Pictures on Kindle: Self Publishing Your Kindle Book with Photos, Art, or Graphics, or Tips on Formatting Your Ebook's Images to Make Them Look Great

by Aaron Shepard

NOTE: PLEASE VISIT AARON'S PUBLISHING PAGE FOR ANY UPDATES TO THIS BOOK.

Almost everything you've read about formatting pictures for Kindle is wrong. The advice offered by Kindle experts and even Amazon itself can give images that are tiny, blocky, noisy, or wildly inconsistent on different Kindles.

Aaron Shepard, author of acclaimed books on both Kindle and print publishing, brings his years of experience in book design, webmastering, and photography to bear on a single question: How do you make pictures look great on the Kindle? He answers that question, while also providing beginners a basic course in picture editing.

Along the way, he discusses how to keep Microsoft Word from sneakily degrading your pictures; how to adjust HTML code to show images at their best; how to make part of a picture transparent against colored backgrounds; how to boost the power of your cover image as a marketing tool; and how to create anything from children's books to photography books to poetry books within minutes with the Kindle Comic Creator.

Nowhere else will you find such in-depth info on working with Kindle images. Whatever kind you're using -- photos, paintings, drawings, diagrams, tables, screenshots -- you'll find -Pictures on Kindle- an essential guide.

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Aaron Shepard is a foremost proponent of the new business of profitable self publishing, which he has practiced and helped develop since 1998. He is the author of -Aiming at Amazon, - -POD for Profit, - -Perfect Pages, - and -From Word to Kindle, - Amazon's #1 bestselling paid book on Kindle formatting.

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REVIEWS

-Far and away the best resource I know for self publishers who plan to include photos or other graphics in their Kindle books. From tips on taking photos, through sizing, optimizing, and placing, this book wastes no space in giving you exactly the information you need. Highly recommended.- -- Joel Friedlander, TheBookDesigner.com

-A detailed, comprehensive guide to getting the best out of your images on Kindle. From taking photos, to scanning, to optimizing, Aaron covers every possible step in making sure your images display well in Kindle format. In addition, he provides very useful explanations of the Kindle's image handling, for those of us who like to understand the reasons behind the steps. I for one will be adding this to my list of reference materials.- -- Jim Brown, JimandZetta.com (ebook services)

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CONTENTS

Getting Started

1 PICTURE BASICS
File Formats Resolution Color Mode Color Space

2 PICTURE SOURCES
Photography Scanning

3 PICTURE EDITING
Cleanup and Repair Cropping Contrast, Brightness, Tint Sizing Sharpening Transparency Lines and Letters

4 PICTURE HANDLING
Positioning Pictures in Word Pictures in HTML Fixed Format

5 PICTURE PUBLISHING
Submitting and Previewing Cover Images

Production FAQ

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference

171 pages, Paperback

First published May 22, 2013

About the author

Aaron Shepard is the author of many books, stories, and scripts for young people, as well as professional books and resources for writers and educators. He has also worked professionally in both storytelling and reader's theater, as a performer, director, and teacher trainer. Aaron's lively and meticulous retellings of folktales and other traditional literature have found homes with more than a dozen children's book publishers, large and small, and with the world's top children's literary magazines, winning him honors from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, the Bank Street College of Education, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the American Folklore Society. His extensive Web site, visited by thousands of teachers and librarians each week, is known internationally as a prime resource for folktales, storytelling, and reader's theater, while his stories and scripts have been featured in textbooks from publishers worldwide, including Scholastic, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, SRA, The College Board, Pearson Education, National Geographic, Oxford University Press, Barron's, Hodder Education, and McGraw-Hill.

Reviews

[David Bergsland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t do this as often as I should (read other people’s books on self-publishing). It’s not because I don’t think they have good things to offer. Mainly it’s the result of a reasoning and a fact. First, I don’t want to accidentally plagiarize someone while writing. So, I tend to keep others’ writing out of the memory banks. Second, most non-fiction on book publishing is far too expensive for my little budget.
But I picked up a copy of Aaron Shepard’s Pictures on Kindle: Self Publishing Your Kindle Book with Photos, Illustrations, or Other Graphics, or Tips on Formatting Your Images to Look Their Very Best (New Self Publishing) yesterday. I read through it in a couple hours. I found it interesting and useful—though probably not in a way you expect.

I found a new respect for authors using Word to format your Kindle books
Your level of pain tolerance is simply amazing. I knew Word was difficult to use, but I stand appalled. As all of you know, I use InDesign and Photoshop for writing, editing, graphic production, and so on. The ease with which these apps solve production problems tends to make me unsympathetic to Word users. I repent of that attitude. My career gave me tools not commonly available to self-publishers. But I want you to know, there is a better way, if you need that relief.
I do understand the seeming necessity. If it’s all you know and the only software on your computer, then you use it. There really is no free, or even low-priced alternative. Good tools are always an investment in your future. But painful doesn’t begin to describe the tortures necessary to use Word and the freebies. I’m saddened by what you must tolerate.

More importantly, I found out more about why Kindle causes design pain
It’s a world developed for Word users by PC/Android programmers. The compatibility issues are immense, but the basic programming mindset is not focused on designer options, but on ease of production for Amazon. Even reader comfort is a secondary issue for them. An excellent designer is always primarily concentrating on producing book designs which offer incredible readability with top-quality graphics to help the reader easily absorb the content. That attitude is quite a ways outside the Kindle paradigm. That’s neither good nor bad, simply reality.
In the Kindle universe, excellent book design is very difficult to execute. Part of that is due to the lack of coherent instructions from Amazon on best design policies. Amazon’s assumption is that the uploader of books to KDP is a design-ignorant author using Word with no illustration skills and cheap stock art or self-shot photos. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
Nevertheless, Amazon remains closed-lipped about their processes. They reprocess our books without our knowledge or input, making changes we cannot control. Developing reliable techniques and workflow is only roughly possible. Plus, their proprietary format is severely compromised in many ways—both typographically and graphically. The need to produce books which work in both black & white, e-ink Kindles and full-color, high-res, HD Fires is a real problem. You have some poor choices to choose from.

Kindle graphics are a crap shoot!
Yes, there are ways to minimize your losses. Aaron gives some good advice about techniques to do this. But I was struck by how many times he said: Amazon may just reprocess your graphics without your knowledge and change them radically.
The information he gives about Amazon’s fixed layout options is helpful. However, most books have no need for this option. Books like mine, with 200-300 graphics, can use them well (and my sales stats prove that, as I have written on several occasions). But these graphically intensive fixed layout ebooks are not commonly offered on KDP or Nook. iBooks handles them well, as does Kobo. However, in this area also, Amazon dominates sales.
My standard advice, to produce inline 600- or 1200-pixel-wide JPEGs or GIFs, remains solid. But, outside of my cozy world of InDesign and Photoshop, the jungle is dangerous and unpredictable. I’ll be happy to introduce you to my world. If that’s not an option for you, Aaron’s book gives you good advice.

Should you read the book?
It’s a good book. Aaron writes well and explains thoroughly. If you have no graphic design background, it will be very helpful. If you have graphic design experience, this has little to offer. Basically he makes the case for me that, if you write and produce several books a year, you really need to take the time, make the effort, and move to Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps with InDesign CC and Photoshop CC—plus all the rest of them. You be able to cut your production times by 70% to 90% with far better quality ebooks produced. [Yes, that’s just a guess based on how I do do things in CC compared to what Aaron is recommending in Word in this book.]
If you do not have the time to do that, you should probably hire someone to produce your books. Doing it in Word is dangerous to your health: mentally and physically. That level of frustration and stress is not good for you.

[Jamie Belanger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book does have some interesting information about dealing with images inside Kindle books. All in all, this is not a bad book, especially if you are new to image creation for ebooks and want to know more about the history, file formats, and how much work you can expect to put into tweaking your images. If you use a Mac, Photoshop, and Word for making your ebooks, you should have no trouble following the advice and instructions.

As for the rest of us? The intro mentions GIMP, and then the rest of the ebook ignores the software. I find that odd, since GIMP is free, and all it would take is some time to include comparable instructions. From what I know of working with GIMP, I was able to figure out most of the procedures, but there are some methods presented in this book that simply cannot be done in GIMP, as far as I can tell. For instance, the author of this ebook uses the "Export to Web" feature in Photoshop quite often. I have yet to find an equivalent feature in GIMP. (if you know where it is or know of a plugin that offers this functionality, please let me know!)

For me, this ebook didn't solve the one issue I have with transparent images... which was the whole reason I purchased this in the first place. I read the whole ebook and didn't learn much--mostly because of the focus on Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, but partly because there's a lot of info in here I already knew. For what it's worth, I didn't see anything about images or the editing process that was wrong, just saw some things that I don't know how to do in GIMP.

[Thyme Wisper · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have PhotoShop CS or PhotoShop Elements, I think this book would be perfect for you. The explanations seem to be excellent for working with pictures with that software. However, I am a GIMP user. I was hoping that there would be guidance either not specific to software or at least cover the different software to be used to make the pictures be correct in a Kindle book. Aaron Shepard mentions in the beginning that there are other software that can be used, including GIMP. When I "looked inside" I saw that statement which led me to believe that as a GIMP user the book would be appropriate for me. I tried reading this book, but the step by step details of what to do in PhotoShop and then, if the steps are different, in CSS Elements, are extensive, yet meaningless for me. I finally gave up.

I don't understand why in the very long title or in the lengthy (sales) description there was not a specific statement about the software to be used. Yet to mention in the beginning of the book about one can use different software, such as GIMP, is very misleading. There may be information I can use later in the book and maybe when I have time (someday) I might look for it, but at this point I feel that I ended up buying a kindle book that is not very helpful at all.

[David Griffiths · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, Aaron Shepard, is an expert in Microsoft Word, Photoshop, and web graphics. You will get a ton of information for $0.99; however, if you are not familiar with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you might have trouble following the author. He does explain how to use these programs, but Photoshop is difficult to learn on the fly.

The author does a great job of showing you how to put quality images into a Kindle book. The reason this information is so valuable is that there is so much misinformation available on this subject, some of it even coming from Amazon.

Based on the value of the information provided and the low price, I would recommend this book even if you are not familiar with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. If you have illustrations in your Kindle book, you need this information.

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

By its nature Pictures on Kindle is technical. I found it helpful, comprehensive and logical, with a step by step explanations of different procedures or approaches. At times I got lost in the jargon (but that is understandable). A couple of times I read through several pages of information to find an update to say that section was no longer relevant (which was a little frustrating). The book assumes the use of Photoshop though I am confident I can apply most of the concepts and ideas to the programs I use. The screen shots were difficult to read without zooming on my old e-ink kindle - but overall, the many pictures (screen shots, photos, diagrams etc) were helpful to illustrate the points Shepard was making.

Overall, Pictures on Kindle was informative and useful though I think I'll probably have to read some sections over again to fully comprehend them.

[Eddie Jong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource for anyone publishing images on Kindle.

I have published a number of books and have struggled to get images to display clearly on my Kindle. Looking at other books, I noticed that most other authors have the same problem, and reached the conclusion that that's just the way it is, and nothing much could be done about it.

NOT SO!

Aaron will show you exactly what you need to do to get your images crystal clear. The book does get pretty technical, but you can skip those sections if you want to. At the end of the day, I only use a tiny portion of what is in the book as I don't publish many images, but I do know that whatever type of image I want to use in the future, this book will help me make it look stunning on any Kindle.

[Charles Schiereck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess there are a few different ways I could approach this. Although the book is well written, much of the material was too basic and of little use to me. But the bottom line is that I was trying to publish a book on Kindle with pictures and having the devil's time trying to format it. Aaron's book had the answers. Putting pictures up on Kindle can be Voodoo. I followed each of the illogical steps required, and it worked. Never would have done it on my own. Five stars just for that. My book is selling well, and the pictures look as good as they ever will on Kindle .

[Iván Mejía · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is a meticulous systematic exposition of how to get the most when writing a book to be published on Kindle.
I find it very useful for those authors that want to offer a nice and good quality to their readers.
I thing the book deserves a revision of Mr. Shepard to dedicate some words about Microsoft Paint, which is the drawings and pictures program directly related to Microsoft Word.

[John Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very informative book for anyone producing graphics for ebooks - not just Kindles. Well worth the ridiculously low price.
I would take issue with Aaron's suggestion that cover graphics should be square though. Amazon may offer a square 'slot' for thumbnails, but surely that is for CD use?

[Blaine Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good primer...it doesn't completely fit my workflow but definitely offers a few good tidbits for improving what I already do for my kindle books. At just 1 cent it's a no-brainer to pick up although for most folks who don't have Photoshop it will be of limited use.

[Roy Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pictures, how to in word for kindle

Thank you, I found the book helpful and genuine. It is worth the time to read and understand if you want to use word to do your work in for your book.

[Donna Markiewicz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very informative book. The information on image formatting is so vague. It helped me a lot.