for each project.
The quality of the resulting pages is actually quite good and sharp! The images and text all look excellent. If I’m not mistaken, the text quality in this Dinofart I produced with the Kid’s Book Creator is superior to what the Comic Creator produced (but which was still acceptable, nevertheless).
One thing missing, however, is the ability to include clickable links. At least I didn’t find a way to do it. Comics Creator doesn’t let you do links either, so this not being in Kid’s Book Creator isn’t surprising. Disappointing, though. Can’t add live links to our websites, blogs, other Amazon titles, etc. Doesn’t mean we can’t mention them, but we can’t actually link to them from within the book.
It comes bundled with Book Preview functionality. If memory serves, you’re asked if you want to install the previewers; if you don’t have them yet, then yes, by all means install them. Although technically separate programs, they’re nicely integrated into Kid’s Book Creator. But they don’t seem to be very accurate. Which is the major problem I mentioned earlier that I have to fix:
I have the first generation Kindle Fire. And although the previewer for that shows no formatting issues whatsoever (perfect!) — even the previewer on the KDP site didn’t show any problems — the delivered book shows a few text-wrapping issues with the longer lines. If the trailing text on a long line didn’t fit, it got pushed down to the next line, pushing down the lines beneath. Again, these issues did not appear in anything I previewed.
The text wrapping thing is not a major deal, I feel, at least for Dinofart. I had decided to leave them as-is until I realized if the bottom lines got pushed off the page, a new page is created after that that not only contains the text that didn’t fit, but all of the text in the text block. This basically doubles a lot of the text!
This is actually a serious flaw, but being aware of it, you can head it off and prevent it. It looks like I will need to go in and either try to reformat some lines or simply set the font to a slightly smaller font. But that means I’ll have to republish after I make the changes.
You can actually see this if you get a copy with the current formatting errors. Not to worry; I’ll be fixing it up, changing the master file, and asking Amazon to update everyone. It’s actually a way for me to test Amazon’s updating feature. But it’s still a hassle, not to mention that Amazon’s been s-l-o-w at getting my Kindle books published, so this may take a while.
But there you have it, my quick-and-dirty first impression notes on the Kindle Kid’s Book Creator. I do like the tool — a lot — and I have plans to use it a lot more for a number of Bwaha Bean book ideas I have in the hopper. It’s a very good tool to use right now. Keep the rough edges in mind, and they really shouldn’t get in the way much.
NOTE: As of this writing, the Dinofart book on Amazon is the version with the text formatting and flow errors I mentioned. If you’re taking advantage of the free days (Wednestday to Sunday, Sept. 17-21) to get a free copy of Dinofart: The Book, get it now errors and all anyway. It should be updated with the fixed version; when that’ll happen, I have no idea, since it depends on Amazon, of course, but it’ll happen. But if you wait until then to get the book, you’ll have to pay $ for it, since I think it unlikely the changed version will go into effect until after the free days period.
NOTE 2: Don’t own a Kindle? No problem! You can get the free Kindle Reading App for most mobile devices and computing platforms.
Article by Eldon Sarte