Writers in the Storm

Lyn Horner

A cover image is mandatory for a Kindle book. The Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines state, “The preferred format for the cover is a JPEG image of 600 x 800 pixels. Covers with less than 500 pixels on the smaller side are rejected. If your cover is smaller than the required size, do not stretch it as this does not add any quality.” They go on to say, “your cover image should not infringe other publisher’s or artist’s copyrights on the same cover.” Also, it should not “mention pricing or other temporary promotional offers.”

I kept those requirements in mind as I created my book cover. Yes, I did it myself using the “Paint” program in MS Windows. You can access it under Accessories in your Windows programs or via the Open menu in your Windows Photo Gallery. Instructions in Paint’s Help menu are limited, so it required some trial and error for me to master the features. Once I did, this program enabled me to combine a background photo, art work I designed and painted on my computer, clip art obtained free from Microsoft, and text for the book title and author’s (my) name.

My background photo was contributed by a generous friend. She took the photo herself so copyrights are not a concern. She emailed me the photo and I saved it in my MS Photo Gallery. If working with a hard copy photo, you would scan it into your computer then save it. Once I had the photo in my gallery, I used Microsoft Office Picture Manager to resize and crop it until it was close to Amazon’s preferred size. By resizing several times, I managed to blur the image slightly, giving it a more “painterly” look. Next, I opened “Paint” and went to work painting out telephone poles in the distance (it’s an outdoor shot) and wire fence in the foreground.

Now that I had my background, I scanned in a photo of my daughter and altered it to look like the heroine of my story. This required painting different clothes and hair color with the Paint program. I placed my gal’s figure in the foreground of my cover image, using the “Paste From” feature under the Edit menu in Paint. It would take too much space here to explain exactly how to make all this work. As I did, you will need to play with Paint for a while if you want to learn how to apply all the features.

My book is a romance, so I also needed a likeness of my hero on the cover. I didn’t have a photo to adapt as I did for my heroine, so I went looking online for clip art. Clip art is a great resource. Some you can get for free, in other cases you’ll need to pay a small fee. Just make sure it includes the right to use the clip art for commercial purposes. In my case, I couldn’t find a clip art image of a man that would work on my book cover, although I found bits of photos and drawings that gave me a vague starting point. Next, I looked at other book covers and found a couple that gave me a better idea of how to pose my hero with his lady on my cover. Notice I said “looked at” other covers. I did not directly copy them. That would be copyright infringement.

It took quite some time to paint in my two figures on the cover. Paint lets you enlarge an image several times as you work, a feature I employed to blend colors for clothing, hair and skin tones, often working pixel by pixel. This requires patience and it can be tedious. My final image is not as professional looking as I’d like it to be, but I think it provides a glimpse into my book’s content.

Once my artwork was complete, I added the book title and my name using fonts available on Paint’s Text Toolbar, accessible via the View menu. Finally, I dressed up the title with a decorative clip art border, found in Microsoft’s free online clip art gallery.

Would I advise you to follow my example completely? Well, that depends upon how much time you want to spend on your cover AND how experienced you are in drawing and painting. As stated in my first blog, I have a visual arts background which gives me an edge. However, you can use some of the techniques I employed without any painting experience. You might choose a likely photo and use that for your book cover without drawing in figures over it. Adding text and/or clip art is also doable by anyone.

Obviously, the other alternative is to hire someone to create your book cover. Search online and you will find numerous companies that do this type of work. I have not looked into how much they charge, but I’m sure their fees vary according to what you want on your cover. If you choose this path, I invite you to comment about it here. I and others would be very interested to hear about your experience. Meanwhile, I will discuss “embedding” a book cover in your book file on my next blog. Thanks for visiting!

By Lyn Horner

I warned you I’m a newbie at this and you would be learning along with me. Well, I’ve learned a few things since originally publishing this post. Please note the revisions and additions.

Formatting your text for Kindle take some time but it doesn’t have to be painful. First, if you have not already done so, I suggest you read the formatting guidelines provided by Amazon on their Digital Text Platform support pages. Formats supported by DTP are Zipped HTML (.zip), Word (.doc), Adobe PDF (.pdf), ePub (.epub), Plain Text (.txt) and MobiPocket (.mobi and .prc). Since I use MS Word, I will refer to that application.

According to Amazon, “DTP converts all text formatting to HTML tags and processes images automatically.” They advise us to convert Word files to HTML within Word. Then we are to “make sure the formatting looks good” before we upload our converted HTML text to the DTP. In order to accomplish this, we need to do some prep work.

Formatting Steps:

1. Make two backups of your book file, one on your computer and one on an external drive. I use a small, handy-to-carry thumb drive. Keep it in a safe place.

2.  Open one copy of your book file in MS Word. If you store your book as separate documents for each chapter as I do, you need to combine them into one big file. I work chapter by chapter, making the necessary format changes in each one before pasting it to the end of my combined document. If you prefer to combine all chapters first, that’s up to you. This might cause you some difficulty in removing page numbers and headers, although I’m not sure about that. Experiment and see what works best for you.

3.  Remove page numbers. Kindle books are reflowable (viewable with different font sizes); page numbers are unnecessary and would cause problems. Headers with the book title, chap. number and your last name, such as you would include on hard copy submissions to editors, are also unnecessary. Take them out.

4.  The Kindle DTP automatically indents each paragraph. If you use tabs to create paragraph indents, get rid of them. Otherwise, you will end up with uneven indents in your uploaded book. To remove all tabs, type one tab at the top of your document, select it and copy it to your clipboard. Open Find/Replace under the Edit menu. Paste the tab you copied into the Find box. (Word won’t let you type a tab in there.) Leave the replace box empty; click Replace All. This will remove all tabs from your document. Again, you can do this chapter by chapter, or you can combine all chapters first and then remove the tabs. The latter will be less time consuming. NOTE: You can change the width of indents if you wish. Go to the Advanced Formatting section on Amazon’s DTP guide and search for Paragraphs. There you will find detailed instructions for adjusting indent width.

Addition: I do not use tabs in my books. I use the indent feature in the WORD Style Formatting menu. WORD automatically indents each new paragraph for me. This does not cause problems with the Kindle formatting. My indents look perfect on the Kindle Previewer. The Previewer is used in combination with Kindlegen, a software app that converts html text into the Kindle format. Both Kindlegen & the Kindle Previewer can be downloaded from Amazon for free.

5.  Your font style must change sizes easily on a variety of readers. B.V. Larson, in his Kindle tutorial, advises us to use Times New Roman 12 pt.

Addition: The Kindle Previewer’s Font Menu allows you to view your book in six different font sizes. The Devices Menu shows how your book will read on several devices: Kindle, Kindle DX, Kindle for IPhone, Kindle for IPad, and Custom. Custom lets you freely resize the view, revealing how your book displays on various screen sizes. I followed Mr. Larson’s advice for font size and style and tested it with all font sizes and devices on the Kindle Previewer. It read fine every time!

6.  Get rid of all the double spacing we’ve always been told to use for editors and agents. This means double line spacing and double spacing after each sentence (also unnecessary for editor submissions nowadays.)

7.  Remove underlining if you use it to indicate italics. I tried to use the Find and Replace feature under the Edit menu, as B. V. Larson suggests, but could not make it work. So I searched each chapter as I worked and removed the underlining, replacing it with italics. Obviously this takes some time.

8.  Revision: When I first posted this blog I advised you to eliminate page breaks. Please disregard that. I gave you someone else’s advice before testing it. When I ran my book through Kindlegen and looked at it on the Previewer, all the chapters ran together. It looked awful! I checked the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines and low and behold, they say to “use the Page Break feature of Word” – meaning I had to replace all the page breaks between my chapters. That will teach me to do more careful research. Please do likewise, and don’t accept everything I or anyone else says. Check several sources.

9.  Indicate scene breaks, such as POV changes, with one blank line followed by a line with three or four asterisk (* * * *) signs centered, with a space between each. Then add another blank line.

10.  Use the Track Changes feature under the Tools menu to “accept” anything underlined in red in your document, such as slang or foreign words that Word doesn’t recognize. If you don’t do this the red lines will appear on your converted text – again as per Mr. Larson. Hiding them doesn’t work; you must use the “accept” feature. Addition: I could not make this work. Instead, I selected my whole document then went to the Spelling & Grammar feature under the Tools Menu and turned off the spell checking option. All the squiggly red lines disappeared.

11. Revision: Originally I advised you to add copyright data at the beginning of your book. Wrong! Publishing rights are to be entered on the DTP when uploading. Go to the Publishing Rights section on the DTP support pages for more info.

12.  Save your combined text file as a regular Word document first to be safe (in case you need to go in and make changes later.) Then choose “Save As” and save the file again, choosing “Web Page, Filtered” as your file type. You have now converted it to an .HTM file. No, I did not forget the “L”! HTM is the way it appears, why I have no clue. Another question for my computer geek son.  He says it means the same thing. Some apps just leave off the “L”.

That’s all for now. I promised to talk about book covers in my next blog, but that will come later. Instead, I’ll explain more about Kindlegen & the Kindle Previewer. ʼTil then, put your keister in the chair and write!

Laura Drake

Yes, we’re writers, but we’re readers first.  Part of the reason I wanted to write was to give others the transporting experience I’ve had, reading a wonderful book, and ‘waking up’ hours later, unaware of my surroundings.  Or consciously slowing down, toward the end of a book, just so I won’t be done.  Yes, I can reread it, but I’ll never again experience it for the first time.

So I started thinking . . . If I were stuck on a deserted island, all alone, what books would I want with me?

I don’t mean survivalist literature – I’m talking, ‘keep me sane while I’m waiting for the cavalry to show up’ books.   I chose an arbitrary limit of 10, then tried to decide.  The first couple were easy – they popped right into my head.

• Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
• The Stand – Stephen King
• A Gift Upon the Shore – M.K. Wren   (if you’re a writer, you should read this dystopian novel-what would happen to the books if the world crumbled?)
• Malevil – Robert Merle     Okay, shoot me, I love end of the world scenarios.

But after that it got tougher.

• Timeline – Michael Crichton
• King’s Oak – Ann Rivers Siddons
• Any of the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon
• Most anything by Barbara Samuels / Barbara O’Neal
• Violin – Ann Rice  Or The Feast of All Saints -  I can’t decide
• South of Broad – or anything by Pat Conroy.  Maybe if I were lucky, he’d have a new one out I hadn’t yet read….

See how I got flaky at the end?  Too many good books!!!

What are your Deserted Island Books?  I’d love to hear about them.